Viewing profile — moptar

There's a saying "Locks are to keep out honest people". That's basically it with suitcase locks. To keep your kids from playing with your stuff or your friends who might accidental…

The UAE really does have a low crime rate. The people being disappeared, flogged, etc are typically breaking the law. We in the west might not agree with those laws, but they're st…

Anyone who needs to distinguish 20 shades of green would develop the ability to do so. That's more culture or experience than language. Having names for them just means they have s…

Many of the examples tend to be about very hard to grasp concepts in the first place, specifically emotions. Maybe those ideas are so close to the line between important and unimpo…

A lot of disagreement on this but it's basically true. Homeowners want to protect their investment and their comfortable lifestyle so they make sure local government restricts othe…

You can't say the clouds aren't moving because no instrument is sensitive enough to be sure there's exactly zero movement. All you can say is they're moving slower than some maximu…

Even more exciting, a fruit fly https://neurokernel.github.io/

Hopefully. There's a project attempting to do that with a simpler animal, a kind of worm on a couple of Amazon GPU clusters: http://www.artificialbrains.com/openworm

It's a pity that with so many people photographing it for so long, nobody stopped to think of making a well-aligned higher resolution time lapse.

For all the complaints, this sounds like a great deal for the Gtk developers. They don't have to plan ahead of time which version is going to be the stable one. If one ends up work…

About half of UK WWI soldiers were volunteers. They threw themselves into the meat grinder. Even conscripted people could appeal for being a conscientious objector. https://en.wiki…

All finite element analysis software uses "bad algorithms" in the sense that they give wrong results if the user doesn't take their limitations into account. A common type of error…

There's a science reason for denying participants access to their own data. For example, if you suspect you might have some brain anomaly, you might enroll in the study as a health…

Perhaps the world would be a less violent place if we laughed at soldiers for their failures instead of glorifying them. The article fittingly ends with "all that suffering .. for …

Huh? You can have many orders of magnitude between 0 and 100%. 0.0001 is 4 orders of magnitude smaller than 1.

Costing more money is a measure of how many resources it's using. So more expensive is almost by definition more wasteful. The resource might be more human labor than natural resou…

If you can grow food in more hostile environments, won't that mean people move to those more hostile environments and again end up dependent on unreliable food supplies, but now sl…

Not everything and not things his leaders did. Just going to Iraq, which he said he personally did.

It seems to be that way. Weren't the Nuremberg trials supposed to have established the idea the soldiers, or at least officers passing orders along can be guilty even if they're fo…

It's also responsible for the destruction of Iraq and the emergence of ISIS. Are you really proud that your personal success rides on the back of so many innocent lives being lost?…

I don't understand why there's such unanimous words of support for someone who directly contributed to the half million deaths in the Iraq war. I know it's unrelated to his case, b…

The extent to which it cost human lives is a function of the arbitrary emission standards that governments have set. Those standards are obviously chosen as a trade-off between too…

I agree that not listing every oil spill isn't required to make a view American centric. That's not the issue though, it's a straw man. What's American centric is to focus on Ameri…

That's kind of like Godwin's law. It's worth comparing things to the Nazis to reveal how little we despise other bad actions. But we have unreasonably strong negative feelings abou…

That's a sadly America-centric view of the world. Shell's spills in the Niger Delta are just as bad or worse and nobody cares because it's some weird foreign country that doesn't a…