tashi

What does "your hand is behind your eye" mean, and how does that relate to taste? I don't understand what advice you're giving.

(FYI, your comment could have come across as implying that Ira Glass is a fraud who's just a "curator" pretending to be a "creator," so that could be why someone took offense.)

It might be helpful to put in some sample questions so people can try it out without having to enter their own data.

McDonald's fries are a special case, because, as some vegetarians discovered after years of being misled by their "cooked in 100% vegetable oil" claims, they're already flavored with beef tallow.

"Washington Bullets" isn't about Washington state either, which seems like a thing he'd be likely to know, so maybe he wasn't trying to be that strict.

Yes, from the pictures it looks like the light diffracts off the glass and fills the cockpit.

The plane moves fast but it's also far away, so the angle it changes by relative to the guy with the pointer is small. To follow it, you wouldn't have to move the tip of the pointer more than (if my rough calculations are right) about a centimeter a second.

I don't think that's true. People who are mentally ill commit violent crimes at about the same rates as their neighbors. Also, crime rates are lower now than when Reagan took office.

My theory is that what really changed our levels of trust was the invention of 24-hour news. People didn't used to have someone in their ear all day reminding them to be afraid. But tons of other things have changed too, so I may be off base.

I know that doesn't feel like optimism to you, but in my experience whenever people decide to let things get so bad that there has to be a revolution, bad just becomes the new normal. The only advancements I've seen in politics, in my few decades of paying attention, have come from people working incredibly hard to make tiny improvements.

"Queer" is the word that springs to mind immediately because it seems like the project to reclaim it has had almost total success. Many other examples here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reappropriation

It's not inherently a side project, it only has to be one because his department doesn't view this work as a contribution to pure mathematics. Seems shortsighted for a field where progress is often measured in centuries.

It is fascinating and a little bit scary to learn that adding antibiotics to livestock's feed makes it possible to fatten up animals with less food! Biology is full of surprises.

I don't think I forgot to mention that, I used a hyperlink to point to it instead. As a guy who loves chess and has studied it off and on over the years, I doubt I'll ever win a game against a grandmaster under any circumstances, so it still seems impressive to me.

But even I know enough, from watching videos on YouTube that analyze some of the AlphaZero vs. Stockfish games, to appreciate that AlphaZero was playing in a style I haven't seen before. What's the threshold for someone serious enough to write a chess article?

Well, he may not have an official rating, but Strogatz did once beat a grandmaster at chess.

http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2006/05/checkmate-professor-...

I've been pretty impressed with him as a sort of cross-disciplinary math wizard ever since I used his Nonlinear Dynamic and Chaos textbook in a class. His research is pretty wide ranging. He may be wrong about the future, but I'd be shocked if it was because of a lack of technical understanding of the algorithms.

Oh. No, he didn't get caught because he failed at acting, he got caught because he forgot to keep the act up while he was drunk.

No luck figuring out what reason you have in mind. Want to explain?

History shows that you'd only need to be as good an actor as Mel Gibson.

The central story is about how a conservative author was publicly shamed by her conservative ex-boyfriend, so I'm not sure how illuminating your link will be.

That's an interesting prediction to make of a guy who became famous because his personal sense of ethics overpowered every other concern in his life. It's hard to imagine him trying to cash in on that fame.

Some candidates, depending on their backgrounds, may be wary of being thought of as complainers or being "difficult." Something to look out for.

Does destroying houses and food supply so that civilians starve or freeze to death count? If so, yes. See the Sullivan Expedition.

Well, if you're going to take the high road and give him the benefit of the doubt, I won't argue further. Maybe I'm just being cynical.

But in the review he wasn't just talking about "people who make maths the primary focus of their study." If he had just been talking about students' areas of interest or work ethic I would never have objected. It was specifically this: "One should pick one's audience carefully... and treat these gifted kids like apprentices." In my experience that approach misses a lot of talented people who were different enough not to get matched by the "gifted" filter.

I'm familiar with the expression. Its use here indicates that the reviewer believes the world is divided into those who are smart enough to follow the book and those who are wastes of time.

If it's not obvious why that sucks, imagine going to this professor's office hours if you're having trouble following a proof. Imagine that, rather than thinking you might just not have seen this style of proof before and trying to walk you through it, he indicates you aren't cut out to understand it and suggests you change your major.

(If it sounds like I'm being too harsh based on that one data point, after I read the review I went and looked up the professor on ratemyprofessor.com, and that seems to be his approach to struggling students: that he's weeding out people who just can't learn the material, not people who just got stuck because they're lacking the mathematical sophistication or exposure or confidence they need, or people who are learning more slowly and will be fine if they put in more time and effort and come up with better strategies. Not sure how a professor at Loyola Marymount decided he's qualified to be The Gatekeeper of Mathematics, but there it is.)

Holy cow, check out that review: don't waste your time trying to teach this to an average undergraduate math major because it "would largely amount to swine facing pearls not meant for them."

Well, that's documentation for PeopleSoft, so it's Oracle the company, but not necessarily backed by Oracle the database.

And to paraphrase the old quote, if you're having a problem sending messages between two systems, and you try to solve it by setting up an instance of the PeopleSoft Integration Broker, you now have a larger number of problems.

At this point a mathematician might step in and say that you all need to define your terms. You're basing your arguments on two subtly different definitions of the word "intuition."

I'm not sure that "writer," or even "fiction writer," the job title shared by James Joyce and Stan Lee and William S. Burroughs and J.K. Rowling and Dr. Seuss and Toni Morrison and The Coen Brothers, is especially descriptive.

I was just looking at a list of Maine's governors, and something stands out: your state really is ideologically diverse! You only care about picking the right man for the job.

  The Times describes some founders who put up with unwanted sexual advances because they were desperate to raise money for their 
  startups. There’s an old-fashioned word for what these ladies are doing that I shan’t repeat here.

So, women who reject these advances but don't want to object too loudly out of fear of burning bridges or being seen as a troublemaker, are being accused of prostitution. What a fascinating way to smear the victims.

That's an interesting theory, but the Flynn effect raised IQ scores way more over the same time period. But if it makes you feel better, I still see a lot of people smoking on construction sites, so builders may be keeping the flame alive, so to speak.

Is that what you believe the author is doing? Because he's put a lot of hours into writing about specific works of music and even more into making his own.

Thank you! My math brain says I can define (I think) a pathological system that is both "patterned" and "non-patterned," and a bunch that are non-patterned but still result in equality given the right initial conditions, but these definitions aren't meant to be rigorous in that way, right? He's talking more about what's likely to be true given what we know of realistic human societies?