bhattid

Not the original commenter, but the math is (making some implicit, but arguably reasonable assumptions):

Probability that someone in the population has schizophrenia = (1870/500000) = 0.00374

Probability that someone does NOT have schizophrenia = (1 - 0.00374)

Then if we assume that blind people have the same rate of schizophrenia as the population, Probability that 66 blind people ALL don't have schizophrenia = (1 - 0.00374)^66 = 0.78

I didn't know the team was so small! Just wanted to say that I love both apps, makes commuting much easier. :)

There's a formalism in math/information theory describing this idea called the Kelly criterion. Not a common/colloquial phrase, but it describes a similar idea of portioning bet size according to percentage of available cash based on the risk of the bet.

Well said. In addition to that, I think a speaker's intended meaning is also important to consider.

imo, people often take what people say literally or default to a first-instinct interpretation, rather than trying to understand what the speaker is attempting to convey. I try to interpret what people say charitably (a few of my friends think much too charitably), but I really believe that the vast majority of people seldom intent any malice in their comments.

In the example, it might have been intended in an empathetic way - "Damn, sorry, I didn't realize you were still hurting. I would have extended a shoulder to you if I realized". Or a pragmatic way - "I think the situation isn't as bad as you think, want to talk about it?" It could have been bluntly honest (personally, I typically appreciate honesty over politeness) or a totally aloof statement made on reflex. It could also just have been someone being a jerk, but I suppose the point of my rambling is that there's a myriad of ways to interpret a comment, and it's largely based on both the speaker's experiences and how they communicate.

I used to keep a diary (that I stopped keeping due to lack of time) and it echoes your experience to a large extent. I mostly wrote about how I was feeling or what I did that day or what I was planning to do in the near future.

I also vastly underestimated the amount of time and energy it would take to excel in certain things (for example, I wanted to compose and play music, excel at math and physics, write fiction books, play tennis, all at professional levels) and overestimated the difficulty of a few others (namely escaping poverty/becoming wealthy). Though, I suppose this may be the consequence of work being such a major timesink in one's life and my having the fortune of various opportunities in my life.

Similarly, my desired storylines and opinions have all been roughly the same since then. There have been occasions where they shifted, but then returned as if to equilibrium after a brief amount of time. As someone who views themself as having a terrible memory, I suspect it may have less to do with memory and more to do with some stable characteristic with emergent qualities. To extend the equilibrium analogy - a spring doesn't need to "remember" its equilibrium position to reach it - after experiencing friction for enough time, it'll reach it again.

It's nice being able to see a reflection of my past self though. I think I'll try to keep a diary again.

I had a similar experience when I was doing physics in undergraduate as well. I read online and was often told that a physics degree opened a lot of doors - academia, government/industry research, engineering, high school teacher, software development. But during my senior year when applying for jobs, I was hard-pressed finding any place that was interested in me. I was fortunate enough to find a job as a laser engineer immediately after graduating, but the specific role was leading to a deadend career.

I self-studied from my alma mater's computer science program (fortunately, many of the resources were all online) and was able to pivot into a career in software development, but it was a colossal amount of work and energy. I may as well have just done the computer science degree originally. A lot of my peers who had studied physics/math also took the same route, transitioning into data science or software development.

Playing around a bit, I think the margin of error is probably the average of the sum of widths (so the width of a finger, if they're equal).

I like this one!

I was curious what the margin of error for this was (I'm conjecturing the sum of widths of the fingers touching the stick), so I tried this out, but with a pencil instead of a stick.

I was consistently getting just off-center, so I was thinking maybe the 'surprise' wasn't consistent, until I realized the end of the pencil (metal + eraser) is probably denser than the wood and shifts the center of mass to exactly where my fingers ended up. :)

Out of curiosity, was the bot based on the bMotion repository? https://github.com/jamesoff/bmotion

I remember a friend of mine settings up an IRC bot (named Zeta) like that for his sheet music forum many years ago. She was involved in a lot of hilarity - probably my favorite antics were when she randomly decided to courtmatial someone. Good times indeed! :)

Damn, this is news to me. Seems I have some reading to do, thanks for pointing that out.

When a superconductor interacts with a magnetic field, currents generate at the surface of the superconductor that will produce their own magnetic field, which cancels the external one. The superconductor doesn't fall out to the sides because the field gets cancelled and there's no net force acting on the conductor.

There can still be torque (i.e. rotations) for type I superconductors, and type II superconductors when they're fully superconducting. I'm not familiar with how the specific dynamics work though - I'm guessing it's related to gravity?

There's a noticeable distortion of the magnetic field near the superconductor. It's this distortion that keeps the superconductor stable - it's caused currents that appear on the surface which match and cancel* the surrounding field.

*some of the magnetic field penetrates onto the surface of the superconductor, but internally, there's 0 magnetic field within the superconductor.

If you're interested in the term, what you noticed with your eyesight is an example of hyperacuity. Coincidentally, I learned about it making the same observation with my own eyes. :)

I think what you suggested is an unpopular opinion, but I also wholeheartedly agree with it. :)

I'm certainly no expert on copyright law, but my understanding is that its purpose is to protect the financial interests of certain creators from the progress of technology (e.g. copy paste). I've heard arguments that removing copyright would lead to less creativity or reduced quantity or quality of work, but I'm personally a bit skeptical (probably for the same reasons as you - I think people have a natural desire to create). Even in terms of financials, I would speculate that an employment/patronage model would become more widespread.

I think there's something to be said about the benefits of having freely available knowledge, music, and art for common consumption. When I was a child in high school (or well, always lol), my parents couldn't afford a lot of material I needed or wanted for studying (especially for standardized testing, SAT and AP tests) and most of the books in my local library either did not exist or were outdated. But when I discovered that much of this information could be found online, it really changed my world and made success in life feel attainable to me. I consider myself quite wealthy now, but I don't think I would have been able to escape poverty if all this information was paywalled from me. Maybe others would argue the writers are not being compensated for their efforts, but if there are other people in the world in the same position as past me who could positively benefit from it, I think that's a better world to live in, personally.

Incidentally, the release of StableDiffusion has actually inspired me to draw a little. Not sure why, but I find it inspiring being able to iterate on a prompt and produce something of quality that I can try to replicate on my own. Even if I fail, I still have something to appreciate that maps fairly well to the concept in my head.

My hope is that these technologies might lead to a change in our financial system (I think UBI would be a good idea), but I suppose we'll see where everything ends up. I think there's likely going to be a lot of pain in the short-term (especially since there are those who don't want to adapt), but hopefully everyone will positively benefit in the long-term.

The primary reason (as far as I'm aware) is because buses are (relatively) more massive and structurally different from cars, so they exhibit different collision physics in the event of a crash. In the event of a crash, the greater mass means any forces can distribute across a greater load and lead to less acceleration for those inside.

I think there are more details related to types of crashes (e.g. head-on vs on the side) that are taken into account through a bus's structure and how it's internally designed too, but I'm less familiar with how and why it works.

Hopefully I'm not interpreting, but I think latency's point is more epistemological than a comment on "how science is being done". For example, scientists will still use Newtonian mechanics (as opposed to relativistic mechanics) to model reality even though we know it's "wrong". Part of this is pragmatic (tensor arithmetic is computationally expensive), but part of it is also because there's a beauty in the model itself and how it approximates what we observe. Taken to a greater extreme, we can also make Newtonian-like models that don't model observed reality at all, but

Ultimately though, I would say you're right overall - most scientists (in my experience) do want to understand the world/reality, and want to do it accurately.

This has been my experience as well (especially with Anki), though I've always felt like my ability to memorize information to be poor in general. In my experience, I find it easier to memorize things rather through brute force/frequent repetition. To use memorizing foreign language vocabulary as an example; repeating words to myself, listening, or writing them out for 30-60 minutes everyday or every few days (as opposed to spreading out fewer terms over, say, two weeks). The conjecture I have is that my brain commits to memory more heavily based on frequency/intensity during short intervals of time rather than long intervals of time, but it's just a guess.

Not sure if I'm just an outlier, but I think you're right that many learning heuristics aren't one-size-fits-all. Hope you can find something that's effective (and enjoyable) for you. :)

What you're describing is called the "observer effect", which is different from the "measurement effect" that's used to describe the quantum mechanics problem. The misunderstanding is understandable though, because it's difficult to properly explain why 'observation' in quantum mechanics is so weird. What constitutes observation is a bit controversial, but you can more or less interpret it as taking a measurement - measuring voltage with a voltmeter, looking at something with your eyes, touching something, etc.

I feel like Schrodinger's cat is used as an example a lot for this, but imo it's a bad example because it doesn't properly distinguish between our classical intuition (the cat is either alive or dead) and the quantum interpretation (the cat is in a superposition between being alive and dead until observed). If I recall correctly, when Schrodinger originally proposed the thought-experiment, it was more of a jab against quantum theory, since the concept of a cat being in a superposition of being alive and dead sounds nonsensical (and probably is, since most would agree that a cat, or any conscious entity, measures things constantly).

Also, in case it's not clear, saying an object is in a superposition between X or Y does not mean that the object is either in a state of X or Y. I don't think there's an intuitive way to describe it without referencing some math. If you've taken some linear algebra, imagine that X and Y are linearly independent vectors in a vector space. Then classical mechanics says that an object can either be in state X or state Y. Quantum mechanics says that the object can be in X, Y, or a linear combination of the two vectors.

To work with something concrete, let's say that our object is an electron and X is spin-up and Y is spin-down (disclaimer: spin is bad name since they don't correspond physically to something spinning). I'm hoping this might be familiar to you since you like electronics, but let's just say that we've created a context where these are the only two states the electron is ever observed in.

In the classical interpretation, the electron is only ever in a spin-up or spin-down position, regardless of whether we're observing it or not. In the quantum interpretation, it's possible for the electron to be in a superposition of spin-up and spin-down when we're not observing it, and when we observe it, it "collapses" into either spin-up or spin-down. Put this way, it sounds like cheating; quantum mechanics is saying we can only observe spin-up or spin-down anyway, so what's the difference! Well, fortunately, there ARE experiments that can distinguish between the classical and quantum based on what they're doing 'behind the scenes' when we're not observing them.

Imagine now that we have photons of light. Instead of spin-down and spin-up, these photons are either horizontally polarized or vertically polarized. The experiment I'm about to explain would also work for the electron example above, but I'm only switching to photons since I know experiments for this have been performed (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GHZ_experiment&ol...).

Suppose that we've entangled three photons of light together. If you're unfamiliar with entanglement, it just means that we've produced the photons in such a way that they're either all horizontally polarized or all vertically polarized. We can confirm this by using a horizontal polarizer (or vertical polarizer if you prefer). Whenever we shoot the horizontal polarizer with the three photons, they either all go through or none of them go through. Maybe we switch the horizontal polarizer with a vertical polarizer just to be sure, and indeed, we observe the exact same thing happen. Right now, the classical and quantum interpretations agree that this is what we should observe.

Now let's do something that sounds a bit silly. Horizontal and vertical polarization aren't absolute things, they're relative. What this means is that we're testing for polarization at angles, say 0 degrees and 90 degrees. This also means we can rotate our polarizer to a 45 degree angle.

Just for fun, let's say we shoot our three polarized photons through the polarizer which is now at a 45 degree angle. If you're thinking classically, you might think that maybe all will go through or all won't go through. Maybe some will go through sometimes and others will go through other times (probabilistic).

The standard classical interpretation says that you'll observe either: 1. All three photons go through. 2. None of the photons go through.

This is where the classical and quantum disagree. The quantum interpretation also says you'll observe one of two scenarios as well, but those scenarios are: 1. Two photons will pass through, one photon will not 2. One photon will pass through, two photons will not

And lo and behold, experiments show (within experimental error) that the quantum interpretation is correct!

There's still plenty of room for disagreement. Maybe you or someone might argue that the photons are interacting with each other or something funny is going on with the polarizer in question. However, we still observe results aligned with the quantum interpretation regardless if we use different polarizers for each photon, have them sent on a delay, or so on (although, I don't know how many variations have been tested by others for this specific experiment).

Hopefully, I haven't been much of a bore, or wasn't overly confusing. :)

There are ways to "save" classical mechanics using non-local hidden variables and other fancy things, but (if you can take my word for it) at that point, classical mechanics starts losing its intuition anyway. I'm not very knowledgeable about these alternate theories of classical mechanics, but my impression is that they don't make strong predictions, which I'm guessing is why quantum mechanics is more heavily favored.

If you're interested in reading more on the topic, an experiment related to Bell's Inequality was a major piece of evidence in favor of the quantum model. It's similar to the GHZ experiment I described, but simpler. The tradeoff is that its predicted result is inherently probabilistic.

Also Touhou: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GsZuS-vyM4&list=PL0A503B6DA...

Thank you so much for this, this is hilarious.