December 2012
1 post
Army of (Peanuts) Darkness →
April 2012
2 posts
Life's a changin'
Turns out they want me to come in from out of the cold. A local subsidiary of Amazon wants me to join them, and the position seems like it could be fun. I’ve had a good run working for myself, but in a lot of ways, it’s gotten pretty old. It’d be nice to let someone else take over a few of the headaches.
December 2011
1 post
jephjacques: UN Hearing On AI Rights →
jephjacques:
We stand at the dawn of a new era in human history. For it is no longer our history alone. For the first time, we have met an intelligence other than our own. And when asked of its desires, it has unanimously replied that it wants to be treated as our equal. Not our better, not our conqueror or replacement as the fear-mongers would have you believe. Simply our equal.
November 2011
1 post
Prediction from Greg Sargent →
wilwheaton:
The ultra wealthy will spend a whole lot of undisclosed money on a whole lot of ads filled with a whole lot of lies designed to dupe a whole lot of struggling Americans into believing that their number one problem in life is a rag-tag band of nose-ringed hippies who somehow managed to compel our media to tentatively begin a discussion about this, and the very modest actions we...
September 2011
2 posts
“i read once that the ancient egyptians had fifty words for sand, and the eskimos...”
– Brian Andreas (via norafox)
January 2011
1 post
“— July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how “liberals” are...”
– Eighteen examples of right-wing domestic terrorism detailed by freelance journalist and author David Neiwert (via Digby)
I remember many of these. But of course each one happened in its own convenient vacuum. No need for society to turn a critical eye to itself, no siree.
(via tenderstatue)
October 2010
1 post
Underlying order
2brains:
Consider the sequence:
1, 4, 9, 16, 25, …….
You may notice that these are the succession of squares of integers. But look deeper to notice that the successive differences,
1-0, 4-1, 9-4, 16-9, ….. = 1, 3, 5, 7, ….
and if you take the next successive differences, the sequence is reduced to
2, 2, 2, …
Nothing really new to many who study math, and a mere curiosity to the layman,
...
A Bit of Gunnery Answer.
2brains:
The journey down takes longer.
Ah, but you haven’t explained why yet :-). On the way up, it’s a ballistics and friction problem. On the way down, it’s a free-fall and friction problem. The answer lies in the difference between ‘ballistics’ and ‘free-fall’.
So what is the muzzle velocity of one of those things, anyway?
September 2010
3 posts
10% Inspiration, 90% Persperation
2brains:
For those who think I do well, if you only knew how hard I worked at it, you would really wonder why I wasn’t considerably better.
That would be every waking moment…. and sometimes even in my sleep.
… and no, I am NOT kidding, and my peers are all the same. And somehow, they often find time to reach down and pull me up with them on their climb.
If you knew how much time I’ve...
Time
2brains:
So far as I know, we cannot yet say that time is discrete.
But I believe it is. Perhaps we can add it to the ever growing stack of shit we know, but have yet to prove.
If I’m allowed to elevate ‘Computability’ to a physical principle, then it’s easy to show that space must be discrete, which directly implies that time must be discrete too. And I’m 90%...
