David Sartor

9 followers · 14 following · 1193 views

on the atlas — 32

highlights — 41

The city was named from its location near the geographical center of Oliver County.[7] Coincidentally, it has also been calculated to be the geographical center of North America.
Center, North Dakota - Wikipedia
There are four substances that the body can metabolize: carbohydrates, fats, protein and alcohol.
Insulin Resistance and Glycemic Index — LessWrong
Write them down in a big list of one-off ideas and cluster them over time. If the same idea keeps coming up in different forms, there’s probably something larger interesting there! - William Merrill
Lydia Nottingham (@lydianottingham): "Filtering research ideas: Write them down in a big list of one-off ideas and cluster them over time. If the same idea keeps coming up in different forms, there’s probably something larger interesting there! - William Merrill By elimination. For example, you can rank them b…"
It’s my cousin Mirna, you say, I was assigned to get her a gift and I don’t know her at all!! Poppycock. She’s human and you’re human; in other words, you have a lot in common and there are dozens of great things you could get for any human.
Ruby's Ultimate Guide to Thoughtful Gifts — LessWrong
Garfield is the great-great-grandson of U.S. President James A. Garfield and his grand-uncle Samuel Fay invented the paper clip.
Richard Garfield - Wikipedia
there may or may not be a Dunning-Kruger effect in aggregate over any given group, but the original Dunning-Kruger paper and most of its replications make systematic statistical errors which render them useless; the original and pop-sci D-K effects are obviously true for some of the population some of the time but the same is true of any coherent psychology hypothesis including their exact opposites; miscalibration about competence still seems worth trying to fix but you’d need to check which mistake is being made.
You’re probably overestimating how well you understand Dunning-Kruger — LessWrong
Roosevelt's nine nominations filled eight seats on the Supreme Court
Franklin D. Roosevelt Supreme Court candidates - Wikipedia
George Lucas testified before Congress in order to enact legislation that would protect artists from having their work defaced as well as ensuring the public had access to classic films--their cultural heritage--in the original form.
Save Star Wars
An acid such as vinegar or tomato sauce and electrically charged atoms like salt form the electrolyte. Aluminum foil is one electrode, and the pan, often steel or different alloy of aluminum, is the second electrode. This causes the aluminum foil to pit and dissolve, and you shouldn’t ingest gravy filled with metal ions
Beware Of The "Lasagna Cell": The Danger Of Food And Metals - Meathead's AmazingRibs.com
I am the king of the Rationalists and above the gods of irony!
Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ on X: "@slatestarcodex I am the king of the Rationalists and above the gods of irony!" / Twitter
We turn to one of my favorite historical books of all time, the late 19th/early 20th century bestseller The Copperhead, or, The Secret Political History of our Civil War Unveiled, Showing The Falsity Of New England. Partizan History, How Abraham Lincoln Came To Be President, The Secret Working And Conspiring Of Those In Power. Motive And Purpose Of Prolonging The War For Four Years. To Be Delivered And Published In A Series Of Four Illustrated Lectures.
Abraham Lincoln, Ape-Man | Slate Star Codex
Away with LiveJournal, and in with a new, sleeker-looking blog. A classier blog. A more mature blog. A blog where we’re not afraid to ask the big questions. Questions like: did Abraham Lincoln sign a demonic pact with the ghost of Attila the Hun?
Abraham Lincoln, Ape-Man | Slate Star Codex
A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen. Static typing would be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way they taught me to in college. But that's not how any of the hackers I know write programs. We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler.
Hackers and Painters
Classical game theory treats players as special---a description of a game contains a full, explicit enumeration of all players---even though in the real world, "players" are no more fundamentally special than rocks or clouds. It isn't trivial to find a decision-theoretic foundation for game theory in which an agent's coplayers are a non-distinguished part of the agent's environment. Attempts to model both players and the environment as Turing machines, for example, fail for standard diagonalization reasons. In this paper, we introduce a "reflective" type of oracle, which is able to answer ques…
[1508.04145] Reflective Oracles: A Foundation for Classical Game Theory
On their job listing page, they say that one of their "core values'' is "Don't be evil.'' From a company selling soybean oil or mining equipment, such a statement would merely be eccentric. But I think all of us in the computer world recognize who that is a declaration of war on.
Great Hackers
Einstein at one point worked designing refrigerators. (He had equity.)
Great Hackers
John McPhee wrote that Bill Bradley's success as a basketball player was due partly to his extraordinary peripheral vision. "Perfect'' eyesight means about 47 degrees of vertical peripheral vision. Bill Bradley had 70; he could see the basket when he was looking at the floor.
Great Hackers
If you're worried that your current job is rotting your brain, it probably is.
Great Hackers
If there is a Michael Jordan of hacking, no one knows, including him.
Great Hackers
But it's particularly hard for hackers to know how good they are, because it's hard to compare their work. This is easier in most other fields. In the hundred meters, you know in 10 seconds who's fastest. Even in math there seems to be a general consensus about which problems are hard to solve, and what constitutes a good solution. But hacking is like writing. Who can say which of two novels is better? Certainly not the authors.
Great Hackers
Like with extraverts and introverts (who are about equally numerous), wambs by virtue of being wambs — and therefore more focused on other people — are going to have a greater influence on social consensus, including what personalities are considered normal. Social normality doesn’t reflect statistical normality because the construction of normality[4] is a social process and not a statistical one.
The Nerd as the Norm – Everything Studies
In his telling, both the end of slavery and the end of segregation happened significantly after white American opinion had tipped against them—because people didn’t know that other people had also changed their minds. “According to one study [in the 70s], 18 percent of the whites favored segregation, but as many as 47 percent believed that most did so.” And so change, when it came, was very sudden
Power Lies Trembling: a three-book review — LessWrong
Another of Singh’s most striking case studies was of a low-level Ghanaian soldier, Jerry Rawlings, who carried out a successful coup with less than a dozen armed troops. He was able to succeed in large part because the government had shown weakness by airing warnings about the threat Rawlings posed, and pleas not to cooperate with him. This may seem absurd, but Singh does a great job characterizing what it’s like to be a soldier confronted by revolutionaries in the fog of war, hearing all sorts of rumors that something big is happening, but with no real idea how many people are supporting the …
Power Lies Trembling: a three-book review — LessWrong
The auction was first described academically by Columbia University professor William Vickrey in 1961[1] though it had been used by stamp collectors since 1893.[2] In 1797 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sold a manuscript using a sealed-bid, second-price auction.[3]
Vickrey auction - Wikipedia
In perceptually uniform color spaces, the lightness of the full colors varies from around 30% in the violetish blue hues, to around 90% in the yellowish hues. The chroma of each maximum chroma point also varies depending on the hue; in optimal color solids plotted in perceptually uniform color spaces, semichromes like red, green, blue, violet, and magenta have a high chroma, while semichromes like yellow, orange, and cyan have a slightly lower chroma.
Gamut - Wikipedia
(Redirected from Disambiguation of disambiguation)
Disambiguation_(disambiguation)
fruit juice has methanol in it. Orange juice has around 100 mg/L - fruit juices overall have 12 - 640mg mg/L methanol, and the average juice has around 140 mg/L
Activated Charcoal for Hangover Prevention: Way more than you wanted to know — LessWrong
It has been reported by a newspaper that in the 1920’s, “Argue and Phibbs” were actively considering taking on a third member of staff, a solicitor from England, by the name of “Cheetam”
Argue and Phibb's (former Solicitor's company) - Sligo Town Ireland
A modern car contains vastly more interesting technology than a modern house. That's because there are big-company car manufacturers with centralized factories and R&D departments competing to offer the car that you'll like the best. Imagine if instead, a boutique car-constructor company sauntered over to a parking space and built a car there over a year or so. And then you looked around for an available parking space that wasn't too far from your house and had an associated car that was acceptable. If no car was good enough, you could buy a parking space and its car, trash that car, and have …
Movable Housing for Scalable Cities — LessWrong
dispatchers ordered the shunting of the runaway cars to track 4, through an area with lower density housing of mostly lower income residents
The Trolley Problem and the Nature of Intention: Implications for Social Work Ethics - International Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics
the volume Vn(1) is increasing for 0 ≤ n ≤ 5, achieves its maximum when n = 5, and is decreasing for n ≥ 5
Volume of an n-ball
Although most phobias are dangerous to some degree, needle phobia is one of the few that actually kill. In cases of severe phobia, the drop in blood pressure caused by the vasovagal shock reflex may cause death.
Fear of needles
cf. [Garrabrant+’16]
The bunkbed conjecture is false | Igor Pak's blog
NFINITELY LONG JOHN SILVER (spoken): "Aye aye, captain!" CAPTAIN LAPLACE: I answer "i times i is minus one!"
Fermat's Last Stand: Mathematical Pirate Shanty - YouTube
INFINITELY LONG JOHN SILVER: (spoken) Everyone! Come quick! The white whale has been sighted to starboard! The white whale! CAPTAIN LAPLACE: (spoken) Arrrr, all you can prove is that there's a whale to starboard, at least one side of which is white. INFINITELY LONG JOHN SILVER: (spoken) What kind of white whale has only one side? CAPTAIN LAPLACE: (spoken) Arrrr, Moebius Dick.
Fermat's Last Stand: Mathematical Pirate Shanty - YouTube
I am indebted to Greg Egan for helping me loopify these movies in postproduction.
Cris Moore's Gallery
Step one: figure out steps two, three, and four.
r Animorphs: The Reckoning Chapter 02: Marco, an animorphs fanfic | FanFiction
There are large areas of modern life where people are actively, aggressively political, such as in Washington, D.C.
The Elephant in the Brain_Hidden Motives in Everyday Life Page 7 Read online free by Robin Hanson
“Whatever. Fine. You’re doing the best you can, conditional on being a bad person. When you die, God will give you the best afterlife possible, conditional on sending you to Hell.”
The Prophet And Caesar's Wife - by Scott Alexander
(“God shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”)
There Are Rules Here | Slate Star Codex
Auden said that “God put us on Earth to help others; what the others are here for, I don’t know.” At some point altruism has to bottom out in something other than altruism. Otherwise it’s all a Ponzi scheme, just people saving meaningless lives for no reason until the last life is saved and it all collapses.
Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman