I see no strong reason to believe a meta-analysis should be any more convincing than a single, large, well-designed study.
Does anyone claim it is? I thought the advantage of a meta-analysis was the cost savings of not having to do a new, large study.
I strongly agree that you’re more likely to get wrong results out of someone else’s code than your own, because you tend to assume that they did their own error checking, and you also tend to assume that the code works the way you think it should (i.e. the way you would write it yourself), either or both of which may be false.
This is what led to my discovering a fairly significant error in my dissertation the day before I had to turn it in :) (Admittedly, self-delusion also played a role.)
Speaking of media for children, I once read that the MPAA will not certify a film as “G” if it contains if it contains morally ambiguous characters, regardless of the sex, violence, language or drugs. Unfortunately I cannot find an internet citation for this (beyond the talk of “mature themes”).
Indeed, some of us spend 9 more years in school to postpone this decision. (In case you were wondering, it doesn’t help.)
But does it actually punish you for waiting, or just threaten to? (I haven’t gotten around to playing Mass Effect 2 yet.)
Similarly, if you’re on a quest to save the world, you do side-quests to put it off as long as possible
I’ve explicitly made note this fact, that one should do quests in exactly reverse order of importance, in every cRPG I’ve ever played. Because often making progress on major quests will change the game (lock you out of an area, say, or kill an NPC) such that you can no longer complete some minor quests if you haven’t done them already .
Yeah, as JamesAndrix alludes to (warning: extreme geekery), the Dwarves were created by Aulë (one of the Valar (Gods)) because he was impatient for the Firstborn Children of Iluvatar (i.e., the Elves) to awaken. So you might call the Dwarves Aulë′s attempt at creating the Elves; at least, he knew what the Elves would look like (from the Great Song), so it’s pretty plausible that he impressed in the Dwarves an aesthetic sense which would rank Elves very highly.
I believe D. is imitating the style of Terry Pratchett, who uses small-caps for his “Death” character. The full-size caps are a bit annoying, I agree.
just a sweet quest item
Yeah, having Bacon’s Diary equipped gives Harry a totally sweet +1 to all his attacks. And it doesn’t even use up a weapon slot!
So, I don’t so much mean one year vs. 7+ of in-universe time; I mean one JKR book-length vs. 7+ JKR book-lengths worth of writing. (I.e., is Eliezer shooting for 75kword, 1.1Mword, or something else.) Should have been more clear about that.
I rather suspect that it will be important in the finale
Which raises the question: is Harry going to “win” (defeat QM/bring about the Magical Singularity/generally wrap up the plot) in one year, or seven, or some other number? And is Eliezer going to keep writing that far?
Even so, I would think that having all of them off planet Earth would be preferable to some on it and some off. Inside the Sun, inside some of the ice-moons of the gas giants, and on various random trajectories out of the solar system (not strapped to a probe whose telemetry we know very well, for goodness’ sake) would seem to be optimal. Of course this all depends on Voldy’s actual ability to put them there.
Then there’s the whole issue of traps/alarms. Trapping is probably not worthwhile if you’re hiding in highly-inaccessible places, since if your enemy can get there she’s pretty powerful already, and the traps could easily draw attention. (On the other hand, if you have something as crazy as the Big Bowl o’ Poison one, where the enemy somehow is forced to injure himself to get the horcrux, with absolutely no way around it, then it could be worthwhile.) (Silent) alarms, on the other hand, seem absolutely essential: you must know if one of your horcruces has been touched, let alone destroyed, so you can take appropriate steps.
would guess from MoR canon that relativity-compliant signaling is not necessary for a Horcrux to work
Horcruces: the ultimate “spooky action at a distance”!
Fortunately Eliezer gave himself some phoenix-magic wiggle rooom:
The logic had presented itself with a strange diamondlike clarity. Harry couldn’t have said if it had come to him during Fawkes’s singing...
Upvoted; I think cosmology in particular and astronomy in general is a very important case study of how to make theories and generally become less wrong in a situation where you absolutely cannot make any changes to the thing you’re studying. (Of course I’m likely biased because it happens to be the field I’m in at the moment.)
Right, so this is the standard misunderstanding about what it means for space itself to be expanding. These two Wikipedia article might be a good place to start, but in brief: relativity forbids information to pass through space faster than light, but when space itself expands then the distance between two objects can increase faster than c without a problem. (The second link quotes a number of 2 trillion years for the time when no galaxies not currently gravitationally bound to us will be visible.)
I don’t think redshifting destroys information.
Well, technically I guess it just lowers the information density, which means less information can be gathered by observers on Earth (and less is available inside the observable universe, etc.) And then eventually the wavelength will be greater than the size of the observable Universe and thus undetectable entirely.
Without getting mathematical: there are galaxies moving away from us faster than the speed of light (and moreover every galaxy outside the Local Group is accelerating away from us). In the future these galaxies will not be visible to Earth-based observers. Similarly the CMB will be more redshifted and hence contain less information. So if you’re using a meaning of “event” such that every Planck volume of space produces an event every Planck time regardless of whether there are any atoms there or not, then yes, that number can only go up. But if you’re talking about actually interesting things to observe, then it’s certainly going down.
I agree, I was just pointing out the flaw in your wording.
The Big Bang Theory, Episode 402.
Sheldon (the most socially atypical character on a show full of them) plans a program of life-extension so that he will last until the Singularity, which he projects to occur around 2060 and chiefly involve the uploading of human consciousness into machines (his roommate Leonard describes the latter as become a “freakish self-aware robot”. By the end of the episode Sheldon seems to have given up on the plan as too inconvenient/inadvertently dangerous.