xkcd

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Small talk is hard. Yep, it is hard to believably fake my interest in the weather, traffic, someone's spawn, or sports; nor do I believe the fake interest from the other person. :roll: That's why it's an effective signaling behavior: it's expensive. You're not supposed to believe they are intereste...

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Math is hard, like a lot of other subjects. But unlike a lot of other subjects, you can't dumb it down without making it boring.

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A good programming language is different from other programming languages. There are no "better" vs. "worse" differences, though there are trivial vs. profound ones. Great programming languages are profoundly different.

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Consider an ensemble average.

http://people.brandeis.edu/~pmiller/COMP_NEURO/STA.pdf

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Sizik wrote:Yeah, the programmer part was kind of not thought out well enough.

There are unproveable statements which are nonetheless true, and ungettable jokes that are nonetheless funny. And yours is very funny as it stands.

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Focus narrowly. As you advance in your career, and find out how intelligent you really are, adjust your level of specialization down to something narrow enough that you're a genius at that, though at nothing else. If you're actually a genius, or even very intelligent, you won't specialize very much,...

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I used to be skeptical of the notion that learning a language with an unfamiliar paradigm makes one a better programmer. However, I enjoy learning new languages, and began studying Haskell for that reason. Turns out, it's had a big influence (for the better, I think) on my programming style in Pytho...

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Pepve wrote:This thought may be a bit radical, but why not ask him?

The only really practical answer. I hope your friend chooses Haskell.

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Can someone tell me this: Is my system insecure if I exhaust its supply of entropy, e.g. cat /dev/random > /dev/null no. When the entropy pool is empty, reads from /dev/random will block until additional environmental noise is gathered. Ow. I think my toaster just stabbed me in the face :?

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Maybe worth mentioning that the reproducibility of pseudorandom sequences, given the same seed, is really quite useful, if you're runing a Monte Carlo simulation: you may want to run the program repeatedly with "random" input that's the same every time. If you were using a truly random gen...

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If you want to become a first-tier famous scientist, then 1) cultivate endearingly humanizing features, such as frizzy hair, playing the bongos, or near-total paralysis. 2) learn to popularize really well, and 3) do better science than most of your colleagues who aren't distracted by #1 & #2. #3...

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Dason wrote:I have no idea what you're trying to say there.

You should have stopped there.

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Frequentist confidence intervals require wacky mental gymnastics. All this week, I've been worrying that the p value I had calculated correctly, could become retroactively incorrect later on, if I computed another p value -- but that this would either happen, or not, depending on my intention, or l...

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Natty wrote:Statisticians dislike mathematicians because mathematicians whine to the teacher.

Wait, who's the teacher in this metaphor?

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I would nominate Python, with the Numpy & Scipy libraries, to fill the Matlab niche. Weaker in some ways, stronger in others -- and one of the strengths is Python's better considered as a general purpose programming language. At least I think so, and I don't think my opinion's particularly eccen...

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Saying "you know that 100,000 dollar machine we have? yeaaaa it's broken" has got to be one of the most terrifying sentences to say There's worse. Sometimes you make a mistake and you have to tell your human subject's family that he's died. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=Article...

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There exist specialised disciplines where a computational approach is taken or where computational methods to the specific field are studied, ... Why not ask around at the institute you're studying at? Even better: find a field of science where a computational approach is not usually taken, but whe...

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you bet they will program it without fear. Not a safe assumption at all. Fear serves a useful function in biological brains. Perhaps it's possible to implement Azimov's Third Law without fear -- perhaps not. Perhaps it's possible, but beyond the technical ability of the folks who program the first ...

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Why would it be any more unethical to create simulated humans (or human-level intelligences) than it would be to have children? Yes, you would have the power to mess with the universe they inhabit if you are simulating an entire universe for them, but as long as that power isn't abused, I don't see...

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Namiki Falcon. To be polite, I pretend to understand why some people don't use this.

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I used to use tabs for nesting, spaces for alignment, but my IDE complained, so I switched to all-spaces. I decided I didn't like 8-spaces per level indenting so I had the editor change it to 4. However, the diff between the current revision and the previous one now shows changes on every indented (...

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"To show the Martians, when they arrive, what Bomber Command can do."

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I bet it's a "cron" job, probably indexing the hard drive. On my MacBook Pro, by default, that job runs on saturdays. Try launching Activity Monitor, and, when the problem occurs, looking for a job that's either using a lot of CPU cycles, or doing a lot of disk access. Then, when you have ...

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No idea about the CC license, but what sort of high school is this where a majority of the Junior class would find #422 funny?

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I'm a scientist, and my collaborators are mostly engineers. While I'm sure there's an "official" distinction, most of the time, if you just watched what we spent our time doing you couldn't tell us apart. Every now & then, though, a certain cultural difference crops up: they're interes...

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My first thought was Haldeman, rather than Burma Shave

Stuck on this lift for hours, perforce ...
This lift that cost a million bucks.
There's no such thing as centrifugal force.
L5 sucks.

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cha0tic , if you do decide to take Berengal 's advice, please consider blogging a diary of the experience. I'm sure I'm not alone in wondering whether a functional language like Haskell seems difficult to a person with no preconceptions. Even more interesting would be an account of learning your se...

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Yes, but for those of us without $40 million dollar surgical suites, it's not exactly a good idea to put a laptop through the autoclave. For those of you without $40 million surgical suites, it's not a good idea to do the kind of surgery that requires really scrupulous sterile technique :wink: . No...

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There are no books or computers (because they cannot be sterilized or cannot survive being sterilized), and no time to have someone leave and check.. I agree with your conclusion, but not with your argument. Surgeons routinely use computers while scrubbed in. For example, stereotactic targeting sof...

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You spend all your time memorizing stuff that takes 15 minutes to look up. Leo Szilard, after moving from physics to biology, complained that he could no longer work in the bathtub, because he kept having to climb out in order to look up a fact. My point being this: in fields like biology, you have...

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Notation and terminology are two very different things. How? Notzeb uses terminology , e.g. strings of Roman-alphabet letters like "space," "spectrum," and "is isomorphic as." If he replaced each with a single letter in Greek, or Hebrew, or some obscurer alphabet, woul...

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I believe that mathematics is clearer without notation. I have seen this explicitly given as advice for mathematical writing from at least two reputable sources, Knuth and Munkres, who both have been writing mathematics long enough that they should know what they're talking about. Notation doesn't ...

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I claim it'll be *harder* to understand because the formulas are a crutch to make the math *easier* Only for a mathematician. A non-mathematician will find the symbolic version completely incomprehensible, but they may be able to make some sense out of the 'English' version (and will at least be ab...

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A basic reason is that it's hard to read formulas, but easy to read words. Mathematicians use a lot of syntax that is unfamiliar. I disagree, and this is testable. Try, as an exercise, translating an article in a mathematics journal into English. Or even something from an advanced undergraduate mat...

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ellaruby wrote:
Admiral Valdemar wrote:YMBABM if you consider the perfect organism has already evolved.

How exactly are we defining perfect?

We could recognize the perfect organism, if it existed, by the fact that it had *stopped* evolving.

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(Obviously it wouldn't be impossible to prove something like, "There is no hippo in my room". You can inspect your room yourself and be sure of that). Nope. You can't even prove that. If you claim to have searched the room exhaustively, I can propose various counterhypotheses, such as a c...

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What it sounds like to me is someone's parroting a theory of inductive reasoning associated with Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle, and logical positivism. It ceased being respectable among philosophers in 1951 (Quine's "Two dogmas of empiricism") and among historians of science in 1962 (Kuhn...

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Parsimony and model building is admittedly less of a big deal with a purely predictive model, but it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Doing anything with your data without a reason why gives me an uncomfortableness. I think you're assuming the OP is doing science. He may be doing process engin...

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A good rule of thumb is you should only at max one explanatory variable for every 10 observations you have. Which means really, your data can manage a linear fit, and a second order fit is stretching. Agreed, but I've also never, ever seen someone give a plausible reason for a 6-order term besides ...

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