Viewing profile — qrendel

Just take comfort in knowing that female attractiveness usually drops off a cliff far earlier than male attractiveness does. The same girl writing that essay will one day be 40+ an…

> I wonder, for instance, how much sooner we'd have discovered the Juniper backdoor --- possibly the most catastrophic backdoor in the history of the Internet --- if a larger colle…

I was a bit shocked, though I probably shouldn't have been, to notice recently that police in the local airport all carry assault rifles now. Assault rifles. I'm not that knowledge…

That's kind of my point - they could have tested me easily by giving me some problems from a previous final, or anything else, or even talking to me for five minutes, but instead t…

Eh, if you're just auditing the class, maybe. When I was in college they made me retake ridiculous prereqs for the most trivial of reasons every time I transferred, allowed no exce…

I read a lot and don't have a ton of money. It's a tradeoff I'm willing to accept, and if I'm concerned about the author, I'd honestly rather donate to them directly than see it si…

When I said "cheap," I meant in price. I'm averse to low-quality books, and would rather pay a few dollars more or hold out longer for a copy with clean pages and little wear. Espe…

My personal experience, from having been an e-book aficionado who eventually went back to almost entirely paper (cheap used hardcover when I can find it): Ebook advantages: - Cheap…

You (along with the immediate parent) actually do have a good point here. If any pollsters ask, I'd probably say I support Johnson for this reason, though overall I'd personally pr…

This is already the first election in which millenials and gen-Xers (terrible name, btw) outnumber them as far as eligible voters. The problem is eligibility isn't enough - old peo…

If what matters to you is actual electoral support, there's no reason to be voting third party anyway. Both Stein and Johnson got less than 1% of the vote in 2012, and even combine…

Regarding size, the official memberships from 2014 were ~411,000 (Libs) vs ~248,000 (Greens). You could look at that as either the Libertarians being 66% larger, or them being prac…

Green Party is also an option if you want to protest vote. A problem, for some, with supporting libertarian candidates is that they (voters) may not be as fond of the low-hanging f…

In general, it allows a better approximation of the solution function for far less hidden neurons. Sure, you could get arbitrarily close using a single hidden layer, but that hidde…

Which r/askhistorians thread are you referring to? A quick search and only found one, not exactly a fisking of his work: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2w7ur9/is_s…

It's not a bad book, but imo it starts off very strong and then quickly goes downhill throughout. This was the general (and unsolicited) criticism from most everyone I've shared it…

> What we really need therefore (IMHO) is to teach ethics to people that work with data Studies seem to indicate that studying and teaching ethics does not make you more inclined t…

> Ant genomics declare 'checkmate' to red king theory Interesting stuff, but they've only shown mutualism increased the rate of evolution (compared to non-mutualists) in a few spec…

I was under the impression that the bigger danger was the expected eventual earthquake of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, potentially leading to tens of thousands killed or injured a…

> The few people in the Democratic party who believe in homeopathy and UFOs are considered nut cases and marginalized -- it's not official dogma promoted by the leaders of the part…

"Will" in this case, though, is basically a euphemism for "cost of (retro)fitting trucks and loading docks with guardrails" vs "cost of lives lost by failing to do so." I'm not sur…

This. BJJ is probably the most useful for self-defense (personal opinion), but it's also the most complicated to learn. It covers ground fighting better than wrestling or judo, whi…

The techniques aren't fake, they're just unreliable outside of training. It's one thing to pull it off against a training partner who is using a known subset of attacks and when yo…

Specifically, Vonnegut was present at and survived the bombing of Dresden, which became part of (the main?) the inspiration for Slaughterhouse-Five: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K…