Viewing profile — tjradcliffe

"Maybe people intuitively figured out what was up (one of the parameters of the Drake Equation must be much lower than our estimate) but stopped there and didn’t bother explaining …

This story is a textbook example of bad reporting. The headline and opening paragraph combine two completely different categories of error--"wrong" and "late"--so that it is possib…

I agree on the phrasing issue. Both there "types" seem to require Bohr's classical observer, but as soon as you assume that observers are classical you've swept the big question un…

The creation of science depended on a large number of random factors, from Judeic monotheism (or something like it) to the disasters of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and…

Sure you can, unless you're shuffling a perfectly ordered deck. OP was deleted so there may be some context missing?

That's a very odd observation, because religious people as a population show very slight deviations from non-religious people. It is extremely difficult to tell by observation whet…

It's a mediocre article. It glosses a bunch of history adequately and then points out a completely different anomaly. By "completely different" I mean "has all the signatures of an…

Their results may be significant to VCs, but likely aren't to anyone else. They get about a 4% increase in good outcomes, from 23% to 27%, for a 1 sigma increase in expert positive…

We find it because that's what we're looking for, or inventing. Here's a comparable question: "How is it that we can find an unfathomably small sub-set of possible symbols--a mere …

Reality is continuous. Human categories--like cancer--only have sharp edges because we draw them with an act of selective attention. The edge of our attention is discontinuous. Not…

The meaning is not the same because it's very difficult for poor and less educated parents to give their children what rich and more educated parents give them. My kids went to a h…

Oxygen is not flammable (neither is fluorine... every other element is, in the sense that it forms stable compounds in exothermic reactions with oxygen.) Oxygen is, however, fairly…

For comparison, the Great Lakes are about 60 m above sea level (Kingston, at the junction of Lake Ontario and the St Lawrence, is at 200 ft). Salt water inundation has not been a p…

These are lovely anecdotes and he's obviously an interesting and capable story-teller, but he worked very hard to make his nominal epiphany true. The trick of writing in a foreign …

All knowledge is probability-based. The question is: are the probabilities in this case low (or high) enough to be very interesting?

My first thought on reading the headline was: hadn't they better get printing working first? I just assumed it still doesn't because after five years or so of not being able to pri…

I have long suspected that the story of "The Aristocrats" is a hoax, although I've never bothered to pursue the question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aristocrats_%28film%29 M…

We could call it cfront: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront

Yeah, and by the mid-1990's no one was using them, which is the adoption curve that's characteristic of a fad, not an effective method of doing anything useful. Now 20 years later …

No worse than normal, at least for me. I found the experience dull. Always having some internal auditory stimulation may have been part of the cause of that. Also, I meditate very …

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. When we look at the actual history of the Quran--and it has one, just like any other book made my human hands--we find that the…

This is fairly boring because the "incompleteness" is built in to the Navier-Stokes equation from the off, and we (physicists) have been well-aware of it for over a century. Soluti…

One might as well say we are hardwired to social stratification (which we almost certainly are) and our language reflects that. Every human society has more-or-less arbitrary rules…

What is meant here is an ordinary empirical claim that is false, which is unsurprising because it is made independently of any empirical investigation into how we form our notion o…

There is a certain type of mind that delights in paradoxes, to the extent that even after an explanation has been clearly produced, the person will continue to insist there is a pa…