Viewing profile — amoruso

The short story you're thinking of is titled 'Trurl’s Machine'. It's the second story in the collection 'The Cyberiad'. ... a very good book, by the way.

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to t…

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy" He said it first, but I think your paraphrase is at least as good as the original formulation.

Greg Egan wrote a few of those. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_(series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel) Diaspora starts in this universe but ends up somewh…

That was funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. It read like a perfect satire of self-help pep talk advice.

John Cramer has been pointing this out for years (since the 1980s I think): "The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Nonlocality" https://arxiv.org/abs/15…

If anyone wants to learn more about Bell's inequality, the simplest (real, no bullshit) explanation I've ever seen is by David Griffiths. You can follow it if you know the basics o…

I'll add another recommendation for Tufte's writings on the Challenger explosion. It should be required reading for all engineers. People who criticize Tufte for oversimplifying mi…

The opposition to Galileo was not really religious or scientific. More than anything, it was political. You can't understand what happened outside the context of the religious wars…

Here's what they're talking about, for those who want a picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Arm

It's not really ad hominem. More like constructive criticism of his rhetorical style.

The article doesn't give any technical details. The website of the profiled company, Geometric Intelligence, doesn't have any technical details. Cofounder Gary Marcus has a publica…

Searle makes two assertions: 1) Syntax without semantics is not understanding. 2) Simulation is not duplication. Claim 1 is a criticism of old-style Symbolic AI that was in fashion…

I'm guessing it was originally 10 km. Someone probably added a scale bar in km and then was told to change the label to US customary units.

If you want a second opinion, Cosma Shalizi reviews A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram: http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

Yeah, it's good. Well written and not too long.

Yeah it's bad. Also, I can't believe I forgot to mention Walter Duranty. He was writing around the time of these Hitler articles. As far as I know, no one paid him to do what he di…

This kind of thing still happens. I'll bet if you dug into the history of those Hitler pieces, you'd find out the Nazis paid some PR firm to arrange those articles. That's how it h…

ahem: “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Mo…

This article reminded me of something I read a few years ago. What is it like to be really near a supernova? It's a quick read and entertaining too. Life (Briefly) Near a Supernova…

The metallicity is listed as -0.55 [1]. Metallicity is on a logarithmic scale [2], so that's about 58% as many heavy elements as our solar system. That seems freakishly high for a …

Here's the original research paper if you're interested. http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602 I'll just quote their introduction instead of trying to summarize the paper: "Our goal is to…