"As I lay there musing in the brisk darkness, I suddenly sensed a tightening inside me. It was as if I was being ever so gently wound. Then quickly, the pressure intensified, and I breathed in rapid-fire staccato and violently shook. I was a guitar string being tuned beyond its highest range. The string popped. A spike of fear slashed through my guts. And that’s when I split apart."
This has come up in a number of threads about burnout which frequent Hacker News. It's anecdotal per account and I've found weak evidence to corroborate its actual basis however... I think it's interesting that a lot of people report hearing the same thing: a guitar string, bending and snapping in their head. More specifically, a bass guitar.
I read a paper once about an ancient tribe of hunters who had exhausted the local fauna and consulted the wisdom of the spirits through an oracle bone ceremony for the next bounty.
In essence, the oracle bone would give them a random direction. If there was nothing, they'd ask again, if there was something, they would keep asking. Doesn't matter. The important function of consulting the oracle bones was that they were randomly distributing their hunting patterns without overexhausting one particular area within range. This allows the population of game to stabilize over time.
tldr
If you're looking for answers, searching at random and searching frequently is probably the most efficient method instead of wasting time figuring out how to find it.
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition." -Alan Turing
Indeed, that is the purpose and action of the Horoscope column running in every newspaper.
It doesn't matter which "sign" gets which advice; all that matters is that different people get different advice, and get different advice this week than they got last week. The whole birthdate apparatus is purely a randomizing device.
It is a remarkably sophisticated psychological technology that keeps people from getting stuck in ruts, and not paralyzed by indecision. It just doesn't do what its promoters think it does.
I think Co-star is fascinating for this reason because it's not so much the science of belief but the charisma of truth. People like it mostly because it's kind of sassy. For the most part, sun-moon-rising offers a quick and dirty way to assess relationship compatibility in a dating-app world where rejecting everyone and accepting everyone is tedious and exhausting. It's also a particular love language of understanding and explaining what it is you look for and being aware of how people explain themselves, for those that use it.
Technically, astrology is based on algorithms observing data of the planets positions. For the most part, to the naked eye, and to human sensibility, the planets seem to behave in harmony, resonance and stability. In reality, the long-term behavior varies chaotically. It's an n-body problem, which is as of this time of writing, unsolved. Generally, that doesn't mean it hasn't been answered, rather it means that solutions satisfying specific conditions cannot be determined by the criteria of uniqueness or existence.
But yeah, if you're going to make short term observations of a chaotic system, a sporadically random system is basically just numerical approximation. You don't need to rationalize irrationality, because you can't.
Planetary motion is absolutely predictable, to the millisecond decades in advance. It just doesn't correlate with anything else, making it useful for randomizing the "else".
The sun's apparent motion correlates with sleep schedules, decreasingly, and the moon's with tides and animal behavior, making those less useful for the purpose.
4-5 cups seems about right.
I typically ingest about 8 cups of coffee throughout the day.
That's a close-to-full pot of coffee for me.
As some have mentioned, "cups" the measurement does not necessarily equate to "cup" a receptacle.
I only say this because, one or two coffees brings me to life in the morning.
After that, I start to basically sustain a prolonged professional panic attack of concentrated anxiety that is more or less a reason to not schedule meetings with me in the afternoon.
That is to say, a cup from say, Starbucks would come in the following sizes:
Demi: 3oz
Short: 8oz
Tall: 12oz
Grande: 16oz
Venti: 20 oz
Trenta: 31 oz
In the US, to my knowledge:
1 cup : 8oz : 16 tbsp.
Typically, when I make 8 cups of coffee in my coffee pot, I use 6 level tablespoons of coffee grounds, medium, medium-coarse-ish. It literally doesn't matter. You swing from Turkish coffee to Cowboy coffee, the importance is that you have a consistent way to produce your desired grind. Ground coffee is unacceptable, because it oxidizes too quickly since it all tends to come in bags that nobody ever seals those correctly, and mostly because if you drink coffee, you're already lazy in the morning.
As many in the scientific community are familiar, the US is one of the last holdovers of the imperial system.
What most do not know, is that there is even significant difference between how the US and UK measure a tbsp for instance.
US: 14.8 ml for tsbp
UK: 15.0 ml for tbsp
If you're making coffee, that's a huge difference.
Example:
My ideal ratio is about 6 US tbsp : 8 cups of water.
That's not for flavor – so much that, in the morning, my brain literally does not care about mathematics or physics or cooking or anything really – I want to dump an exact amount of water, pour an exact amount of coffee and have a consistent cup that I can then slowly improve upon if I have a satisfactory cup of coffee.
The difference between US and UK would be 6 * 14.8 and 6 * 15.0 = 88.8 ml vs 90.0 ml.
You might say, that is a negligible difference!
HOW DARE YOU. THIS IS COOKING. THIS IS TASTE. THIS IS CHEMISTRY, THIS IS SCIENCE. THIS IS MATH. TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO FORGIVE IS DIVINE, BUT TO NOT CARE IS DEMONIC.
Less confrontational: That's just for one measurement of say grounds or fluid. The conversion of difference in measurement can be applied to both grounds and water.
So let's just convert tbsp by itself between UK and US.
6 tbsp of level coffee grounds.
96 tbsp of water, at whatever quality Los Angeles tap water is, which is terrible.
6:96 = 0.0625
This is an arbitrary ratio which means absolutely nothing, but let's compare it to the UK version.
So we know that UK tbsp is slightly larger.
Exactly (15.0/14.8) ~ 10%?
Okay, so that would be...
(15.0/14.8) 6 = 6.08108108108
(15.0/14.8) * 96 = 97.2972972973
So notice, when you take the ratio, it is exactly the same. The terms cancel out, but you are making more coffee.
This stuff tends to matter more, at higher altitudes or various humidity.
Essentially, water is the most sensitive medium for variation in boiling and quality control.
This may seem trivial, in my personal experience – I'd rather have too little caffeine than too much.
Basically, I want exactly two cups to be satisfactory.
It has more to do with the experience of drinking coffee and taste than the actual 'boost'.
Programmers or statisicians, data scientists, machine learning engineers will understand – You'd rather have just 2 of something, than to round up to 3. Nobody pours 2~3 cups of coffee. Either they are satisfied with 2, or they're chugging 3.
In whatever-programming, we call this the domain of non-linear real arithmetic as a decidable language. As in, I decide to drink more coffee than not.
As someone who started drinking coffee heavily since a teenager to offset the fact that I have never been a morning person and never will be, while also trying balance professionalism towards working in different timezones where clients prefer to start their day with a meeting...
Yeah, 1-2 cups of coffee. 8oz exactly. I have Ikea mugs. Those are 8oz.
One to install my brain, another to calm it down.
The second-order effects of caffeine are not unsubtle.
Anything more? I am bull-riding an anxiety trip of wanting to simultaneously produce Berlin techno and the latest innovation in machine learning. Your Mileage May Vary.
For true scientific intuition and experimental honesty, observe the following video detailing what occurs when you drink a full jar of coffee:
I have seen other summaries of this description as replacing step 2 with "mutation" or using simulation of a Turing machine as being synonymous with mutation
I am not a fan of this analysis, I think two rules is too many. Really there should be only one rule: no rules.
Plus, I think the second rule necessarily implies the first, since the theory of the universal Turing machine sufficiently allows for self-reproduction which later outlined the sketches for cellular automata and subsequent models such as Conway's Game of Life.
I've gotten it down to more or less one rule. Keep being. Everything else flows from that one rule, often with surprising consequences. Coelacanths are better at keeping being than mountains and continents.
It took me a month to finish a full game for my AP European History class in High School.
Easily the best board game I have ever played.
It inspired me to actually pursue a path in diplomacy and international relations for some time.
The game was setup to be high stakes. It amounted to a month's worth of assignments. Only one team could achieve an A grade by domination. Everyone else fails the assignment.
There were 42 of us. So each nation had 6 students.
I remember almost every move we made to this day because I remember how we reached the final turn and what had to happen for those pieces to be there.
One twist:
Each nation had spies. I was a spy for Germany. But I was elected as leader of Turkey. My grade depended on Germany winning, not Turkey. However, Germany does not know I am a spy for them. But I won my election by revealing to my group that I was a German spy and how I would use this information to manipulate both countries.
11 turns later. Europe is decimated. Italy has been crushed by the mighty Turkish armada. Russia is starving while fending off a relentless horde of Turkish armies. Austria-Hungary is completely occupied by Turkish forces, advancing on Germany. The British and French navies form an emergency pact to resolve their despite over the English channel to meet us in the Mediterranean, and are prepared to strike us at Greece. This last turn is my masterpiece. The Germans have rallied a massive force, intending to match my positions in the Balkans. The Turkish empire only needs one or two more tiles to claim a victory. The final moves are coordinated such that the Germans must strike at us to deter our assault. However, if I moved things around slightly, the German army would end up seizing the majority supply center limit necessary to achieve victory.
My team ousts me as leader. Right on time. They intend to decimate Germany. I have been useful up until now. I cannot issue the final commands and the German resistance will be annihilated by the sheer amount of units we possess. They issue the assault without me and I cannot do anything but reveal our hand to German intelligence. With or without me, the Turkish army will fall since we know their movements.
However, Germany fails to issue any orders before the time limit expires. They make no moves. They are crushed by the unencumbered Turkish assault.
The German leader was a Russian spy.
Turkey wins. Victory by domination.
One problem.
The entire country of Turkey was composed of spies, assigned to every other Great Power. No one technically works for Turkey. None of our grades belong to Turkey. Every group receives an F. Everyone in our group fails. Nobody receives an A.
The class absolutely loses it. I have somehow managed to piss off the entire class where everyone loses.
The teacher is frustrated. Technically, this was possible, but it has never happened before. He chose Turkey to be made of spies because Turkey almost never wins, to give it some advantage. He's reticent to amend his grading policy since if any of the other spies were actually good, they would have revealed each other to the group and avoided this situation. But nobody ended up revealing themselves because they assumed that I was the only spy - because I already revealed myself.
A compromise is negotiated and settled upon.
We're going to watch Patton and write an essay on it. Everyone receives an A.
Perhaps you've heard of the "Butterfly Effect" but not a formal definition of the term.
For the issue of predicting weather, the model of weather is "sensitive". The observation metaphor of the "butterfly effect" is that relatively small perturbations to the system have the observed effect of being indistinguishable between relatively large perturbations. We may substitute "small" with "deterministic" and "large" with "non-deterministic".
A summary of this statement would be that initial or past conditions of the system poorly characterize the dynamic and chaotic behavior of nonlinear dynamic systems.
The phrase is drawn from the title of the paper by EN Lorenz:
Somber note:
Weather is in fact, becoming predictable, precise and accurate: towards chaos, volatility and instability. Measurement and policy do not adequately address the ongoing issue of climate "change", which may more adequately be defined as climate chaos.
This has come up in a number of threads about burnout which frequent Hacker News. It's anecdotal per account and I've found weak evidence to corroborate its actual basis however... I think it's interesting that a lot of people report hearing the same thing: a guitar string, bending and snapping in their head. More specifically, a bass guitar.