shawnyar217

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Comment · 17 years ago

A visit to the front page of this wacky site reveals an "interesting" selection of topics:

- Israeli Mind-scanner May Take Over US Airports - The Obama Administration's Cover-up of the Flight 253 Affair - The Terror Card: Fear is the Key to Obedience - CIA chief holds secret talks with Egypt, Israel - Presidential Assassinations of US Citizens

Comment · 17 years ago

Thoughts:

Anyone who doesn't get that graphing historical toilet usage times resulting from tragically poor medical science against modern toilet usage times resulting from pathetic laziness and/or extreme nerdiness regarding laptop computers is hysterically brilliant and funny, needs to get a life or at least go away and stop bothering people.

I don't know the guy, but judging from the hot girls modelling T-shirts on the website, I'd take a guess that the author of XKCD is not a male hyper feminist as the critic tried to claim. Hot girls don't go for male hyper feminists. He's simply a confident male who has figured out that making smart girls happy (thru fun comic strips starring smart girls) tends to get him laid. In this he is no different from any man who tells a gal a joke to help her relax.

Criticizing a wildly popular work of art known for weaving complicated math and science topics into quality jokes is dangerous to begin with. There is so much danger that the reason you don't "get it" is because its over your head and you don't know it. To then express the criticism with such poorly-written captions is just sad.

XKCD forever.

Comment · 17 years ago

"Not all hackers are criminals." --me

Comment · 17 years ago

This is from the FAQ on the EcoDrain website:

    When my drain clogs, I use chemical and/or bacterial
    cleaners to unclog it. Is it safe to use these with the
    EcoDrain?

    The EcoDrain is corrosion resistant and it is as safe to
    use chemical and bacterial cleaners with the EcoDrain
    as it is for the rest of the piping.

The FAQ also says there is a non-stick coating to help prevent buildup inside the unit.

Comment · 17 years ago

Maybe a different kind of summary would be helpful for certain people.

The article is roughly divided into two parts:

Part #1: How this regular guy, a college dropout, an apparently average Joe, can walk into a room full of parents and children and own them, making the children laugh uncontrollably, the mothers secretly want to sleep with him, the fathers impressed by him. Then they gladly PAY him and he earns six figures working only on weekends. At a business he started by pretending to talk to customers on his cell phone.

Part #2: How every business is made up of real people, with real personality and real-life problems. And how some people (all people?) who have fantastic qualities can also be deeply flawed in other ways.

Part #3: Yes I know I said there were only two parts. The third part is afterwards when you realize this essay that started off as a not-too-serious business article about marketing was in fact an amazing work of art and that it won a PULITZER PRIZE for a reason.

Now go read the whole article.

Comment · 18 years ago

I have a (simple) question to all THEISTS:

If you believe god created you, what name do call that god by? Jesus? Allah? Yahweh? Buddha? Zeus?

Theists, talk amongst yourself. If you ever settle on one name for god, then maybe we atheists will start taking you more seriously.

Logically, if you didn't create yourself:

1) Maybe a god created you. 2) Maybe something else created you. 3) Maybe you weren't created at all. (Ex: Maybe the matter and energy in the universe have existed forever.)

As an atheist, I'm humble enough to admit I can't pick #1, #2, or #3 conclusively.

Comment · 18 years ago

What you are missing is: 1) Analyzing a function's behavior sometimes (frequently) takes as long as running the function itself, 2) some functions can run forever, and 3) sometimes we can't tell the functions that run forever from those that run a very long time.

Example: Write a simple function F to generate prime numbers. (Search the internet for examples if you've never tried it. It can be done in a few lines with two loops.) Your prime-number-generating function F will never halt, because it will never run out of integers to check -- i.e. because there are infinite integers to be tested for being prime. So the halting problem is solvable for F, it is known that F will never halt.

Now slightly modify function F to notice whenever it has generated two primes in a row that are only two away from each other, such as 11 and 13. Increment a counter C whenever these Twin Primes are detected. This is as simple as storing the previous prime P1, subtracting it from the newly-generated prime P2, and seeing if P2-P1 is equal to 2. Finally, make one last tiny change to your function: accept a parameter X, and halt when the counter C becomes greater than X. At this point the function F is probably less than ten lines long and not very complicated at all. I get to pick X for you. Can you write an analyzer function A to decide if function F(X) halts or not?

The answer is: No, you can't. To write function A you would have to prove or disprove the Twin Prime Conjecture, which mathematicians have been trying to do and failing at for centuries.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime_conjecture

Lets imagine that the Twin Prime Conjecture is wrong and there are a finite number of Twin Primes, N. We've been searching for N for so long that I'm confident than N is very, very large, whatever it is. Meaning I can pick an X that is less than N, but still so large that function F(X) will take longer than our lifetime to generate that many Twin Primes and halt. Alternately, lets imagine that the Twin Prime Conjecture is correct and there are infinitely many Twin Primes. Again, I can pick an X so large that it will take longer than our lifetime for F(X) to halt. Either way, we would both be dead before knowing the results of the test, and maybe the test will never complete, who can say?

Worse, any analyzer function A you could write would have to know N to decide if F(X) will halt or not. But N is not known and has not yet been discovered after hundreds of years of trying. So function A would either have to disprove the Twin Primes Conjecture (unlikely with anything less than artificial intelligence) or it would have to calculate C by generating all the primes that F(X) would generate, meaning that A is equivalent to F, meaning that A is no faster than F.

Therefore, neither you nor any currently-conceivable function A can decide if function F(X) will halt or if F(X) will continue searching forever. That's the halting problem and it's unsolvable for this F(X).