Viewing profile — flaubere

Stephen F. Blinkhorn, is that you?

Gould wrote a controversial book attacking whole swathes of science done in the past. The existence of a senior lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire who has written a critic…

Although von Neumann was certainly a genius who happened to be in the right place at the right time, he's also an example of how groups of people can create a culture seemingly muc…

I'm sure there are lots of bright people who are coasting at either Stanford or Google. If that's your goal, you might well achieve it. But at the same time, there are people who a…

Yes, what people competing to get their children into the 0.9% miss is that 1. There are going to be other tests and hurdles in the future which differentiate your child from those…

It seems like you are advocating, for a bright but not exceptional child, that they do get pushed to the point where they burn out, just in case they manage to win the lottery of a…

Not sure why you are asking this in this thread, but the implication is that the bullets are fired from ground level, not necessarily horizontally. The maximum distance a projectil…

The author said in a postscript that he was worried about seeming elitist. I didn't think it was elitist at all, and I completely understand why it was a good choice for him to wri…

I think he picked a good number. It clearly wasn't $1000 of effort. Jim may not have been interested in hiring someone who, like his previous software guy, was looking to shake him…

I don't think that Dr Dre gets to evaluate the performance of Apple employees who are women (or Korean, etc) simply because they have a JV making headphones.

I think if you write something which says 'I am biased', the burden of proof is now on you to show hiring managers that it was all a bit, rather than on them to demonstrate that it…

Absolutely agree. The best and most creative environments I have worked in have been full of people who you could turn to and say "What if we did X?", and they would immediately co…

By redefining anyone who has worked very hard and enjoyed success as a 'fierce nerd', you make the term meaningless, and the supposed payoff from being one into a tautology.

I have found a few of his essays very good, indeed expressing things I haven't seen anywhere else. I think he has provided very good advice to young people at times. The vast major…

That depends on what the alternative is. If it involves clueless people filling up garbage bags with gasoline and storing them in their kitchens perhaps letting the pipeline contin…

You just end up with a situation where there's intense competition to make cheatbots as good as possible, within the parameters of plausible deniability. People start meta-hacking …

The rest of the world makes a useful distinction between a 'country' (such as France), a 'state' (the public institutions which run France), and a 'government' (the political entit…

It looks like many of these show a construction which you have to follow the details of to check that there aren't gaps or overlaps. Is there a way of checking these automatically?…

Here's a visualisation that helped me think about the 4-cube: Cut the 3-cube with a plane which is diagonal to all axes, eg x + y + z = c. Start at a corner and take sequential sec…

Do all the 2-nets of the 3-cube tile the plane?

If the chance of it happening is that small, isn't it fair to also consider the probability that we live in a universe without objective reality and/or where a god or gods intentio…

I can only imagine the reaction of all prisoners in large Federal corrections institutions if one sunny morning they are lined up and processing for the release of every single inm…