Comment Re:China (Score 1) 347
Apparently, the NSA is either stupid enough to think that nobody could ever figure them out, or just as stupidly shortsighted as other branches of the US government.
"To what extent can xkcd be credited?" Not a great extent. Most of us knew the math already
There is a difference between knowing the math and applying it. A nice, easy to remember story can make that difference.
but it only works well when you really select randomly from a dictionary instead of making grammatically correct sentences
Grammatically correct is not that much of a reduction in key space. I would imagine that "Adjective" "Noun" "Transitive verb" "Adjective" "Noun" yields a larger keyphrase than four random words, and it is probably easier to remember than "Noun" "Noun" "Adjective" "Noun", even for rare words.
Remember, if AZT was in trials during the time period - if it had been found to have fatal side effects, there wouldn't be an oscar-winning movie about the guy... or if there were, he would be the bad guy. He wanted to make money, he got lucky. It happens.
Woodruff WAS the bad guy who smuggled non-effective medicine. He SHOULD have been the bad guy of the movie: "Worse, the real Woodruff rejected the one truly promising drug at the time, AZT, as hopelessly toxic and instead smuggled drugs like Peptide T, which never panned out. " (from Science Based Medicine).
The metric system only simplifies a few grade-school problems.
The metric system makes calculations where you combine units easier. These tends to occur in science, particularly (in my experience) when calculating energy (because so many different formulas give energy, or because J=N*m=kg*m^2/s^2=Pa*m^3=W*s).
the idea that if you make someone suffer enough they will not commit any more crimes for fear of more.
I think you give the author too much credit. As I read it, it is steeped in pure lust for vengeance, no rational thought required.
IQ tests are [...] not applicable for general usage
Childhood IQ tests is one of the best predictions we have of adult success, in whatever terms we have tried to measure that. They aren't good, but they are better than, say, socio-economic status of the home.
Quite possibly, each and every person is similarly intelligent, only adapted to different environments.
You haven't been teaching much, I can hear. It seems that some people are just faster at understanding and applying information than others. In what environment is it an advantage to be slow to understand new information? Even within the same social strata, there still seem to be quite a spread, which wouldn't be expected if it was simply adaption.
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.