Comments on: Even More Links For September 2014

By: SanguineEmpiricist

SanguineEmpiricist — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 00:58:10 +0000

I bought naive set theory alongside with basic set theory because the cover was great.

By: Web Roundup: Links for October - rs.io

Web Roundup: Links for October - rs.io — Sat, 11 Oct 2014 04:37:03 +0000

[…] Chinese restaurant owner laced noodles with poppy to get customers addicted. The evil genius in me wants to root for this guy, but his implementation was so disappointing–the police released him because the dosing was all wrong. It was just… food. A more realistic version of Walter White. (via SlateStarCodex) […]

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By: Rory O’Kane

Rory O’Kane — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 03:13:15 +0000

A link to that statement’s source: “This is a thing that actually happened. It […]” – Eliezer Yudkowsky – Facebook

But yeah, I wondered why the cover wasn’t infinite too. I thought maybe that it was to raise interest in set theory by making people ask “can a set be recursive, but not infinitely recursive?” I assumed that the answer is yes and that the author discusses it later in the book.

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By: David

David — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 23:02:27 +0000

I was going to say, you couldn’t play that tune properly on a normal highland bagpipes (though it would be trivially easy on an Irish or Northumbrian bagpipes), since you’re missing a note on the bottom if you’re playing it in D, or two notes at the top plus the seventh is flattened if you’re playing it in A. But of course, you can just cheat and play it in A anyway, shifting the high notes awkwardly down an octave like that guy.

Still, I am perplexed and bamboozled that highland bagpipers don’t ask for a key to extend the range one note down. You’d think it would be routine, yet I’ve seen it exactly zero times.

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By: RustyGunner

RustyGunner — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 00:44:32 +0000

There is no Blackgaze, only Zeuhl.

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By: suntzuanime

suntzuanime — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 13:49:59 +0000

I would nominate Obama’s election as the point where TDS jumped the shark. Good political comedy has to be subversive, so when their brand of aw-shucks leftism is winning, they have to either take a critical look at the foibles of their own side (lol) or else they have to make shit up to pretend they’re subverting the establishment when they’re really serving it. So DrBeat’s example of the Zimmerman trial: they present white-on-black murder as if it were “open season” so that they can sound like they’re taking a stand against something without having to take a stand against anything that might be politically uncomfortable for them.

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By: Matthew

Matthew — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 05:10:40 +0000

The new atheists don’t exhibit that behavior as a general practice when encountering views they disagree with; they exhibit it specifically in response to either religious views or the view that one should be tolerant of religion.

Random aside: The juxtaposition of “new atheists” with “I never encountered in college” is quite humorous for me. In 1997 or thereabouts (at a time when the name meant nothing to me), an avuncular older fellow approached my friend and me while we playing ping pong in the student center at Tufts and asked if he could get in a game. I said sure, and as we started to play, he introduced himself as, “I’m Daniel Dennett. I study the mind” or something to that effect.

He then proceeded to hand me the worst whupping I’ve ever received in ping pong. I was a fairly good player, and he shut me out to 11. Apparently his study of consciousness included human perception, because the man could put insane spin on the ball that made predicting its course impossible. Totally changed the way I played the game.

This shall be filed in my memoirs as “That time I was publicly humiliated by a famous intellectual.”

But he was otherwise quite soft-spoken and friendly in person.

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By: Sniffnoy

Sniffnoy — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 05:03:15 +0000

Consider e.g. the New Atheists.

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By: veronica d

veronica d — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 02:19:20 +0000

I’m a pretty huge fan of RSS. That said, I find RerSS to be a perfectly thoughtful counterpoint.

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By: Cyan

Cyan — Wed, 01 Oct 2014 02:11:14 +0000

I’m trying to figure out what the cover the Naive Set Theory means for EY’s contention that “all infinite recursions are at most THREE LEVELS DEEP.”

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