xkcd

schapel

Toffo wrote:Ok now I thought about it some more, and now I'm equating those things again.

This is clearly wrong, as mass (or more correctly, mass-energy) is conserved, but the entropy of a system can increase (i.e. is not conserved).

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I'm just bored at work and was reading the post about the programming language for the XKCD phone. It got me thinking, would it be possible to build an "RNG based" language, where, for example, there is a probability that your variables will shift one bit?. This is the way most modern com...

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189 = (4!+(4!/.4))/.4...

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87 = 4 * 4! - 4 / .4...

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84 = √4 * 44 - 4

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SPACKlick wrote:What is a word made up of four letters, yet is spelled with three. Although, it is written with eight letters, and then with four. Rarely, it consists of six letters but never is written with five.

Spoiler:

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The only way to save the sun is to remember that it's = it is.

Removing iron from the core won't do much because the sun will never produce iron, or many other heavy elements. It's not large enough. Maybe removing its core in the future could help.

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I asked for an example of a behavior that isn't using feeback - what specific behavior in mate seeking is not operating on feedback principles? "Having" a brightly colored something is not a behavior. Oh, I can think of one. A male plant releases pollen and gets no feedback whether it suc...

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Stimulus-response could occur in an open loop without feedback. I can't think of any biological examples where this would be the case, as usually an organism can sense some change that the response caused. I suppose I could contrive an example -- numb your arm and hand with a local anesthetic, then ...

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But would it work? Yes, it works. When I took geology in college, we looked at still stereo images of mountains taken from a plane. When we viewed the images through a stereoscope, we could see the 3-d topology of the mountains in great detail. If you had cameras on the ground and pointed them up a...

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Recently at work co-workers have been very impressed by my ability to type commands in the Linux command line interface to do my work. The first time this happened was after I quickly typed a correct tar command without looking anything up . I soon realized that this person was impressed that I was ...

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Does the radiation not gain energy on it's way down, and does that not decrease the time to heat the pizza to appropriate temperature? No, photons do not gain energy as they're traveling towards a black hole. Energy is conserved. When an object falls, its potential energy is converted to kinetic en...

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Here's another way to think about the difference in size between the set of integers and the set of reals. Every subset of integers (finite or infinite) can be encoded in just one real number. Just assign a decimal place to each integer, and write a 1 in the decimal place if the integer is in the su...

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memoization

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I take the average of the digits

5

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mojo12 wrote:I caught that too. I hope it's not an Americanism. I don't know why the 'real v really' issue annoys me so. And I don't get that "fake" kind of annoyed when I see it, I get real annoyed.

What annoys me is when people drive to slow. I mean real slow!

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SDK wrote:How does the government benefit from carbon trading?

Whenever they talk about carbon trading, they're not talking about new t*xes. Watch my lips carefully -- talking about new t*xes is a sure way not to get re-elected.

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commodorejohn wrote:So what's its stance on text editor preference?

It's obvious from the cover... Code::Blocks

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That's a Jupiter slingshot to the Sun maneuver. We should just shoot radioactive waste into Jupiter directly. There's no solid surface, so the waste would fall into the center where the heat would melt everything and allow it to dilute through Jupiter's core. Jupiter must already have quite a few r...

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I take it to the 5/7 power.

243

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Does anyone know the paper/article about middle school children(?) answering a variable assignment question before and after being taught how it works and the kids basically either understood it from the start or didn't learn it at all? This is a common problem in teaching. Students often think the...

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I chop the serifs off.

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I think the reason it's hard to prove is that it is false.

For k = 7: p = 2^7-1 = 127, which is prime

127-1 = 126
127-2 = 125
127-4 = 123
127-8 = 119
127-16 = 111
127-32 = 95
127-64 = 63

None of these are prime. 119 = 7 * 17

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While I was reading this very thread, I realized that pushing on my mouse's wheel to the left takes me to the previous web page, and pushing to the right does the opposite. So that's what those little arrows next to the wheel are indicating! Also, TIL that Queen's Another One Bites the Dust is about...

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But I'm still a little unclear of why you'd replace i with tau.. Isn't tau defined as [;\tau=2\pi;]? There have been a few very vocal people who have recently tried to push for that idea, but that campaign hasn't gone anywhere that I'm aware of. If you open a math textbook and see tau, you can be n...

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Sabredog wrote:It's indescribably horrifying.

Seems fine to me. I'd rather go that way. A slow, agonizing death is what I'm terrified of. I'm not really afraid of death at all, but the suffering on the way there.

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Tau and some fancy curve ? You mean the integral for the integral term? I'm not going to explain integral calculus here. Just think of it as a sum of recent errors: I_f \sum_{i=t-N}^t e(i) To try to explain briefly, the sigma is replaced with the "fancy curve" and the i variable i...

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Including cannabis? You might want to try a mindfulness-based approach.

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First of all, intuition is often wrong. Exactly. That's why Dennett calls the Chinese Room argument a bad intuition pump. It pumps the wrong intuition to encourage the wrong conclusion. Second, just because Bucky said something does not give it credence. I certainly agree to that, too. If anyone ma...

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It sounds like you took it as a supposed-to-be-plausible sci-fi story. I took it as a thought experiment and I enjoyed it. Of course it's not going to happen that way, but the story presented some ideas I hadn't thought of before in convenient story format. The writing was as you say but I was able...

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Here's how you can find the polynomial for the first five composites in Octave (linear algebra software). It just uses a formula from Wikipedia . octave:1> X = [ [1 1 1 1 1]; [1 2 4 8 16]; [1 3 9 27 81]; [1 4 16 64 256]; [1 5 25 125 625] ]; octave:2> y = [ 4; 6; 8; 9; 10 ]; octave:3> a = inv(X' * X)...

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1. Yes! Given any set of n points where no two points have the same x value, there is a polynomial of degree n-1 that goes through all the points. Therefore, there is a polynomial that goes through (1,4), (2,6), (3,8), (4,9), (5,10), and so on. Unfortunately, the polynomial has infinite degree. 2. I...

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ucim wrote:
schapel wrote:Why should humans work to earn their living when they don't need to?
Why should the robots give the humans what they want?

Why wouldn't they? They do now.

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I think the short story Manna covers the potential positive and negative effects of automating nearly all jobs. I agree that robots taking jobs away from humans isn't necessarily a disaster. It just requires rethinking how the economy works. Why should humans work to earn their living when they don'...

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I don't see you having a problem with syntax. When I asked you to do something simple and specific, get a line from System.in and output it to System.out, you had no problem at all that I can see, not even with syntax. You were unused to putting the package name before the class name, but I think th...

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I'm not sure what you mean by that. On the one hand, the libraries contain the code that is needed for some code to work in the program file... Ah, this is the first inaccurate mental model we've found. You do not need to use import to use the libraries. What the import statement does is allow you ...

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The Wikipedia article passwd explains quite a lot. More generally, you'll want to understand the format of the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files. Accounts are separate from files -- if you delete an account, all of the files owned by that account are left untouched, but ls -l will show the UID of th...

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Awesome!

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I suppose, for now, I could post my final project... I suspect that this code is far beyond where you first got confused, if you had no idea what to do and just started typing import statements. It sounds like you were completely lost at that point. Could you back up to where you first had trouble?...

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pdje wrote:So, while it is great that climatology as a science has been invented, they might want to keep quiet until they have some idea what they are actually talking about.

They've made predictions and our observations match those predictions. They've proved to me that they know what they're talking about.

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