81–90 of 122 posts
I once tried to find out on Wikipedia whether goldfish really have ten second attention spans. I learned that in Nix vs. Heddon the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit.
I once tried to find out on Wikipedia whether goldfish really have ten second attention spans. I learned that in Nix vs. Heddon the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit.
A story that might be interesting: We live in Arizona. Last year two old guys (really old, about my age :-) got out of their pickup truck and walked over to me while I was gassing up our car and asked for directions to some obscure little town. After asking why they were travelling (they were on the way to some distant relative's house for a party) I pulled out my droid phone and used the voice interface to Google Now to ask for driving directions; we also got a warning about a road closure. Neither of these guys had ever owned a computer so they asked the obvious questions of how much would a similar phone cost and where to get one. I would bet that they had a smart phone within days. +1 for easy access to information.
You can still bullshit. You just cant do it by inventing random easily unverified factoids. You need to be a bit more inventive and creative these days.
The story posted in the article provides a romanticized illustration of how finding knowledge in a world without easy access to it can produce an adventure. (I like that it doesn't directly say which of the 1994 or 2014 versions was better , though there's sure an implication from how they're painted.) On the other hand, access to information can produce an adventure, as well; so can many other things. In the end, th…
> On the other hand, access to information can produce an adventure, as well How many of us, solo or in a group, ended up reaching for the asked piece of information basically instantly on Wikipedia, yet, serendipitously hooked on by another piece of information, ended up bouncing around page upon page like a pachinko ball until one says "wait, how did we get up to this already?".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm rather shocked at the fairly visceral reactions a lot of people are having here. This is pretty classic conversational shenanigans. We had a blast with this in college; either you play along or counter with something equally preposterous or unprovable. Looking up the answer is cheating. It's like a game of verbal Calvin Ball or Mornington Crescent. As noted elsewhere in this thread (edit: at least one level up it…
I realize you may have omitted some nuance, but to me, "debating" whether you have to consider the entirety of a mass when modeling gravity sounds incredibly boring. If you use 9.8 m/s*s you are papering over all the nuance, and otherwise 2 masses and a distance is pretty obviously fundamental. Was the real conversation better than that?
It wandered like that. It was a direct result of our introduction to modeling in the early core engineering courses. Wherein we abuse the power of deciding what gets into the model. (It all started with one person noting that we frequently neglect gravity in electrical engineering.)
1) Koalas are from Australia, and in Australia every animal tries to kill you.
2) The AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM[1] has an entire page on them[2].
3) Australian Geographic (the Australian cousin of National Geographic) has a long post about how they tend to target non-native homo-sapiens[3]
4) This study[4] shows how they are best tracked by indirect means. PDF available at [5]
[1] http://australianmuseum.net.au/
[2] http://australianmuseum.net.au/Drop-Bear
[3] http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2013/03/drop-bea...
[4] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00049182.2012.731...
[5] http://eprints.utas.edu.au/16293/1/2013_Janssen_APAS2013_pro...
I once tried to find out on Wikipedia whether goldfish really have ten second attention spans. I learned that in Nix vs. Heddon the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a tomato is a vegetable, not a fruit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I honestly believe we live our lives for the moments that aren't spent learning. Facts are facts, and that's just about it. This behavior is "fun" because their bullshitting about Steven Tyler led to them meeting up with some girls, going to some bars, and having a good night out. It's weird how all these advancements in technology that were supposed to free up our time have just taken up more of our time. It's sad,…
It baffles me how you can call this convoluted process "learning". It's not. It's rightfully called the art of trivia bullshitting and has nothing to do with learning. It's a purely social process that seems foreign and awkward to a visible majority of the HN crowd. I happen to agree with that crowd, I don't see the fun in it. I don't see the point in it. I wasn't raised to respond positively to this specific situati…
Like in programming: a lot of "functions" don't return anything, they're ran for side-effects.