Viewing profile — dgordon

"If we are, in fact, predestined, assuming I have free will doesn't hurt or matter." Not to mention you were predestined to assume so.

Those numbers are based on statistics from the 1960s, when transitioning was next to impossible, and are probably a couple orders of magnitude too low. More to the point, that thre…

Not that it excuses this so-called security, but for the insecurity question, you could just lie. Only problem is, then you have to remember your lies.

"It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficien…

Ah, the old "criminals will rob you if you don't consent to have the government take your money to hand out to them" argument. Often peddled by those who also believe criminals are…

I never had them until my mid-20s, but apparently a lot of people's only experience of brussels sprouts is boiled to death, which allegedly increases their bitterness. I've had the…

Good lawyers have surprised me before, but that's so clearly false, as one glance at Facebook will show, that I have to think it would get laughed out of any courtroom.

"Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them." However, people who apply to universit…

Yep, as anyone who watched the World Cup learned: see the phantom foul (no one even knows who it was allegedly on) that took away the US victory over Slovenia, or the referee denyi…

"A weird-ass cross section of human" is a great description of Carnegie Mellon. Also, for all of the article's bashing of "dumb jocks" athletes at Carnegie Mellon slightly outperfo…

Which unnecessary body parts are those? The appendix is there to repopulate the intestines with beneficial bacteria when they get wiped out. Extra kidneys, lungs, etc., are there b…

The traditional diets (which varied dramatically, by the way) resulted in consistently good teeth for people who never touched a toothbrush. In fact, their results were much better…

>That said the study is highly biased. The "native" people are always laughing in the photos and the "modernized" people are looking sad. But this doesn't explain away the order-of…

22...I think I got five or six wrong by second-guessing my first instinct.

At the risk of being even more pedantic, quicksort with the O(n) deterministic median finding algorithm has a worst-case runtime of O(n log n) -- you use that algorithm to find the…

I think so. Logic is only as good as its premises.

I can't believe you've played much chess if you think that it's purely about deductive reasoning. Humans can't calculate even the least part of all the possibilities in most positi…

I'd just like to point out the difference between this and some comments below that basically say "LOL NAZIS JUST DID THEIR JOB" -- 134 points and counting vs. -4 and probably even…

NO U. Whining about downvoting, especially twice, is pathetic. And I'm willing to risk five points to say this.

45 million dead in four years. Yep, that's about right for the Holodomor times four. Of course, Stalin and Mao still aren't as synonymous with ultimate evil as Hitler was, and won'…

That's the number of new infections in 2006. As HIV/AIDS takes a long time to run its course, and it stays around for life with a very few exceptions involving bone marrow transpla…

Snowflakes are all the same melting inorganic matter as each other. Beauty and uniqueness are simply not automatic for humans.

"Not every X is Y" is almost never a relevant or meaningful argument. It certainly doesn't answer "Position X promotes Y-like behavior, and so many "decent, average people" in posi…

What the banality of evil suggests is that "evil" or in this case "thuggish" behavior is much more a function of social role, and less a function of character, than people thought.…

I don't think you can read too much Orwell, nor, in nonfiction, too much Solzhenitsyn or Milton Mayer.