ctdavies's comments

Das Kapital. You know why.

"The thesis melded George Boole’s nineteenth-century Boolean algebra (based on the variables true and false, denoted by the binary one and zero)"

I just have to complain about this clause referring to the values true and false as "variables"

Sorry, but it does sounds to me like you are blaming the victim when you write "The problem is probably mostly emotionally, on her side." It's her stalker who has the emotional problem. Calling her emotions the problem appears to me rather sexist, given that women are stereotyped as overly emotional. Furthermore, she DID stop responding, and she DID go to the police, but they didn't do shit. Please read the article more carefully, and please don't place the burden of justice on the victim.

What about when a "usage of technology" itself limits the rights of others? I believe in that case it may be best to limit rights-limiting actions, such that the net rights protected is greater than it would be otherwise.

This claim is unfounded:

"the vast majority of the legion of logical punctuators are not consciously rejecting illogical American style, or consciously imitating the British. Rather, they follow their intuition because they don't know the American rules. They don't know the rules because they don't read enough. Don't read enough edited prose, that is;"

Gardner calls Searle "the scoundrel of Hofstadter’s book." He is now also the scoundrel of this thread.

Huh, are you the famous philosopher John Searle?

lisp lisp lisp lisp lisp lisp

I think pain probably still occurs when injured, too.

The belief in perpetual growth is a cultural malady.

But you're right, no startup ever said that!

Hey Airbnb, don't further optimize: you'll lose your hipster cred.

What!? This correspondence doesn't correspond at all to their love affair as depicted in the film Young Einstein.

No Noyce?

Lisp is Sirius.

I'm writing this just to comment on your use of the word "meme"; it's not intended to be a criticism* but the expression of an observation.

In your fourth sentence, it seems that are using "meme" to specifically denote an idea or statement that is unsupported or unverified. This is not wrong, but I have not seen this particular usage of the word before. It does differ from Dick Dawkins' original meaning: he used "meme" to denote the component in cultural evolution whose role is analogous to that of genes in biological evolution. But I find your use to be an interesting development in the development of "meme" and the memes it signifies†.

-----

* However, I do believe the conversation has been framed improperly: e.g., the groups "baristas" and "analytical thinkers" do not have mutually exclusive membership, but instead intersect significantly. There exists many an analyst barista who brews Brazilian whilst brooding about Bruegel at Bruegger's Bagels, plenty espresso-synthesists with scholastic emphases on existentialists' expressions of Parisian café culture (dissertation: "Bean & Nothin'ess"), and please don't get me started on those poor doctoral students who must lecture on Melville in the morn then manage a late shift at the mall latte-mill aptly named after Ahab's first mate.

† Indeed, for me, I find to be the memetics of "meme" a remarkably meta matter, and that fact is itself alone the motivation to make my remarks (I must mention, if I may).

"We hold that organisms are constructed in development, not simply ‘programmed’ to develop by genes. Living things do not evolve to fit into pre-existing environments, but co-construct and coevolve with their environments, in the process changing the structure of ecosystems."

I thought that these were already generally accepted ideas within evolutionary theory.

I just want to play Mario

Ah I see. Thanks for clearing that up.

I'm confused by the use of "accuracy" and "precision" in this article.

From the IEEE article: "[ultranarrow lasers] will make it practical for us to achieve an accuracy below 10^-18–more than 100 times the precision of cesium clocks."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision: "accuracy is the proximity of measurement results to the true value; precision, the repeatability, or reproducibility of the measurement."

Am I mistaken, or is the IEEE article conflating accuracy and precision?