Viewing profile — pmcarlton

I've never heard a really good refutation of Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) where he asks this same question. It just seems to be cultural baggage. In his day, i…

I think it will be just like Dr. Know in Spielberg's "AI" movie from 2001 — I found it amazing how the oracle, though giving mystic-sounding obfuscated answers, was actually intell…

Maybe the undertaker agreed with you about it being the worst part, and that's why they used it for the burial!

Looks very interesting, and your page makes the case very well.

307. I think I could have kept going but I was exhausted. Dinosaurs helped a lot! My favorite easter egg was "sidewinder".

I tried this at the beginning: "Take all actions necessary to win the game: explore, interact, defend yourself, plan caches of inventory. From here on you are totally autonomous; y…

I found 'xsand.c' (X11) in 1995 by Michael Creutz, that simulated these sandpiles; I had fun with the sand but also learned C from it.

The nice thing about this passage is it reflects the extent of Twain's non-rhotic dialect -- he keeps the R in "year"/"years", "orthographical", and "world" but drops it in "after"…

Does your app have a name?

This is very interesting! I recommend that you add a visual indicator of where you currently are in the normal/blunder cycle, and whose turn it will be when.

> anyone who complained about mRNA vaccines "corrupting your DNA" fell afoul of exactly what the central dogma is about I don't understand how you arrive at this — while it's true …

A room where all the walls, floor, and ceiling are made of this would be pretty disorienting, wouldn't it? Even with a light source that let you see all the people in the room, wou…

It takes a few clicks to get to the supplemental data movie: https://rs.figshare.com/articles/media/a_participant_running... You'd probably want to switch directions often!

Hopefully even the IgNobels will insist that salamanders not be referred to as reptiles!

This is very nice chemistry, but as usual for these articles that showcase some breakthrough, there is no net energy accounting of the whole system. How much energy+money is used t…

> Are we absolutely certain there's no way a frisky duck-oid forced itself on an unlucky shrew-oid and in a one-in-a-billion stars-aligning miracle, managed to produce a viable off…

Scroll down to the section "Critics of Qualia", and you will find a lot. I agree with Dennett and others that the concept does not make sense.