solipsist

Karma: 3,073

solipsist Dec 2, 2015, 6:09 PM
4 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Stupid Questions, December 2015
See my edit

solipsist Dec 2, 2015, 2:32 PM
3 points
on: Stupid Questions, December 2015
Why can I hear noise (white noise / pink noise / brown noise), but not hear temperatures?

EDIT FOR CLARIFICATION Air temperature is caused by air molecules moving randomly at high speed, white noise is caused by air molecules moving randomly at high speed, what’s the difference? Why does white noise fill the room with sound instead of just raising the temperature slightly?

My hand-wavy-sounds-like-science-technobable guess is that temperature does fill the air with sound, but most of the energy of that sound is at far too high frequencies for my eardrums to detect (in part because my eardrums are emitting noise at a those frequencies). Maybe the average wavelength of thermal noise is roughly the mean free path length of the air molecules, so the average frequency of the noise is roughly 5 GHz. But I just making stuff up and really don’t know.

solipsist Nov 29, 2015, 6:03 PM
0 points
in reply to: polymathwannabe’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015
Well, I don’t know. Some of the US is near Mexico, but most of it isn’t. In Europe the farthest you can get from a border to foreign speaking country is perhaps southern Italy. The four US states which border Mexico are each bigger than Italy. Germany is a bigish country in Europe area-wise, but it’s less than 3.7% the size of the US. The Mercator projection makes an optical illusion—the US is huge.

solipsist Nov 29, 2015, 6:57 AM
3 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015
Yeah, your explanation sounds absolutely correct. But before you think “silly monoglot Americans”, remember that London is closer to Istanbul than New York is to Mexico. Countries where people don’t mostly speak English are thousands of kilometers away from most Americans.

solipsist Nov 25, 2015, 12:50 PM
4 points
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015
Asset allocation (what portion of your money is in stocks and bonds) is very important, depends on your age, and will get out of whack unless you rebalance. So use a Vanguard Target Retirement Date fund.

solipsist Nov 17, 2015, 1:13 PM
5 points
in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015
Although the Linux kernel and modern CPUs are piecewise-understandable, whereas neural networks are not.

solipsist Nov 16, 2015, 3:58 PM
2 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015
Is it for reasons similar to the Strawman Chompsky view in this essay by Peter Norvig?

solipsist Nov 16, 2015, 3:45 PM
1 point
in reply to: solipsist’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015
Here’s how I read your question.
1. Many machine learning techniques work, but in ways we don’t really understand.
2. If (1), I shouldn’t study machine learning
I agree with (1). Could you explain (2)? Is it that you would want to use neural networks etc. to gain insight about other concrete problems, and question their usefulness as a tool in that regard? Is it that you would not like to use a magical back box as part of a production system?

EDIT I’m using “machine learning” here to mean the sort of fuzzy blackbox techniques that don’t have easy interpretations, not techniques like logistic regression where it is clearer what they do

solipsist Nov 16, 2015, 3:27 PM
2 points
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015

It sounds like you do not understand what your experiments are doing. That’s pretty much why I’m not studying electromagnetism.

-- Letter from James Clerk Maxwell to Michael Faraday, in the setup of a Steam Punk universe I just now invented

solipsist Nov 16, 2015, 3:39 AM
2 points
in reply to: WhyAsk’s comment on: LINK: An example of the Pink Flamingo, the obvious-yet-overlooked cousin of the Black Swan
The Snowden / Manning leaks (from what I’ve heard) suggest this issue is the third or forth priority of US intelligence organizations. One presumes that the US intelligence organizations do not consider it in their interests to advertise this fact.

solipsist Nov 15, 2015, 5:26 AM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 09 - Nov. 15, 2015
I think the article was making a stronger statement: programming isn’t the best way to learn programming (at least at first). Sounds bonkers to me, but I don’t trust my pedagogic intuitions.

solipsist Oct 13, 2015, 2:15 PM
2 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 12 - Oct. 18, 2015
If you’re at the state where the worst thing about a proof is that it relies on the axiom of choice, you’re practically at the finish line (at least compared to here). Once proofs has been discovered, mathematicians have a pretty good track record of whittling them down to rest on fewer assumptions. From my (uninformed dilettante’s) perspective, it’s not worth limiting your toolset until you’ve found some solution to your problem. Any solution, even ones which rest on unproven conjectures, will teach you a lot.

solipsist Oct 13, 2015, 4:25 AM
2 points
in reply to: JoshuaZ’s comment on: Open thread, Oct. 12 - Oct. 18, 2015
I would think it faster to search for proofs of any kind, then simplify to an elementary/constructive/machine verifiable proof.

solipsist Sep 23, 2015, 2:35 AM
0 points
in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Probabilities Small Enough To Ignore: An attack on Pascal’s Mugging
Do you know, offhand, if Baysian networks have been extended with complex numbers as probabilities, or (reaching here) if you can do belief propagation by passing around qubits instead of bits? I’m not sure what I mean by either of these thing but I’m throwing keywords out there to see if anything sticks.

solipsist Sep 22, 2015, 9:23 PM
0 points
in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Probabilities Small Enough To Ignore: An attack on Pascal’s Mugging
I don’t think the consensus of physicists is good enough for you to place that much faith in it. As I understand modern day cosmology, the consensus view holds that universe once grew by a factor of 10^78 for no reason. Would you pass up a 1 penny to $10,000,000,000 bet that cosmologists of the future will believe creating 10^100 happy humans is physically possible?

what criteria do you use to rule out solutions?

I don’t know :-(. Certainly I like physics as a darn good heuristic, but I don’t think I should reject bets with super-exponentially good odd based on my understanding of physics. A few bits of information from an expert would be enough to convince me that I’m wrong about physics, and I don’t think I should reject a bet with a payout better than 1 / the odds I will see those bits.

solipsist Sep 22, 2015, 2:22 AM
1 point
in reply to: IlyaShpitser’s comment on: Probabilities Small Enough To Ignore: An attack on Pascal’s Mugging
Relativity seems totally, insanely physically impossible to me. That doesn’t mean that taking a trillion to one bet on the Michelson Morley experiment wouldn’t have been a good idea.

solipsist Sep 3, 2015, 4:44 AM
0 points
on: Stupid Questions September 2015
In the U.S., what happens to people who cannot survive without assistance (like people without the dexterity to feed themselves, or even people without the ability to keep a job or fill out paperwork) who do not have a family or the means to trade for help? What, physically, keeps them from starving to death?

solipsist Aug 3, 2015, 2:26 AM
0 points
on: On stopping rules
Thank you for writing this post. I’ve had the same intuition as you about stopping rules for over a year now, but have never taken time to sit down and work it out. I look forward to working through the comments!

solipsist Aug 1, 2015, 7:11 PM
1 point
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: How to escape from your sandbox and from your hardware host
What’s a network topology based sandboxing mechanism?

solipsist Jul 29, 2015, 11:39 PM
7 points
in reply to: Elo’s comment on: Open Thread, Jul. 27 - Aug 02, 2015
Question: I have a strong sense of a “dominant” direction (often, but not always, west). This direction is self-apparent in virtually every memory or mental visualization of any location I can think of. So, for example, captain’s chair on the USS enterprise “obviously” faces “east”, and the library on Myst island is obviously on the north side. I’m not going to forget which direction is down, and I’m not going to forget which direction is (usually) west.

Does anyone else here have oriented spacial memories?