ddt

> (Aside: I am intentionally sticking with U. S. customary units of pounds, miles, etc., to be consistent with much of the related literature.)

From the article, it sounds like dietary science in the US is done with imperial units. It was written by an American for a primarily American audience. Americans track their weight in pounds. Those seem like pretty good reasons to not use metric to me.

Especially with how close the precinct station is to Cal Anderson. We're talking ~3 blocks. Maybe it's a case of understaffing and/or suboptimal allocation of officers? I imagine Pike from 12th down past Broadway becomes a primary focus later at night. I imagine that's when most crime in Cal Anderson occurs. Time-of-day data would be awesome in this set.

My understanding is that dumbwaiters and laundry chutes fall under a fire code which boils down to "Nah, dude. Don't do that" just about everywhere. Vertical passages are great for fires, and bad for people who like not being on fire.

There are complicated ways of doing this, but the naïve way is as follows:

First you need a corpus of text that's grammatically correct

Each node in the chain is a word or piece of punctuation. Each word has a certain probability of being followed by every other word in the corpus, including itself. There are a few different ways to start the sentence. One approach is to start from the node for the punctuation mark ".", and only selecting a following node that is not a period, since sentences don't tend to start with punctuation. From there, use a random number generator to pick a following node based on your probability matrix, rinse, repeat.

If you'll notice, there's no guarantee that it will be grammatically correct. There's just some statistical likelihood that it will be.

Oh man, so many memories of giving motion sickness to my friends and parents watching me play Descent.

My big takeaway from the Chomsky quote is that it's useless to ask if computers can think because one of the fundamental properties we associate with thinking is some biological/spiritual aspect. For a computer to "think", we'd need to redefine what we mean by think. And if we have to redefine what it means to think, why bother hailing it as an accomplishment to make a computer "think". The properties are incredibly important to our understanding of the world. The fact that we have different words for "think", "compute", and "calculate" gives some insight into the value we assign to the distinction as a culture. If those differentiations didn't exist, the problem of simulating cognition wouldn't change. What would change is our perception of the problem. If thinking, calculation, and computation all share the same word, it becomes a question of degrees of "thinking" rather than substantially different processes.

I don't think Chomsky is trying to elevate certain things outside of the laws of nature. He's describing how what we choose to differentiate changes our fundamental perceptions of those things. Submarines could "swim". They could also "read", but those words have a very specific set of properties associated with them.

I guess my point was that hipster is such an ill defined word that trying to understand why a particular thing is or is not hipster is futile.

The term "hipster" has become more or less a catch-all for words such as

* pretentious

* egotistical

* artsy

* self-involved

* preachy

* irreverent

* trendy

and many many more. My favorite thing about the linguistic history of "hipster" is that it started out defined as "one who is hip", but has come to describe both the hip person and the hipness itself. Phrases like "hipster shoes" or "hipster band" come to mind.

I love this. Do you happen to know of any good reading materials on pre-Enlightenment or even pre-printing press scientific history? It gets boring hearing that there was no academic advancement from the fall of the Roman Empire until Galileo.

Partly, it has to do with the role of the church pre-enlightenment. The modern secular university didn't exist in the 13th Century. The concept of a teaching body that granted degrees, certifications, and did research was barely off the ground with things like the University of Paris and the Thing Which Would Become Oxford University. The scientific method didn't exist as any formal process. If you wanted to spend your life thinking, you didn't have too many vocational options outside of the church.

As to his role as a "scientist, philosopher, mathematician, theologian", that's more a projection of modern concepts onto a historical figure. There wasn't nearly as much siloing of various intellectual pursuits. There were just secrets of Nature to be discovered, and people looking to discover them.

I think the second reason you listed to be much more compelling than the first. It could be argued that the space race was about ensuring that the US had missile superiority over the USSR, but I'd wager a significant number of the aeronautical engineers and astronauts involved were much more interested in going to the moon because it was there.

This and Twitch Plays Pokemon have taught me a lot more about group efficiency than The Mythical Man Month