Let’s say I’ve started collecting cards, like Magic: the Gathering, or baseball cards. Yesterday, I bought a pack of 100 random cards. Today, I bought another pack of 100 random cards. 5 of them were duplicates of cards that I already had from yesterday.
Question: how many distinct cards are there in the game? I.e., if you wanted to collect the whole set of cards published by the game company, how big an album would you need? Read More
Shane Killians has
released
a subtitle track for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
that aims to correct a lot of the errors and lies in the movie. So if
someone bought the DVD and wants you to watch it, you can add
subtitles so your
friend/relative/smizmar
can get a real-time rebuttal to the claims presented on screen.
The link above includes instructions for getting the subtitles to
display in some popular media players. In addition, I think MPlayer
should automatically pick up the .srt file (dunno about the
.ssa one).
You’ll also need to buy/rent/rip/bittorrent/teleport a video file of the movie, but you’re on your own for
that.
Found at Dembski’s House of Evolution Denialism:
Uncommon Descent has been debunking anthropogenic global warming since the website began 3.5 years ago. We have a keen nose for bogus science here, folks.
Good thing there’s now a Micro Center in town, ‘cos I need a new keyboard.
Ed Yong has an
article
up at
Not Exactly Rocket Science
about a researcher who found a correlation between involuntary startle
responses and support for various political/social programs:
When we’re suddenly confronted with a shocking image, our skin becomes moist and we blink strongly. These actions are automatic and unintentional; they happen without conscious thought. So it may come as a surprise that they can also predict some of our most seemingly considered beliefs – our political attitudes.
According to a new American study, the stronger these responses, the more likely people are to support the Iraq War, Biblical truth, the Patriot Act and greater defence budgets. Conversely, people who show weaker “startle reflexes” are more likely to support foreign aid, immigration, gay marriage and abortion rights.
He calls the connection surprising, but I’m not so sure.
The Skeptic Society (Michael
Shermer’s organization) is conducting a
survey
to test the general public’s understanding of evolution.
It appears to be legitimate (see
here
and
here).
Yes, it’s an online survey, so insert disclaimers about selection
bias, etc., but presumably they know that. So whether you think
evolution is true or not, whether you think you understand it or not,
consider
completing it.
One of the cooler, and more counter-intuitive, bits of statistics I
know of concerns the question: “If your doctor performs a 95% reliable
test on you, and it says you have a disease, how worried should you
be?” (Spoiler alert: not as much as you think.)
Problem: you want to make coffee. In front of you is a coffee maker with freshly-ground coffee, and filled with water. It is turned off. What do you do?
Answer: define a mapping from coffee to tea, thus reducing the problem to a previous joke.
Back in High School, when I got interested in computers, I naturally started out writing toy programs: four-function calculators, Hanoi towers, and so forth. And I looked up to the people who wrote tools like compilers and operating systems: they were demigods who bestrode the earth like colossi. The day when my friend and I learned how to make operating system calls and get the name of the current user so that our program could greet him by name, it was as if we had learned to tap into some source of deep magic bestowed upon us mere mortals by the benevolent gods of the data center.
I’m currently laid up with the flu, feeling sorry for myself, watching trash on TV and periodically shoving cat butts out of my face.
The reason for this, of course, is that new strains of influenza virus appear all the time. Like it or not, that’s evolution.
On the plus side, I’m glad that my ancestors had to deal with a lot of the same problems, and thus developed a robust immune system that can fight off new types of attacks, including (and this is part of what’s making my life miserable at the moment) raising my body temperature so that hopefully some of the chemical processes that viruses depend on to multiply won’t happen as quickly, and thus slow down their reproduction, to give the rest of the immune system a chance to catch up.
(Another reason why I’m sick, interestingly enough, is that I live in a country that has lots of direct commerce with China.)
In the packrattish hoard of accumulata that is my music collection, I recently discovered a song by Russian singer Alla Pugacheva, about a man who loves a woman so much that he sells his house and buys a million red roses, so that she opens her blinds and sees a sea of flowers outside her window. In the end, she can’t stay, and he winds up alone, but it’s okay because they shared a moment in this sea of flowers.
Apparently this is supposed to be romantic. I confess that my first thought was, “Where’s this moron going to live, now that he sold his house to pay for a bunch of flowers that are going to wither in a few days?”
It’s one thing to have larger-than-life events in a story or song; it makes things more exciting. But the story in this song is just insane. So there must be something else going on.