baha_man

I think it's more like 45 than 40.

"Toilet" was by etymology a euphemism, but is no longer understood as such. As old euphemisms have become the standard term, they have been progressively replaced by newer ones, an example of the euphemism treadmill at work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet#Contemporary_Use

"Practically anyone famous for his knowledge can be offered up as the virtuoso in this tale... Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, George Washington, the electrical genius Charles Proteus Steinmetz... How long this story has been around is a mystery."

http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/where.asp

Source? This study gives a 'case fatality rate' of 85% for firearms, 69% for suffocation, and 2% for poisoning:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/case-f...

It's big, but it's not that big, fifth or sixth largest employer in the world according to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers#Large...

According to http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/lurve:

"Origin - 1930s: as a parody of the pronunciation of love in popular romantic songs."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8281741

Anyway, this comment on the article you reference is interesting:

"The truth is somewhere in between, if the JCB's were mini diggers and secondhand it would make economic sense to bury the kit and not a lot of space would be lost..."

Also this quote from http://www.itv.com/news/london/2014-06-06/hundreds-of-jcb-di...:

"The diggers used are tiny little machines and they can be lifted out with a block and tackle. There is always an exit strategy for the equipment."

"In game theory, the Nash equilibrium is a solution concept of a non-cooperative game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only their own strategy."

So, it is not correct to say "Nash equilibrium is about an overall better situation for both sides" - one player wants to win at the expense of the other.

Chosing sides at random is a game theory optimal strategy, that is, it is the best strategy to use when your opponent always choses the best counter-strategy. If the two players flip coins to chose their sides they will both end up winning 50% of games in the long run. Likewise if they are able to randomize their choices perfectly, they will both win 50% of games.

If your opponent plays in a sub-optimal manner (e.g. they chose the left side more often than the right), then the best strategy to use is an exploitative one (e.g. I see you chose left more than right so I always chose left), however, in this case you gain by changing your strategy (so no Nash equilibrium).

I can't see any way to 'beat' this simple game and win more than 50% of games in the long run without using an exploitable strategy, so it seems that chimps have somehow evolved to become better at playing this game in a game theory optimal manner than us.

Yes, if both players chose the same side, the 'matcher' wins. If they chose different sides, the 'mismatcher' wins.

"How can a pair "outperform" another?"

A player is better at the game the closer to a game theory optimal strategy they use. This would presumably be to chose left or right at random. The worst strategy would be to always chose the same side, the matcher would then be able to predict your next move with 100% accuracy.

Randomizing choices to be unpredictable is something humans aren't good at. Poker players sometimes use tricks like checking the position of the second hand of their watch to do this (e.g. if it's between 10 and 12, bet, if not, check). The study suggests chimps may be better at it than us.

"Nash equilibrium is about an overall better situation for both sides..."

No, this is not correct.

ii) "...chimps can read numbers and understand their order?"

It sounds like it from this Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimpanzee#Memory

"A 30-year study at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute has shown chimps are able to learn to recognize the numbers 1 through 9 and their values... jumbled digits are flashed onto a computer screen for less than a quarter of a second, after which the chimp, Ayumu, is able to correctly and quickly point to the positions where they appeared in ascending order."

"The most common explanation for why fancy hotels charge for wifi is that their customers are not sensitive to price: rich customers, especially business travelers who charge everything to the company, don’t care about a $10 surcharge..."

Do you mean geneticist rather than genealogist?

It wasn’t a blackjack-, brass knuckles-type thing. “It went like this,” Morris explained. “He’d knock on a door, sometimes of someone not even connected to the case they were investigating. He’d flip open his wallet, show his badge and say, ‘I guess we don’t have to tell you why we’re here.’

“And more often than not the guy starts bawling like an infant, ‘How did you find out?’” And then disgorges some shameful criminal secret no one would ever have known about otherwise."

"Degenerate, often simply 'degen,' is a well-known appelation for players who behave in a self-destructive manner away from the poker table."

https://www.truckplease.com/how-it-works

"TruckPlease doesn’t employee anyone..."

Not necessarily true, I believe some versions of Visual Studio have their own compiler which is different to the one used by MSBuild:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ed_maurer/archive/2008/06/11/a-tale-...

Sure, but I was surprised by how low the figure was. I would have expected it to be more like 90-95%.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2262020/Humble-kettl...

Flagged.

Where? I can't see it.