Viewing profile — alfapla

At the risk of sounding snarky or disrespectful, I can't fail to notice how often people suffering from depression become all passionate and fiery when discussing the cause of (the…

The job most likely to suffer massive layoffs in the future because of progress in AI is the job of the software developer.

In Belgium people will look at you funny if you ask for salt on your popcorn

I wouldn't call Richard Dawkings close minded. Here's a man who abandoned a successful career in biology because he found contemplating God more rewarding.

Well, you begin by following some basic training course. I suppose a school building is just as accessible as a gym building.

Don't want to be the negative guy, but sometimes I wonder why people would spend their physical energy on gym equipment while you may just as well learn a construction skill that l…

Ignore any blog post that begins with "Why", "Please" or "Dear"

Why not link to the original article instead? ;) http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k56527v/f234.image Starting about halfway the page from "DEMONSTRATION TOUCHANT LE mouvement d…

Cassini and Richter had measured the parallax of Mars (and therefore the distance to Mars) a couple of years earlier. Using Kepler's law they could then deduce the distances to the…

The Chinese room argument is actually needlessly convoluted. Just imagine a piece of paper on which three words are printed: "I AM SAD". Now is there anyone who believes that this …

For Christ sake, this is a guy who writes a very useful text editor and hands it out for free. He's not the UN ambassador of global political reconciliation, as you seem to believe…

Your considerations may be true but there is simply no denying that there is some serious hypocrisy going on at the core of our value system. We fume when muslim terrorists bomb Pa…

Actually, both Israel and Palestines are a bit befuddled that their eternal little conflict has lost a good deal of importance to the rest of the world in view of the bigger events…

> It's not intentional but I doubt ISIS sympathisers see the distinction. I don't see the distinction either. If you drop a bomb and kill some people that you didn't intend to kill…

If you procrastinate a lot, it usually means that you really want to do something different with your life. Go find out what it is, rather than submitting yourself to all sorts of …

If there's positive buzz about molten salt reactors, the most likely source of that buzz is people who want to get rich selling molten salt reactors.

If mobsters were that competent, they wouldn't be mobsters in the first place.

Plaster walls like a pro. I tried to learn it but I haven't got the knack.

This canard keeps popping up with such regularity that one start to wonder what kind of interest group is spinning this. The space around Chernobyl is still a dead zone. The only r…

> I think the fact that Obama won in 2012 supports my argument that most people see him as basically competent. Not bad. A reasonable moderate who did a moderately reasonable job. …

Humanity is suffering from a collective ADD epidemic under the spell of computers and internet and children are getting the worst of it. Computers are the last thing that kids unde…

One of the reasons why poverty is so difficult to solve is that, in a way, poverty is a biological niche. Even if you could manage to lift everyone out of poverty, that niche will …

It's little more than a year ago that Brendan Eich was ousted from Mozilla by an ugly orchestrated cabal. When I read Mitchell Baker's vapid blog post [1] on the decision, filled w…

Your brain is probably the most subtle instrument in the universe and you're plain stupid if you're going to blast it with synthetic drugs the long term effects of which are still …