Viewing profile — pfedor

You want per capita, otherwise you'd think China is wealthier than Switzerland. And you want PPP (though it doesn't make that much difference) since that reflects what people can a…

For example, Alabama is almost as poor as France or Japan, and Mississippi (the poorest state) is almost as poor as Spain and New Zealand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coun…

For example, Steven Pinker looks into this a little in "The Better Angels of Our Nature", long story short there's nothing conclusive, and a sufficiently motivated person can find …

The author manages to make saving a billion human lives into a morally ambiguous deed: had the people starved, they wouldn't be polluting the planet!

Under a "Futarchy", the corn lobby can spend lots of money to "predict" that a sugar tariff will make the country better. To do that they would have to bet a lot of money that the …

Specifically, Bronze is a good game to get started, with some game features and a help system designed for beginners.

" Questions will be raised about Snowden’s mental balance. Also propaganda." Why? Is it not a fair question to ask whether the guy who is the single source of all the revelations m…

So pretty much your argument boils down to, "such a lookup table cannot exist, therefore any argument using it is irrelevant." Note that even Scott Aaronson disagrees with you in t…

Thanks for the link. I just read section 4 and I don't really see how it addresses the argument. It mostly seems to argue against the opinion that computer programs cannot be senti…

So while we're at that, how do the proponents of Turing test respond to the lookup table argument? Say I make a giant lookup table, with keys being all possible conversation prefix…

For example, consider this blog post: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=63 Now ask yourself: how on Earth did the author consider the information about Turing's persecution rele…

"All the King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren.

If you don't have a connection to the world of physicists you may not realize how huge Mathematica is. I have a friend for whom it is the environment of choice for pretty much ever…

And just in case you weren't perfectly satisfied with the level of mathematical rigor of the article, here is a complete, formal, machine-verified and hyperlinked version of the pr…

I think the vast majority of Americans would not object to the government building solidarity and shared values. That is and always has been a core function of the educational syst…

You actually think that these states would still have slavery? To this day, thirty years after the last country in the world (Mauritania) abolished it?

I tried Elance and it worked surprisingly well for me, maybe I was lucky. Email me if you like and I'll give you details of the artist I'm working with and their pricing.

The reality is probably that no Linux (or FreeBSD) system in any configuration is secure from an attacker that can run native code in an unprivileged process. There's a lot of web …

As http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1400 admits, large-scale entanglement most likely does take place in D-Wave's computer. So now he just argues that their proof of concept pr…

Good to know, thanks. I'd argue that perl gets it right--as the default behavior, this behavior would gravely violate the principle of least surprise, but for the 0.01% of people w…

Doesn't happen in Perl for me: pfedor@Pawels-iMac:~$ perl -ne 'print "Digit!\n" if /\d/' af 3 Digit! 23fa3 Digit! asdf ١٢٣٤٥٦٧٨٩۰۱۲۳۴۵۶۷۸۹ ৩৪৫৬৭৮৯੦੧੨੩੪੫੬੭੮੯૦૧૨૩૪૫ ୧୨୩୪୫୬୭୮ ౨౩౪౫౬౭౮౯…

From what I've read, the best approach seems to be to sit, but also to set a timer to get up and walk around for a minute every half hour or so FWIW, that's exactly what my doctor …

The truth is, D-Wave has done nothing to foster the coherence of their "qubits", and so they have built a very expensive, superconducting, classical computer. There is no quantum t…

Say I don't necessarily want to be ripped but I just want to do the minimum amount of exercise to be healthy. So I can go to the gym twice a week and do the program you advocate, o…