At an earlier job we moved buildings, breaking down and setting up our workspaces. I had been working away as usual for over a week thereafter before realizing I had neglected to actually plug in the mouse.
dlthomas
I absolutely use “wonderful” seriously sometimes.
Replacing the symbol with what it signifies? In CS terms, this is “beta reduction”, no?
Strictly, it should be “a mechanism for incompatibilist free will.” Free will may or may not be compatible with physical determinism, depending on exactly how you formulate it. Formulations which object to physical determinism are dubbed “incompatibilist.”
As a compatibilist, I would assert that the mind does have mechanisms for free will and nonetheless there may be only one possible universe at T+epsilon given a state of the universe at T.
“keep banging our heads [...] until a split opened up”
Ow.
I’m not sure what you mean by “grow exponentially” here—they certainly can’t add dimension or number of live cells exponentially with respect to time; dimension is only ever added one cell per time-slice and is thus O(n) while number of cells contained within the maximum dimensions is O(n^2) and thus so is the number of live cells.
To my mind, I have free will to the degree that there is an “I”. My decision is determined by my environment and my self. Were there, hypothetically, some other individual in my place they might well make a different decision. So I determine my actions, and can therefore be said to have free will.
It is true that my state follows from my history and my genetics (arguably a part of my history, in a sense), but I assert that this is irrelevant because of our main reasons for caring about “free will.” In my experience, people care about whether we have “free will” for two reasons. The first is a sort of despair in the face of inevitability that echoes the determinism of classical Greek mythology—the gods have something planned and no matter what you do it will happen. This, of course, is not a feature of physical determinism—what you do is a part of the system, and if you had done something else things might have turned out considerably differently. What you will do is determined, but it’s determined through who you are, not in spite of it.
The second reason people care about free will is to allow us to reason about responsibility and blame. This can also be dealt with by much of the above, however, along with an observation that blame and praise, and the brains expecting these, are themselves a part of the system.
“How many zeros does it take to make a baker’s dozen?”
13
Come up with several hypotheses in parallel, perhaps?
I think this is the only interpretation of “God does not play dice.”
This is more or less what I was saying, but left (perhaps too) much of it implicit.
If there were an entity with perfect knowledge of the present (“God”), they would have perfect knowledge of the future, and thus “not need probability”, iff the universe is deterministic. (If there is an entity with perfect knowledge of the future of a nondeterministic reality, we have described our “reality” too narrowly—include that entity and it is necessarily deterministic or the perfect knowledge isn’t).
Median is often better, but not always—it depends on the purpose you wish to put the data to. With anything less than the full distribution, you’ll be able to hit some cases in which it can mislead you.
Edited to add:
Specifically—if you are interested in totals, mean is usually a more useful “average”. Multiplying the total number of water balloons by the average amount of water in a balloon gives you a much better estimate (exact, in theory) with mean than with median. If you are interested in individuals, median is usually better; if I am asking if the next water balloon will have more than X amount of water, median is a much more informative number. Neither is going to well represent a multimodal distribution, which we might expect to be dealing with in the great*-grandparent’s case anyway if the hypothesis of a strong genetic component to variation in intelligence does in fact hold.
I’m an environmentalist because I don’t want mercury poisoning from my sushi...
FWIW, on Amazon you can often search inside books you’ve purchased through them.
Limited, but occasionally invaluable.
(X->Y)->X and (X->Y)->Y have the same truth table.
Present Karma affecting future votes, or present karma affecting all votes cast? I can see arguments for both, although I worry that the latter might not be stable or computable for certain sets of parameters (my downvote lowers your karma which weakens your upvote which lowers my karma which weakens the aforementioned downvote, etc...)
Unless you can get it cheaper ways...
That was the joke...
The following is from my reading, thinking, and experience. Hopefully it contains some useful ideas.
“Etiquette” is being conscious of the needs and wants of others, and changing your behavior (within reason) to accommodate these. If your thoughts are sufficiently engaging, this may be difficult or even undesirable.
What I find works for me is to partition my time. For some of it, I am interested in the world outside my head (including people) and for some of it I’m coding or thinking deep or sick or what have you and am not. While I try not to be outright rude in the latter state, it’s probably clear where my priorities lie.
These attitudes I apportion strategically, and make a point of establishing the appropriate context with grooming (basic maintenance always gets done, but making sure I actually look okay to go along with it might not) and clothing (jeans and a t-shirt, I’m probably not looking as much to engage the world outside my head as if I’m dressed up a bit).
Set aside some time for deliberate practice in treating people considerately—literally. That is, giving them consideration and letting that guide your actions.
“Manners” are patterns of behavior—when they tend to correspond to the actions one would take if they were acting considerately, they’re “good manners.” These are habits, with all the good and bad that implies. Specifically, the good is that they can happen without thinking—meaning your interactions may be improved even when you’re not focused on them; the bad is that they will not always apply, and so one shouldn’t rely on them when things are particularly important, and should turn to actual consideration of the involved individuals.
I’ll briefly note that “protocol” is yet another class of behavior—that which is rigidly proscribed, generally around some function. While it is usually both etiquette and (consequently) good manners to follow protocol, the three should not be confused. In particular, etiquette and manners can usually be figured out—protocol must be taught, but thankfully there’s usually reference material regarding more formal settings.
I do recommend perusing a book on etiquette or manners (the Post tome, for instance), reading not so much for the details but for the thinking behind them.