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15th January 2019, 08:47 AM | #441 |
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15th January 2019, 09:25 AM | #442 |
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Indeed. If you saw a coin land heads up 100 times in a row, and were asked to bet on the next flip, you should obviously pick heads, because it's almost certain that the coin flip is NOT perfectly random (be it the coin itself, the flipping process, or both).
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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15th January 2019, 09:28 AM | #443 |
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15th January 2019, 09:35 AM | #444 |
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"We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." - Carl Sagan |
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15th January 2019, 09:40 AM | #445 |
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15th January 2019, 09:43 AM | #446 |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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15th January 2019, 10:03 AM | #447 |
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15th January 2019, 10:15 AM | #448 |
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In practice, that's true enough. But in the more abstract, it's not.
The issue is that a string of heads is somehow "special". From a statistical point of view it's not. Put it this way. Let's say you do, in fact, spend some idle time flipping a coin 100 times. Let's call the resulting sequence of heads and tails "RandomSequence". After you have done this, I provide you an unfalsifiable prediction of RandomSequence. Does this mean that the flip was somehow rigged? No. It means that either I was cheating (somehow) or that I got very lucky. When we look at long strings of heads or tails, we think of them as somehow special, rather like my prediction of RandomSequence. In the long run, of course, they are (since they should not show up too often), but any predetermined sequence is equally special. As long as it is specified in advance. And any sequence which shows unlikely regularity is deemed to be special ex post facto. "Not only does the Law of Averages permit the most outrageous coincidences, it requires them." |
15th January 2019, 11:18 AM | #449 |
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It's only not special if the coin toss is random, and if you get 100 heads in a row, you should immediately suspect that it isn't.
If it's not random, then it can be special. For one thing, it's easier to fix a coin to come up heads 100 times in a row than it is to fix a coin to come up heads 50 times and tails 50 times but in a specific order. For another, if there's an actual person involved who can influence the outcome (ie, the flipper is cheating), then 100 heads in a row will BE special, and for two reasons. First, because humans perceive it to be special, and second, because we're bad at being random. If someone can control the outcome of the flips, then they are much more likely to flip it heads 100 times in a row than they are to flip it one specific but apparently random sequence. ETA: but in line with your post, if you specify any sequence of 100 flips beforehand, and then get that sequence of 100 flips, you should also immediately suspect that it's not random. 100 heads is basically already specified by default. |
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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15th January 2019, 11:34 AM | #450 |
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Because a coin toss is just practically random.
It's an easily accomplished task that can be done with a common item who's results or random enough for everyday purposes. Coin tosses are perfectly deterministic, hobbyiest level engineers have already built coin flipping robots that can flip a coin to a desired outcome with fairly high accuracy by just controlling all the variables. A "Coin Toss" is a fair approximation of "50/50 chance" on a practical level because the way we do it, just flipping the coin with our hands, in daily practice is impossible for us to control or observe all those variables. |
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15th January 2019, 12:07 PM | #451 |
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"We are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically — not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits, and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are." - Carl Sagan |
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15th January 2019, 12:29 PM | #452 |
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Scott "Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted & thoughtless labour; & of looking at plants & animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system." Bill Mollison Biome Carbon Cycle Management |
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15th January 2019, 12:54 PM | #453 |
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"If everyone in the room says water is wet and I say it's dry that makes me smart because at least I'm thinking for myself!" - The Proudly Wrong. |
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15th January 2019, 05:32 PM | #454 |
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Body mass of mammalian carnivores is limited to about a ton.
This paper was thrown into the face of the prehistoric predator matchup superfans to keep em quiet for a few years, until they found an even more enormous bear in Argentina. |
15th January 2019, 06:04 PM | #455 |
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That’s interesting, but what stops them from evolving more robust bones? There will be diminishing returns but I’m not seeing a specific cutoff. I also don’t see what’s specific to mammalian predators here.
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15th January 2019, 06:27 PM | #456 |
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I'm uncomfortable calling that one a "fact." And not just in the pedantic way that all scientific facts are provisional, but even in the common parlance method. It's a plausible hypothesis, and what little I could see of the paper seemed to be reasonable, but I don't think I'd say it's a fact the way I would with "the force of gravity is proportional to 1/radius^2" or "the charge of an electron is opposite that of a proton" or even Cheetah's largest-antarctic-animal thing (which, in my mind, had an implied "that we know of")
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15th January 2019, 06:55 PM | #457 |
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You forgot to specify terrestrial (the paper did specify). Take away that constraint, and you can get much bigger than 1 ton.
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"As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose -- that it may violate property instead of protecting it -- then everyone will want to participate in making the law, either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominant, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, and the struggle within will be no less furious." - Bastiat, The Law |
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15th January 2019, 07:09 PM | #458 |
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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant. |
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15th January 2019, 07:38 PM | #459 |
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15th January 2019, 07:44 PM | #460 |
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15th January 2019, 08:32 PM | #461 |
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"In times of war, we need warriors. But this isn't a war." - Phil Plaitt |
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15th January 2019, 09:09 PM | #462 |
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So take that quantum equation and recalculate the wave by a factor of hoopty doo! The answer is not my problem, it's yours. Three Word Story Wisdom |
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15th January 2019, 10:29 PM | #463 |
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15th January 2019, 11:51 PM | #464 |
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Portia is the most intelligent arthropod known, by a long shot. P fimbriata being the best studied.
It's a small jumping spider that has "the most varied prey capture techniques of any animal in the world except humans and other simians." They have very good vision in their two main eyes, more acute than a cat in daylight and 10 times better than a dragonfly. They hunt other spiders up to twice their own size and quickly develop new tactics to deal with prey in the lab that they could never have encountered in the wild. They are slow and meticulous when stalking their prey. "Portia species can make detours to find the best attack angle against dangerous prey, even when the best detour takes a Portia out of visual contact with the prey, and sometimes the planned route leads to abseiling down a silk thread and biting the prey from behind. Such detours may take up to an hour, and a Portia usually picks the best route even if it needs to walk past an incorrect route." "Portia uses trial-and-error to successfully solve a confinement problem (i.e. how to escape from an island surrounded by water) both when correct choices are rewarded and when incorrect choices are punished." "A Portia can pluck another spider's web with a virtually unlimited range of signals, either to lure the prey out into the open or calming the prey by monotonously repeating the same signal while the Portia walks slowly close enough to bite it." It tries out, learns and remembers different strategies for dealing with different prey and it does it with only about 600 000 neurons. Isn't that amazing? |
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16th January 2019, 01:55 AM | #465 |
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The thread about parasites eating tumors reminded me of parasitoid wasps and the polydnavirus.
It's a virus in a wasp in a caterpillar. The full genome of the virus is integrated into that of the wasp. The viral proteins are only produced and assembled in special cells in the ovaries of female wasps. The virus is injected into the caterpillar with the eggs and does not replicate, but suppresses the immune system, allowing the eggs and larvae to survive. It's an old association between the wasp, the virus and the caterpillar, more than 70 million years and it's not sure whether the virus is wholly derived from wasp genes or an existing virus that got incorporated long ago. |
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"... when you dig my grave, could you make it shallow so that I can feel the rain" - DMB |
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16th January 2019, 07:53 AM | #466 |
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The relative size of the orbits of the planets (excuse the simplification to circular orbits). The light red band is the asteroid belt. The sun is nary a dot.
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Gunter Haas, the 'leading British expert,' was a graphologist who advised couples, based on their handwriting characteristics, if they were compatible for marriage. I would submit that couples idiotic enough to do this are probably quite suitable for each other. It's nice when stupid people find love. - Ludovic Kennedy |
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16th January 2019, 08:05 AM | #467 |
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You can calculate PI to a... fair, no great, not super-precise but fair, level of accuracy with a sheet of paper, a straight edge, a pencil, and a handful of matchsticks or similar sized objects.
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articl...opping-sticks/ |
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16th January 2019, 08:08 AM | #468 |
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But Pluto isn't a planet
This is one of the cooler things on the interwebs: http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/...larsystem.html The Solar System scaled to the moon being 1 pixel. |
16th January 2019, 08:11 AM | #469 |
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You can count to 1023 on your fingers in binary.
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16th January 2019, 08:13 AM | #470 |
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16th January 2019, 08:28 AM | #471 |
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There is truth and there are lies. - President Joseph R. Biden, January 20th, 2021 |
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16th January 2019, 08:45 AM | #472 |
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16th January 2019, 10:51 AM | #473 |
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Gunter Haas, the 'leading British expert,' was a graphologist who advised couples, based on their handwriting characteristics, if they were compatible for marriage. I would submit that couples idiotic enough to do this are probably quite suitable for each other. It's nice when stupid people find love. - Ludovic Kennedy |
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16th January 2019, 11:25 AM | #474 |
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"... when you dig my grave, could you make it shallow so that I can feel the rain" - DMB |
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16th January 2019, 12:14 PM | #475 |
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16th January 2019, 12:24 PM | #476 |
So far, so good...
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Over we go.... |
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16th January 2019, 12:51 PM | #477 |
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Gunter Haas, the 'leading British expert,' was a graphologist who advised couples, based on their handwriting characteristics, if they were compatible for marriage. I would submit that couples idiotic enough to do this are probably quite suitable for each other. It's nice when stupid people find love. - Ludovic Kennedy |
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16th January 2019, 02:15 PM | #478 |
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Science is self-correcting. Woo is self-contradicting. |
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16th January 2019, 02:29 PM | #479 |
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Yes, sign language and fingerspelling are not the same thing, a fact that many people do not know.
Furthermore, there are sign languages that encode specific spoken languages, and there are also dialects in sign languages within countries. I had a deaf colleague at a university in the US who went to a conference in England. When she got off the plane, she needed a restroom. So she asked one of the deaf Brits who had come to meet the US group. Unfortunately, the American Sign Language gesture for restroom |
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Over we go.... |
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16th January 2019, 03:27 PM | #480 |
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