Month: September 2007

Impaled

His eye remained very blurry, his body was weak and his neck was stiff after the incident. “I feel all right at the moment, actually, but I am too weak for work,” he said in a raspy voice, a consequence of the chair leg passing through his throat.

phineas gage, is that you?

New Zealand wiki laws

“People are calling it ‘extreme democracy’ and perhaps it is. It’s a novel move but when it comes to the principles that go into policing, the person on the street has a good idea … as they are a customer. They’ve got the best idea about how they want to be policed.”

halfway there. now make the wiki the canonical way to make sausage and laws. and do a nice diff highlighter for all those riders.

Tardigrades in Space

The world’s toughest animal has been sent into space. Tardigrades can survive incredibly harsh conditions, including freezing to near absolute 0, extreme vacuum and radiation. Exposed to open space on the Russian FOTON M3 satellite, tardigrades are the first animals tested and perhaps the best candidate on earth for surviving space travel.

I wonder how much of their hardiness is a function of their size, and how much of superior genes
2021-12-23: And now they’ve demonstrated another feat:

To perform their entanglement experiment, Dumke and co cooled their tardigrade to below 10 millikelvin, almost to absolute 0, while reducing the pressure to a millionth of that in the atmosphere. In these conditions, no chemical reaction can occur so the tardigrade’s metabolism must have entirely halted stopped and the processes of life halted. “This is to-date the most extreme exposure to low temperatures and pressures that a tardigrade has been recorded to survive, clearly demonstrating that the state of cryptobiosis ultimately involves a suspension of all metabolic processes given that all chemical reactions would be prohibited with all its constituent molecules cooled to their ground states”

Strikes are irrational

There is no commonly accepted economic theory of strikes. The main obstacle is that if one has a theory which predicts when a strike will occur and what the outcome will be, the parties can agree to this outcome in advance, and so avoid the costs of a strike. strikes are apparently not Pareto optimal, since a strike means that the pie shrinks as the employer and the workers argue over how it should be divided. If the parties are rational, it is difficult to see why they would fail to negotiate a Pareto optimal outcome. Hicks suggested 2 possible explanations for strikes: either the union is trying to maintain a “reputation for toughness”, or there is private information on at least 1 side of the bargaining table

the best outcome is for GM to die quickly.

Bigger Numbers

The sequence of Busy Beaver numbers, BB(1), BB(2), and so on, grows faster than any computable sequence. Faster than exponentials, stacked exponentials, the Ackermann sequence, you name it. Because if a Turing machine could compute a sequence that grows faster than Busy Beaver, then it could use that sequence to obtain the D‘s—the beaver dams. And with those D’s, it could list the Busy Beaver numbers, which (sound familiar?) we already know is impossible. The Busy Beaver sequence is non-computable, solely because it grows stupendously fast—too fast for any computer to keep up with it, even in principle.

a fun mind expander with ackermann numbers and busy beaver functions

Phone Deadlock

The triumvirate of phone manufacturers, mobile carriers, and entertainment companies are the world’s reigning champions at shifting blame and pointing fingers. Ask Apple why it won’t let you use any song in your iTunes library as an iPhone ringtone and they’ll tell you it’s the fault of the greedy record companies.

+1. i am doing my part by not subsidizing any carrier.