Viewing profile — nu23

There seem to be a lot of defensive comments, which I guess, seem to be coming from the focus on individual guilt. Focussing too much on individual choice is examining a particular…

One important thing to note is that cyclone hit Orissa at low tide. Floods, more than wind speed, seem to be the the important factor. There was flooding some time after Phailin in…

Interesting. This is a very detailed effort, with encyclopaedic ambitions across different languages. The question is if there is a lightweight version of this - someway of chosing…

Maybe, we should have an international language reform to introduce a phonetic spelling system (WYSIWYHear) which would also lead to a somewhat standardized accent. The local ways …

The title seems apt actually. I think 'universe' here refers to the concept of a set so large that it is closed under all set theoretic operations and since mathematical operations…

To me, 'hack' and 'unintuitive' carry different meanings. 'Hack' indicates some kind of ad-hoc patch to fix the model. Even if it fits the data, there could be a theoretical irregu…

This shouldn't be surprising given that the traditional maps of the Vipassana explicitly talk about negative stages. The problem is that somehow this information is not commonly kn…

Reasoning from basic principles is a valuable tool to evaluate conclusions. Sure, it has strong weaknesses (hidden assumptions which are wrong, insufficient imagination about what …

We need a higher resolution in our vocabulary when talking about technological risks. Someone can be in favour of most forms of technology, and yet even when dealing with technolog…

Well, I'd love to be wrong about this and hope that you are right. What worries me is that key parts of the technology, like the processor, sensors and software might be available …

In twenty years or so, this could easily be widely available, just like machine guns today. Even if there was an explicit ban on the endproduct itself, the basic technology could b…

In your metamorphosis example, is the finished project essentially be a robot? Would you have the same problem when a software agent is transferred from one computer to another? As…

> he talks about how its impossible to make an algorithm tile a grid in a certain way. My guess, is that here he is talking about undecidability which appears quite often in mathem…

I guess the problem is you need to pay a significant amount of money to file a claim. Interestingly, some have advocated the same method for preventing spam in email by requiring y…

Otoh, one of the early tests for general relativity was a minor deviation in Mercury's orbit from what was predicted by classical mechanics. My rough intuition is that inconsistenc…

Sometimes though, not finding good names might just be an indication of the newness or non-standardized nature of the situation you are using the name in. Even in natural languages…

Someone already mentioned PLOT. This would be a good thing to lookup when designing your hygienic macro system, http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/index.html . The author was als…

The counterpoint here would be that memorization happens more naturally when practicing, as frequently used knowledge is automatically memorized. I remember school courses in histo…

My solution to this problem was to print the todo file whenever a terminal is opened using .bashrc. It works much better as I see the terminal more often than the desktop.

Yes, a place to take exams could be one of the important services the center provides. There could be an independent exam standards organization, which would check that the exams a…