dgordon

"If we are, in fact, predestined, assuming I have free will doesn't hurt or matter."

Not to mention you were predestined to assume so.

Those numbers are based on statistics from the 1960s, when transitioning was next to impossible, and are probably a couple orders of magnitude too low. More to the point, that threefold difference seems to be much smaller, if it exists at all.

Not that it excuses this so-called security, but for the insecurity question, you could just lie. Only problem is, then you have to remember your lies.

"It makes me wish we didn't have names for these things for people to rally around. If you replace "I'm a libertarian" with "I'm skeptical of government solutions without sufficient supporting evidence" notice how the lack of abstraction makes it impossible to avoid focusing on the issue at hand."

This is a good point. I'll keep it in mind for the future. On less civil sites, it also at least makes someone work to invoke a string of identity-politics nonsense like "LOL LIBERTARIAN MOAR LIKE STRAIGHT RICH WHITE MAN AMIRITE?"

Ah, the old "criminals will rob you if you don't consent to have the government take your money to hand out to them" argument. Often peddled by those who also believe criminals are not responsible for their actions, they're just oppressed/had a bad childhood/whatever.

I'm fine with universal (modulo pacifists and those not capable of handling a gun) individual gun ownership. Combined with anything resembling rule of law, in that case armed robbery quickly drops off the list of "what it takes to survive", because it no longer results in long survival. The criminals will always be outnumbered.

But let's get back to the real topic. Fact is, I like libraries. I think they're very positive for everyone in many ways, in particular for being an intellectually-oriented gathering place.

I never had them until my mid-20s, but apparently a lot of people's only experience of brussels sprouts is boiled to death, which allegedly increases their bitterness. I've had them roasted, and they were reasonably good.

Good lawyers have surprised me before, but that's so clearly false, as one glance at Facebook will show, that I have to think it would get laughed out of any courtroom.

"Universities don't charge enough as evident from the fact that there are an order of magnitude more applicants than spaces at many of them."

However, people who apply to universities in this class normally apply to many of them. Granted, some of them also get into many of them, but usually not all or most.

Yep, as anyone who watched the World Cup learned: see the phantom foul (no one even knows who it was allegedly on) that took away the US victory over Slovenia, or the referee denying a game-tying goal by England against Germany that the whole stadium got to see on replay, to which FIFA's response was to ban replay from the rest of the World Cup.

It's not good in sports and it's far worse in government.

"A weird-ass cross section of human" is a great description of Carnegie Mellon.

Also, for all of the article's bashing of "dumb jocks" athletes at Carnegie Mellon slightly outperform non-athletes in GPA (something like 3.23 to 3.16 while I was there.) I ran cross-country and track there with people who were studying Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Architecture, Physics, Biomedical Engineering, etc. -- the one who was studying Biomedical Engineering ended up with a 3.97 as well as being one of the best distance runners in school history (3:51 1500m, 14:40 5000m, runner-up at the DIII national track and field championship for 5000m.) The team has consistently gone to the DIII national cross-country championship in recent years as well. I was never good enough to go with them, but some of my best memories are with that team. That's an important part of college too.

Caltech can have their famous losing streaks.

Which unnecessary body parts are those? The appendix is there to repopulate the intestines with beneficial bacteria when they get wiped out. Extra kidneys, lungs, etc., are there because that's what naturally happens with bilateral symmetry, and provide useful redundancy. I'm having trouble thinking of other "unnecessary" ones.

The traditional diets (which varied dramatically, by the way) resulted in consistently good teeth for people who never touched a toothbrush. In fact, their results were much better than those of people on processed diets who had toothbrushes. That's the point.

>That said the study is highly biased. The "native" people are always laughing in the photos and the "modernized" people are looking sad.

But this doesn't explain away the order-of-magnitude differences in dental health Price found everywhere he went between people living on traditional diets (who typically didn't have toothbrushes, either) and those living on processed diets.

22...I think I got five or six wrong by second-guessing my first instinct.

At the risk of being even more pedantic, quicksort with the O(n) deterministic median finding algorithm has a worst-case runtime of O(n log n) -- you use that algorithm to find the median each time and use that as the pivot.

The constants would make it less efficient for most cases, though.

I think so. Logic is only as good as its premises.

I can't believe you've played much chess if you think that it's purely about deductive reasoning. Humans can't calculate even the least part of all the possibilities in most positions. Knowing where to look -- which is just one role intuition plays -- is indispensable for a chess player.

I'd just like to point out the difference between this and some comments below that basically say "LOL NAZIS JUST DID THEIR JOB" -- 134 points and counting vs. -4 and probably even lower in fact.

This is how you make this sort of argument. And I'm not just saying that because I agree with it. (That's what my upvote was for.)

NO U.

Whining about downvoting, especially twice, is pathetic. And I'm willing to risk five points to say this.

45 million dead in four years. Yep, that's about right for the Holodomor times four.

Of course, Stalin and Mao still aren't as synonymous with ultimate evil as Hitler was, and won't be, despite killing quite a few million more people. For decades Western leftists even praised them. It probably has to do something with not being utterly defeated in the biggest war of all time. History is written by the winners and all that, and Stalin was a winner of WWII. (Mao wasn't in power yet.)

That's the number of new infections in 2006. As HIV/AIDS takes a long time to run its course, and it stays around for life with a very few exceptions involving bone marrow transplants from naturally immune people it, I'm certain that the total number of people infected is at least an order of magnitude higher. 500,000 people in the US is about one in 600, making it an uncommon but not especially rare disease.

Snowflakes are all the same melting inorganic matter as each other.

Beauty and uniqueness are simply not automatic for humans.

"Not every X is Y" is almost never a relevant or meaningful argument. It certainly doesn't answer "Position X promotes Y-like behavior, and so many "decent, average people" in position X will be Ys."

What the banality of evil suggests is that "evil" or in this case "thuggish" behavior is much more a function of social role, and less a function of character, than people thought. (Yes, it really was a radical idea -- recall that two-thirds of the people in Milgram's famous experiment went to shocking an unresponsive subject with 450 volts, when almost everyone had assumed, prior to the experiment actually being run, that only a one-in-a-thousand psychopath would get there. Check out Milgram's book Obedience To Authority for more details.)

I don't think you can read too much Orwell, nor, in nonfiction, too much Solzhenitsyn or Milton Mayer.

"It's the fundamental (and obviously incorrect) assumption that they're some sort of thugs, rather than decent people just trying to do the job they are paid and trained to do, that makes the author a certified douche bag."

I don't find that obviously incorrect. The banality of evil is probably the most important lesson in human nature of the twentieth century, and it makes many kinds of "decent people just trying to do the job they are paid and trained to do" look a lot closer to thugs -- or at best their enablers.

Could he have done what he did in a less abrasive way? Probably so. But refusing to go along with even little infringements on human liberty is an essential part of eternal vigilance.

But impoliteness can tip the scale.

In fact, in this case (412 divided by 17) what you did is exactly what the long division algorithm would have you do -- try to divide 41/17, which is really 410/17, and take the closest-without-going-over multiple of 10 -- 20 in this case, then recognize how much you actually "used up" -- 340 -- and then divide into what's left.

So it's even worse than you imagined with your ignorant teachers -- you were doing long division after all and they didn't recognize it.

American football is as violent as it is because of the pads. When you can throw yourself at a guy and not get badly injured yourself, that'll start happening. It doesn't happen in rugby -- there, you tackle to bring the guy down, not to knock him senseless. Forward passes encourage that kind of tackling as well.

I'm an INTJ. INTJ wins these polls everywhere I've been on the internet. Allegedly only one percent or so of the population is INTJ.

This could be since my interests tend to attract lots of people like me, or because INTJ isn't actually that rare, or because internet forums as a whole attract a disproportionate number of INTJs. Perhaps the true reason is something else, though.