__tg__'s comments

Being an IIT grad mainly proves how well you could prepare for its brutal entrance exam (<1% acceptance). At work, I've seen IIT grads fare no better than other people. Sure, there are some brilliant people among IIT grads but that's to be expected with a filter that selects the top 1% of any population.

A less known aspect of IITs in the past is their gaming of the GRE/US grad school application process, ranging from straight out cheating in the GRE (in the paper-pencil version, IIT students were given a single block of time for all sections rather than having time-limits for the sections, a blatant cheat made possible by their self-proctoring), to creating GRE question banks by collectively memorizing the test, to using the Australian time zone (ahead of India's) to find out the questions on the GRE. When applying to grad school in the US, IIT students would divvy up the schools among the graduating class so that no more than 1-2 would apply to top schools and claim to be in their class' top 10%, regardless of actual standing.

So, anytime I see an IIT grad at work, I'm not really impressed by that aspect. The fact that Satya isn't from an IIT is of no consequence and actually makes him more credible in my eyes.

Wasn't this on Deja News that Google bought and integrated into Google groups? How is this archive different?

Whatever one thinks of Wolfram's theories, the Mathematica generated diagrams are gorgeous.

I hear the term 'emergent property' bandied about in relation to the mind as if using it somehow explains anything. It says nothing more than mind exists, somehow, yet we have no clue about its nature.

Scientists and philosophers agreeing on something means nothing as they have agreed on utter bunk before. The short of it is that we know little about the mind and have no idea how to even start expanding on the little we know.

Re. the bridge analogy in the article: we had a bridge being built behind our building at work and they had announced the opening date a year in advance. Sure, when the date came the bridge was opened exactly on time. I was walking with my colleague across it and asked him, "How come we can't ever predict when we'll be done?". His answer was deeply insightful: "They build the same bridge every time while we build a different one".

A long time ago in a philosophy of math class, our professor offered this problem: upon hatching chicks have to be separated by sex. Experienced poultry farmers know how to tell them apart from feel but it's not a process they can describe. The problem then was: how would they teach it to a new hire? The solution offered was that they have the rookie hold the chick in their hands and guess while the experienced farmer corrects them. This was a great example of how tacit knowledge is acquired.

Not sure about the Starship numbers but if its is $2m per Hubble mass, then launching 200 hubbles would be $800m, not $43m. This however is not about sending bricks into orbit. The ELT mirrors are segmented and need precise alignment with each other to micron precision. Deploying a segmented mirror in orbit has still not been done (the James Webb Telescope launches in 2021); the engineering involved adds orders of magnitudes of complexity over a single-piece primary mirror such as Hubble has. Add to this maintenance costs: a mirror the size of ELT in orbit needs a huge maintenance program behind it to work at all. The lifetime cost for such a mirror would be in tens of billions, if not hundreds. This is why such large telescopes keep getting built on Earth.

The most useful bits are always buried deep down in the threads. Thanks for posting this.

I've had migraines for 40 years, and suffered much before being prescribed Sumatriptan. It relieves the migraine completely in about 30min. Doesn't work for my wife who also has migraines but an alternate formulation, Rizatriptan, does. My migraines have also evolved over the years from intense day long affairs to duller 3-day ones. Sometimes I need a subcutaneous triptan shot which relieves it in, I kid you not, 1 minute.

I tried preventative medications but the cure seemed worse than the disease. One, Topiramate, made me forget things and lose my train of thought. No thank you.

I also tried keto for a while and noticed that I hardly had any migraines while on it.

There are a lot of options available now. If you suffer from migraines, go talk to a neurologist with current knowledge, not something they learned 30 years ago.

In other news, Americans rediscover the Jewish/Muslim way of burial.