The number of witnesses may be exaggerated, how much of the attack any given witness saw is probably exaggerated, and the extent to which any of those witnesses could have plausibly realized the severity of the attack is likely exaggerated.
(...) no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Most only heard portions of the incident without realizing its seriousness, a few saw only small portions of the initial assault, and no witnesses directly saw the final attack and rape in an exterior hallway (...) Additionally, after the initial attack punctured her lungs (...) it is unlikely that she was able to scream at any volume."
Not exactly a happy story either way, but nowhere near as bad as "a group of people watching a woman be raped and killed and choosing not to do anything", just your ordinary, garden-variety, this-is-clearly-someone-else's-problem bystander effect.
Does this negatively impact the incident's use as an example? Not really.
More importantly, it doesn't change the fact that the correct reaction to the incident is clearly to don a mysterious mask and become a costumed, crime-fighting vigilante.
More importantly, it doesn't change the fact that the correct reaction to the incident is clearly to don a mysterious mask and become a costumed, crime-fighting vigilante.
Which will inevitably result in your winding up in the hospital, with a bunch of metal in you, and a complete inability to feel pain. Which no doubt will help you the next time you feel inclined to be so stupid. Which will get you into trouble that you need real superheros to get you out of.
(If you don't understand this comment, you probably didn't watch Kick Ass.)
Not that they don't have standards--I'm sure they're very careful not to release anything that would reveal private information about specific, identifiable users.
Other than that, yeah. Those guys pretty much do statistics for the lulz. I would not be surprised at all if wzdd turns out to have been correct...
The author argues that males have a wider intelligence distribution, and so though they are equally as intelligent as females on average, there are more of them at the far right end of the scale.
At both ends, actually, but that's largely irrelevant to the argument. Actually, I think the idea is that males have higher variance on a variety of attributes, due to higher expected utility, in an evolutionary sense, from trying high-risk, high-reward strategies (standard disclaimer: do not anthropomorphize evolution, do not equate evolutionary goals with conscious goals).
But there's a link here he never established, unless I missed it. Is it really true that the brightest of the bright go into STEM?
That's not necessary--only that success in STEM fields is more strongly correlated with intelligence than with unspecified other attributes. It doesn't matter what very smart people in general do; only that higher intelligence confers an advantage. Intra-field competition will take it from there.
It is not, I think, controversial that intelligence correlates with success in STEM fields, seeing as it correlates with success (to some degree) in almost every area of life, but as always, the details are complicated.
What if we established that the intelligence of people who go into STEM is on the right side of the distribution, but not the far right? Then there would be as many females as males at that intelligence level.
Not necessarily--that depends on the shape of all three intelligence distributions (both sexes, and STEM fields).
That said, though, the whole article was basically fluff--lots of raising questions, not much in the way of relevant research, and virtually nothing in the way of concrete predictions or testable hypotheses. Now, as far as I know, there is some established research behind the "wider variance" idea... but to be honest the article raises all kinds of red flags; it feels like something written by picking a conclusion, then looking for science-y-sounding things to support it.
> Actually, I think the idea is that males have higher variance on a variety of attributes, due to higher expected utility, in an evolutionary sense, from trying high-risk, high-reward strategies (standard disclaimer: do not anthropomorphize evolution, do not equate evolutionary goals with conscious goals).
I think if anything it can be attributed to lower evolutionary obligation of males rather than to higher expected utility. Breeding for males is fairly easy so you can have a kid even if your IQ is 60. Child of woman of such low IQ would have much higher probability of dying.
Also males having single X chromosome have higher variability in traits influenced by genes on X chromosome as the defect of some gene of X chromosome won't be alleviated by correct gene at the other X (because there is no other X in males).
Personally I don't care if all Einsteins and Newtons will be male but since more and more scientific discovery rely on joint venture of tens or hundreds of scientists I really think that you should not pass up on opportunity to encourage half of the population to go into science just because there might be some relevant skewing in right tail of distribution.
While it would be nice to imagine something like this catching on, somehow I suspect that any language whose reference manual gives a specification of semantics using sequent calculus before discussing the standard libraries is unlikely to gain much use.
Fast, expressive, flexible, with static analysis that can prevent entire classes of common bugs? That sounds great! Oh wait, no, it uses words that sound like math, obviously that makes it unsuitable for the real world. Sigh.
I find that the deal-breaker for most languages is just a case of missing "production gloss." Things like seamless installations, breadth of packages, language interoperability, platform compatibility, documented quirks.
Take, for example, Ur vs. Python. Python has a plentitude of frameworks, template libraries, protocol implementations, dev tools, packaging and deployment mechanisms. Ur has just started, thus it has little to offer in any one of these categories. The raw language advantages of safety can't be justified in a commercial environment where speed of deployment is mostly contingent on having the ecosystem there - if you plow ahead without having them in place, you're going to tack on weeks or months building and refining new implementations of those things.
Fortunately, it's entirely possible for language designers to bootstrap the entire ecosystem. It just takes a long time and lots of dedication to do so. The author indicates that he is eager to make this language worthy in these ways, so I'm wishing him the best. :)
"...this is a vehicle that, in still air, would go uphill under its own lack of power..."
No, it wouldn't. The vehicle extracts energy from the velocity difference between the air and the ground, which it converts into forward motion. This is essentially the same mechanism used by sailboats tacking against the wind, and despite being counterintuitive at first is well-established. The speed is limited only by gearing and mechanical efficiency--an idealized device could accelerate arbitrarily.
While the Wired link doesn't explain how the device works, the same idea has made the rounds on the internet many times before; links to detailed descriptions were already posted in the comments here, which I assume you didn't bother to read before implying that this is a scam?
"Trying to put skeptics on the defensive"
Sticking with a knee-jerk reaction against something while ignoring further information that supports it gives "skeptics" a bad name.
"This is essentially the same mechanism used by sailboats tacking against the wind, and despite being counterintuitive at first is well-established."
Tacking is different from this. This is using ground-speed to generate thrust, as even the shills acknowledge.
"The speed is limited only by gearing and mechanical efficiency--an idealized device could accelerate arbitrarily."
Arbitrary magic acceleration inside an atmosphere should be your first clue that something's extremely wrong here.
And yes, I looked at the various forum links that turned up, which made very clear the very typical full-court astroturf press going on (like the argument above with someone who registered only to argue with unbelievers in this thread). You might take a look.
"Sticking with a knee-jerk reaction against something while ignoring further information that supports it gives "skeptics" a bad name."
Skeptics get a bad name because they don't join in the squee.
All I ask is that you look at the further information. Check back on this story in months and years and see whether it pans out.
...in other words, either you didn't actually read the explanations or you didn't understand them. The energy is being extracted from a velocity difference between two media. And no, tacking works on exactly the same principles in order to sail upwind. Some manner of mechanical linkage decelerates one or both media with respect to the other, extracting usable energy. In the case of a boat it's the combination of the keel and sail; for this vehicle, it's clever fixed gearing between the fan and wheels. In either case, the velocity of the vehicle relative to either medium is nearly irrelevant.
Check back on this story in months and years and see whether it pans out.
The idea behind this vehicle has been floating around the internet for at least three years, by the way.
If you're really so confident that you're correct, I'm sure one of the "shills" would be happy to make a wager with you, mediated by a neutral third party. What kind of odds would you accept for a wager that the vehicle doesn't work?
You don't get infinite acceleration from one velocity difference. End of story.
"If you're really so confident that you're correct, I'm sure one of the "shills" would be happy to make a wager with you"
Funny; demands to make a bet seem pretty common around this whole matter. No, I'm not going to waste my time dickering over the terms of a bet with shills or true believers. I'm going to wait for this farce to fall apart.
You don't get infinite acceleration from one velocity difference. End of story.
Given a steady source of energy, you can accelerate as much as you like, up to the limit of losses due to friction. What do you think is going to prevent that? More energy, more acceleration.
And again, remember that the ability to extract energy from the velocity difference is independent of the vehicle's speed. The acceleration isn't infinite of course, because the energy has to come from somewhere--but so long as the velocity difference between the media persists, energy can be extracted. In this case, that means "as long as the wind is blowing", since the energy to move a lightweight vehicle around isn't going to make much of a difference compared to the total energy in the atmosphere.
Funny; demands to make a bet seem pretty common around this whole matter.
Demands? More like an offer of free money, wouldn't you say? I mean, you'd just have to prove that their clearly impossible machine indeed doesn't work, right?
Hmm. A solid idea, but it's important to contrast it with a less desirable, but superficially similar methodology, namely "Development Driven Development":
Glorifying "hard work" as more important than intelligence is a common mistake made by intelligent people when they finally realize that sitting around being intelligent is not, in fact, sufficient to make things happen (this is often surprisingly contrary to expectations formed during schooling).
I think intelligence and attitude are both multipliers. The difference is, if you glorify attitude (to yourself) it can help you improve your attitude. Glorifying intelligence won't improve your intelligence so easily.
However, we programmers must fight egotism and arrogance. The danger is that in forgetting that we are fallible and were new programmers once, we commit a grave error. We're all shortsighted at one time, or another--unless we fall prey to egotism.
I disagree--we should instead continue what appears to be the current trend, namely, putting 4chan in charge of the national political discourse. This seems likely to substantially increase the amount of honesty, intelligence, and common sense involved in the whole process.
Hey, environmental destruction isn't something to take lightly. Spewing huge amounts of corrosive chemical pollution into the air as a byproduct of energy generation, irrevocably altering the environment, causing mass extinctions world-wide, all because of--eh? What? Humans? Oh, I thought we were talking about cyanobacteria.
(...) no witness saw the entire sequence of events. Most only heard portions of the incident without realizing its seriousness, a few saw only small portions of the initial assault, and no witnesses directly saw the final attack and rape in an exterior hallway (...) Additionally, after the initial attack punctured her lungs (...) it is unlikely that she was able to scream at any volume."
Not exactly a happy story either way, but nowhere near as bad as "a group of people watching a woman be raped and killed and choosing not to do anything", just your ordinary, garden-variety, this-is-clearly-someone-else's-problem bystander effect.
Does this negatively impact the incident's use as an example? Not really.
More importantly, it doesn't change the fact that the correct reaction to the incident is clearly to don a mysterious mask and become a costumed, crime-fighting vigilante.