Exactly. The editorial comment has the misconception that this form of betting aims to find the winner.

Instead, they are looking for models which better predict to the "true" likelihood of any team winning. These models output a series of probabilities, and the amount of money you can make depends on the disparity between this distribution and that predicted by the current betting odds. You place a family of bets which target this disparity proportionally, and then after a sufficient number of events you'll make money reliably.

If other people start predicing the odds more accurately, you'll find that the disparity between betting odds and your model will narrow, and there'll be less opportunity for you to make money. There are a lot of people doing this sort of thing professionally, since sports betting is supposedly a less efficient market than share trading.

So you tattoo something safe, and then people start using tau instead of pi.

Sure, Pinker's opinion is worth more than comments here, where we're mostly pissing into the wind. There's an underlying problem though, which is that there's no easy way to distinguish the hard-nosed and appropriately qualified opinion of an academic expert from a well thought out but speculative personal opinion, especially in an op-ed piece like this.

The ideal would be a kind of argument tree of claims and evidence which ultimately supports the conclusion at hand, preferably with a wiki-like structure and references to the scientific literature. Something like that backing an op-ed piece would, although being a whole lot more work, let you and me work out how seriously academic X has thought out their position, or whether they too were pissing into the wind.

The argument seems more subtle than that. Carr thinks that deep thinking is learned (or at least, promoted) through old methods of media consumption, but that our new methods of consumption are ruining this ability. Pinker also thinks that deep thinking is a learned behaviour, but that it is taught (and learned) in the institutions where it is most needed, in particular in universities.

Pinker's not worried about recent changes, because he's confident that people who need these skills pick them up, and uses increasing success in sciences as evidence that nothing is going too wrong. Carr doesn't believe this evidence is sufficient, since he believes that modern science may not need deep thinking for its advances. That claim seems to severely underestimate the difficulty of doing good science, or even average science, and seems trivially false.

Really though, Carr values "deep thinking" in and of itself, and doesn't care if people who need it can do it. He's worried that the general population as a whole will not be able to think deeply on anything, but instead will become light "skimmers" of information. It seems to me that the ability to skim and critically combine information from multiple sources is incredibly important now, maybe more important than the "deep thinking" Carr promotes.

I definitely side with Pinker here. The skills are always around for those who want or need them. Nothing about our current consumption habits prevents us from learning them or using our self-control and employing them. Carr should be deeply uncomfortable with the amount of information we need to wade through day in day out, and realise that people are just adapting to do the best they can in our modern environment.

In 100 years, the archive will interactively back up the word tweet with a wealth of information about Twitter and the culture of the times, for those interested. For those not, it will simply paraphrase tweet with something comprehensible to the person reading it, so that they can understand and move on.

I don't think thoughts of future archiving should deter us from using language however we see fit.

Now having RTFA, they are providing a rental scheme which looks quite reasonable, and financial assistance to parents who aren't able to meet even that. Seems very reasonable to me.

I went to a privileged school, and when I went to high school years ago they brought out their first laptop policy. In many ways, the laptops were "wasted" for official classes, and it was quickly learned that 95% of classes didn't need or use the laptop. For the other 5%, it was really very useful. The side effect of everyone having laptops was a lot of tinkering by all the students, and that had real benefit too.

Laptop schemes are nothing new. There are two questions in this case: why standardise on MacBooks, and what will they do about the underprivileged kids?

As to why they standardise at all, that's clear. It will save them a lot of support effort. They may also be able to do some bulk deal for all these laptops, instead of families having to purchase them at retail price. Whilst I'd love them to demand laptops running Ubuntu instead, I think choosing Macs is reasonably defensible.

As for underprivileged kids, the school clearly needs a policy where their laptops are subsidised or bought outright. If they do something like this, then far from screwing the poor parents they'll be doing the kids a huge favour, likely giving them access to some tech literacy that only comes from having your own machine you can use night and day. Will they do the right thing? I don't know, but it's far better to focus pressure on this particular issue than on the broader issue of requiring laptops.

I find that lined paper doesn't give the flexibility to mix text and diagrams. As time has passed, I'm getting fussier and looking harder for plain paper notepads. Unfortunately, there's often none except for artist sketchpads, where the paper is far thicker than I'd need. Anyone else end up stealing paper from the printer for notes?

That's not quite true. Science demands a kind of skepticism in evaluating evidence, and makes heavy use of principles such as Occam's Razor to prune the space of propositions considered realistic given the evidence. Despite not being able to disprove many things, it certainly passes judgement on beliefs about the world which are beyond the minimum required to explain the world around us (e.g. the Flying Spaghetti Monster). The scientific mindset requires us to discard propositions which are spurious and unsupported by concrete evidence. The belief in one or more gods or an afterlife certainly fails to meet standards of evidence; scientific rigour would thus allows as to discard such beliefs. If further evidence can be brought to bear, great! Until then...

Jobs doesn't make philosophical arguments against Flash though, he only makes business arguments.

His problem is that Adobe dropped the ball, and are lagging instead of innovating. Jobs claims Flash is the number one source of crashes on OS X, and Adobe has done nothing about it. In the mobile device space, Flash doesn't yet support use of hardware acceleration in video decoding, which means massively increased resource usage and thus reduced battery time. Since Adobe lags on these issues, Apple prefers a process they can contribute to and in some sense control, hence open standards in this area of their business. If Adobe had not dropped the ball, Jobs would be happy to use Flash and there'd be no conflict to see.

I also have studied Chinese as a child and Japanese as an adult, neither to a fluent level, and can vouch for the parent's suggestion to look at components during study. That's about half of Heisig's method, which other posters have mentioned, the other half being to not worry about pronunciation until you've first learned the meaning of many characters. (Aside: plenty of people vouch for Heisig, plenty criticise it too; I don't know of any studies showing that it really works, only anecdotes from individuals.)

The only point I'll add is that learning characters is a big memorisation task, and many characters aren't based on strong visual meaning. Don't feel bad about inventing a story to help you remember, even if the story is technically wrong or makes incorrect assumptions about components. Chinese and Japanese teachers make up such stories all the time to teach characters to their students, since as a pure memorisation technique it works.

Exactly. It's only the kanji script which makes the Japanese writing system as a whole deep. You take an already deep writing system from one language (Chinese), smush it over the top of an existing spoken language (native Japanese), salt it by borrowing pronunciations from the first language during three or four historic periods (i.e. different dialects), and you get a very weak relationship between the sounds you're saying and the glyphs you're writing, at least compared to other languages.

Hey, that's what makes Japanese fun =)

You're right on the money. They call the complexity of a writing system's form-sound relationship orthographic depth. English is a deep language, Chinese is deeper, Japanese is deeper still. Spanish on the other hand is orthographically shallow. So it's considered easier to learn to read and write in Spanish, than English, in English than Chinese, in Chinese than Japanese.

In similar situations in Australia, animals (e.g. kangaroos) are simply culled to keep their population down. It's still a bit controversial though. IMHO, animal rights groups don't quite have a coherent take on this, and seem to object to culling on principal. Animals suffer in the wild too though, and if their population is allowed to explode, the amount of suffering will increase as many starve. I'm all for population controls like culling done humanely.

That said, if you could plausibly implement birth control, that would be far more humane. It works in situations where you're the one giving them food to begin with (e.g. pigeons), but I can't see how it be cheap enough to do otherwise.

Despite catastrophic consequences, I sincerely doubt that humanity would perish if global warming continues unabated. I wouldn't want to live in that world though, and surely a lot of people would suffer or die. However, reducing emissions doesn't come for free either. The cost of being wrong, aside from setting society back a few decades, is to keep another generation or two of third worlders in severe poverty. That's hardly free, so it's good that the science gets appropriately debated. Now I just wish that politics would hurry up and iterate towards the same level of consensus as is there in the science.