maxbRuns's comments

It's true- no technology can change people's tendency to act in their own self-interest and vote for what benefits them. Individuals can't be expected to take into account the needs of the whole society. That's the the job of the voting system; it should take as input a set of selfish individual preferences, and produce the fairest possible group decision.

Our goal with Hyperarchy is to build a system that can achieve greater fairness. Clearly, the current electoral process has problems that lead to injustices. As a society, we need to move toward a more advanced system, and it's not going to happen unless we build some and experiment with them.

I appreciate your thoughts very much. I hope you'll try our site, and share any further feedback.

more like a high ratio of one person's preferred signal to other signals

I don't see it as a joke. Why not strive for the conceptually cleanest possible conventions?

It's pretty plain to me that tau is more deserving of the status of 'conceptual entity' than pi is. It's the number of radians in a cycle. Practically every time it occurs in physics, pi represents 'half the number of radians in a cycle'. Kind of crufty if you ask me.

Awesome. I think the eject icon could be made out of unicode symbols.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters#Geom...

in an infinite region of coffee...

Yeah, that's interesting. I always do it the same way as you, but I decided to do a quick analytical calculation. I wrote it up here:

http://maxbrunsfeld.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/on-the-mixing-o...

my result agrees with your intuition.

I think he was saying that although physicists generally understand the principles involved, a chemist might have a better sense of the relative magnitudes of the different effects that come into play in cooling a solution, since chemists have to perform this task routinely.

Computer-use should not replace the nitty-gritty mechanics; it should change the way students learn the nitty-gritty mechanics.

Instead of a homework assignment like this: 1. compute this integral. 2. compute this integral. 3. compute this integral. 4. compute this integral. 5. compute this integral.

Students should be getting homework assignments like this: 1. compute this integral. 2. write a procedure to compute any integral.

"Tenure is the one big incentive academia has going for it."

I'd have to disagree. I think people pursue careers in academia for a lot of reasons besides job security. As you point out, there's such an overwhelming surplus of workers in academia that they end up working for very low pay. It's unlikely that removing tenure would deter so many of these people that we'd actually have a scarcity of workers in academia.

And I don't really understand why tenure would be so important for people doing controversial research. People do controversial research in all kinds of settings in which there's no tenure.

I agree. In my mind, one of the cultural changes that we need is for universities to abandon the tenure system. I think if that happened, there'd be more hiring of new professors, so there would be more of an incentive for academics to maintain a strong reputation in their field.

Academic versions of github might arise, as ways for researchers to show their prospective employers what they can do.

Yeah, because the electromagnetic field contains energy, which can be converted into other forms. A system's temperature is 'how readily it gives off energy'. It need not have anything to do with particles or speed.