hfinney

What % of the sky is visible from a point on a sphere.

50%, duh.

The problem with functionalism is the difficulty of unambiguously determining whether a given system implements a given calculation. This is inconsistent with the need to say that a given system definitely either is or is not conscious.

It's hardly fair to compare Bitcoin to credit cards in terms of "instant gratification", unless you turn back the clock to when you said, Oh, there are such things as credit cards? Cool, how do I get one? I'm confident that the difficulty of acquiring your first bitcoin will compare favorably to the difficulty of acquiring your first credit card.

I'm not sure where the headline came from, but the income figures in the report are adjusted for family size (and inflation). Since families are getting smaller, this causes an increase in their income measure. The actual median increase was 65% (page 8, line 2).

The text is totally invisible on my iPad.

Part of the problem is that the journals are part of a complicated infrastructure for judging academic quality. The best authors compete to get published in the best journals. The best journals are based on years or decades of reputation and history. You can't create de novo a system to replace this instantly. There is a chicken and egg problem to be solved before we have free publishing venues with a widely accepted reputation for only publishing the best papers.

The conventional wisdom is usually right. That's how it got to be the conventional wisdom.

Here is possibly a better link:

http://biovisions.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_mitochondria.html

This is a sequel to the Inner Life of a Cell animation that came out a few years ago. It shows what happens inside the mitochondria, which supply power to the cell.

A brief explanation:

We see a snake-like molecule go through a couple of holes. This is an unfolded protein molecule and demonstrates that mitochondria mostly don't make their own proteins, they have to be imported. Mitochondria have an inner and an outer membrane so it has to go through two layers.

We follow it through the inner membrane and see the glory of the mitochondrial interior. We zoom past (and through) a bunch of proteins that are involved in oxidizing fuel molecules. There's a double helix DNA in the corner to remind us that mitochondria do synthesize some of their own proteins.

We next zoom in on a piece of the inner membrane. studded with protein complexes and surrounded by glowing molecules. Note that some of the proteins have their bottom part spinning - these are ATP synthase, one of the most amazing of proteins.

[Out of time now, will write more later...]

I suspect you may have received the old "mild" patdown and not the new "enhanced" one. I think the new one uses the front of the hand.

The guy in San Diego who refused the patdown a couple days ago now has the TSA claiming he was only going to get the old one:

"Aguilar says that Tyner was facing nothing more than the traditional pat-down that TSA has used for some time, and not a more aggressive body search in effect since late October."

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/nov/15/tsa-probe-sca...

If this is true then patdownees are not yet experiencing the real thing in some locations.

Right, although the NY Times on Saturday claimed the jury is still out on cell phones:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/business/14digi.html

OTOH apparently there is evidence that cell phones actually prevent cancer, so go figure.

Wow, 1 in 45 billion? Yet today TSA announced an investigation into this case, the first step towards a fine. Sounds pretty likely that they'll go through with it.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1911670

If it happens, you will be one of the wrongest people in history! I should have bet you one penny, then you would owe me 450 million dollars.

How can he be charged with leaving the security area "without permission", when TSA had him escorted out of the security area?

Don't forget cell phones, they cause cancer too.

It's a ruling by the 9th Circuit Court, a step below the Supreme Court. The appellate courts have regional jurisdiction. As it happens, San Diego, where this incident occurred, is in the 9th Circuit, so this ruling would be the law unless or until it is overturned by the Supreme Court.

What do you think are the odds that he'll actually get into legal trouble over this? Calibrate your model of reality!

Checked luggage will not fly on the plane without the passenger. Especially if he refused screening! They might want to search it some more but it will stay at the airport where you are.

California is a "two party" state for audio/video recordings. He could get in trouble for posting these recordings made without the consent of all parties. And the records would not be admissible in court if he did get sued.

"It's inconsistent for the Americans to accuse the Chinese of manipulating exchange rates and then to artificially depress the dollar exchange rate by printing money."

Not really. China has a large and growing trade surplus, due in part to currency manipulation. The U.S. has a huge trade deficit. That is evidence that the dollar is over-valued. Printing dollars will help bring global trade into balance, while China's actions preserve imbalances.

For your first example, you could ask whether there was any corroboration of the story, and whether the scanners were even capable of printing out nude images to be autographed, as he claimed.

For your second example, was that situation, a TSA training session where agents were watching each other go through the machine, applicable to the passenger screening scenario, where the display is in a separate room and the screening agent never directly sees or is seen by the passenger?

For your third example, you can find plenty of evidence online that these machines are safe.

As far as the bomb up the butt, that guy failed because too much force went into ripping him apart. Butt bombs are an unproven technology, and should increase the difficulty and uncertainty for the bombers.

I'm worried that we're only hearing one side of the story on these scanners. If you listen to the net you learn that they are a total waste of time and money, security theater, they are harmful to our health, the images will be stored and leaked, agents will laugh and joke about passengers' penis size, manual pat-downs are tantamount to sexual molestation, male agents feel up female passengers, requesting a private room for a pat-down invites abuse, and more.

There is no evidence of critical thinking or questioning whether all these claims are correct. Even here on HN, people who challenge the conventional wisdom are voted down. And make no mistake, opposition to the scanners and stricter pat-downs is very much the conventional wisdom around here.

It may well be reasonable to conclude that the costs of the scanners are greater than the benefits. But please don't just accept everything you are told because it supports your conclusion. Intellectual honesty requires challenging evidence that favors your beliefs as well as that which opposes them.

There are two kinds of scanners. One uses low energy X-rays, the other uses microwaves. If you got the microwave kind, that would not add to your X-ray dose.

I understand pat-downs within the U.S. are by same-sex agents. This wouldn't be the kind of thing they would get wrong.

I've been programming 40 years, so there. Here are some he missed:

- Keep at least two rubber bands around your punched card deck. It doesn't take too many times trying to put your cards back in order after they fall on the floor to learn this.

- Adding a pastry when you submit your job to the operator may mean the results will come out fifteen minutes earlier or more.

- Keep your paper tapes in a waterproof box!

- In Fortran 66, try not to GOTO a GOTO that goes to another GOTO. Keep that code readable.

- There's always room for Easter Eggs in games.

Let's step back for a moment and think about what our goal should be in medicine. Suppose we could extend everyone's healthy life by 10 years. How much have we gained? Say there are 7 billion people. Have we added 70 billion man-years of healthy life? Not necessarily. After all, every year people experience 7 billion man-years of life. After 10 years, we'll have added 70 billion. So this great medical advance is the same as waiting 10 years! All we are really doing is speeding up the rate of accumulation of man-years. And even that is only temporary. After 10 years people will again be dying at the rate they are today (just 10 years older).

You could get the same speed-up of accumulating man-years by increasing the birth rate - more happy humans racking up experiences. But wait, the birth rate is falling! Is that a moral catastrophe? Yes, if you want to maximize the rate of accumulation of healthy man-years.

So these issues are complicated. It's too easy to focus on this personally. Sure, I want to live forever, and I'm taking steps to do so. But for the population as a whole, the calculus works out rather differently.

Apparently graphics-card bitcoin generators are much faster than CPU based ones so that is where the bulk of the blocks are being created.

I'd like to see an iOS app to do this check.

You should ask the copyright owners.

Bitcoin is really two ideas: an unforgeable digital datum based on "proof of work" or "hash collision" ideas; and a global, decentralized, distributed database to keep track of which data tokens have been "spent". The tokens don't yet have any true monetary value, but due to the design of the system, only a finite number of tokens will ever exist, so they would be candidates for being the basis of a monetary system. IOW they might be worth something someday.

The interesting part is making the global DB immune to attack or takeover. Bitcoin relies on the long tail effect. The total compute power of the great number of honest users must outweigh that of a well-funded attacker. So long as this is true, token forgery is impossible.