Is Feng Shui deadly?
If you angle a mirror wrong it will FUCK UP someone walking into the space.

Not to mention that just one of the precepts of Feng Shui is that you not sit with your back to any openings in a room. They say it's for "good energy" but really it's so you can gun down every motherfucker that comes for you before they even see your face.

It's a deadly martial art.

Any student that is disciplined, self motivated, and has learned how to learn, will be more able to learn in a an independent fashion that students who do not have these skills. In a traditional education one went to school where one listened to a professor lecture or read books on the subject. The actual pedagogy, after the teen age years, was minimal, and often involved simple discipline, not teaching of the skills one needed to learn more independently in later life.

This reminds me of something I read here about how taking optional advanced science/math courses in high school was positively correlated with better outcomes later in life, so some government officials wanted to make the courses mandatory. What they were missing is that what was really correlated with better outcomes was choosing to take difficult courses that were not necessary to graduate. The students wanted to learn more despite the fact that there was an easier way.

As long as we could live with the vast majority population engaged in semi-skilled labor, this was fine. However, now we really have more a need for skilled labor. This requires more people to have than a high school education. So we need an advanced pedagogy to help people reach the potential where they can learn more.

Universities and colleges are not^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hshould not be trade schools. They are supposed to teach you how to be trained by an expert in the field who has no special pedagogical knowledge. Do you think companies want to hire college grads who can only learn with the aid of dedicated, inspiring teachers who know about advanced teaching techniques? No, they want their new hires to be able to be trained by there existing staff who just know how to do their job. Of course, most companies don't want to invest in training. Maybe more trade schools (even online ones, with cheap certification centers) are the answer. But that still doesn't solve the problem of everyone wanting 5 years experience, but no one willing to give them that first 5 years. Perhaps shorter, more accelerated (and above all, CHEAPER) college degrees, and redirect college loan funds to funding those first 5 years on the job.

But this will only make worse the problem of how HR depts. view college degrees. Thirty to forty years ago, they were used as a simple way to weed out most of the population from the labor pool. (It was shorthand for rich, white men; or the very motivated and/or lucky minority, who will work even harder because they were living the dream.) But if everyone has a degree, they're worthless for this. If everyone could easily get those first 5 years experience via some sort of federal loan program, then "5 years experience" on your resume' would be useless too. As it is now, all this push to get "college educated workers" more cheaply is just an attempt to lower salary costs by saturating supply side of the job market.

I would say we are accepting that most of kids will be semi-skilled laborers without the jobs to insure a high rate of employment, which means more welfare checks.

The real problem is that the economy only really grows by blood, sweat, tears, or fossil fuels. And we don't have enough of the last, nor much will to spend the first three. Even if everyone had a college degree, we as a nation cannot afford to give everyone the kind of paycheck that such a diploma earned 30 or 40 years ago. The only reason these high-tech jobs paid better was that they automated away several other jobs. The pie isn't getting any bigger, we're just getting better at cleaning the plate. Welfare checks (or something like them; perhaps a basic income with onerous strings attached?) seems like the best possibly endgame for a civilzation whose population continues to grow unchecked as we eventually deplete out fossil fuel reserves. Much more likely is that the whole thing implodes via war, famine, & plague sometime in the next 500 years.

To extend the analogy, suppose both people also have a stopwatch which starts timing at the exact moment when the person who's moving at 0.5c fires a pulse of light in the same direction as his movement. After the observer's stopwatch has reached 1 second, freeze everything and see where everyone is. The person who's moving at 0.5c has moved half the distance light travels in 1 second, obviously; about 149 896 km. The pulse of light has moved twice as far, about 299 792 km.

This "freezing" doesn't make any sense without measurement. The photons of the light pulse aren't anywhere until they are detected. So imagine setting up a 149896 km long "racetrack", with the "nonmoving" observer at one end and a light pulse detector at the other.

The moving person, saw it travel only half as far relative to him - only 149 896 km - yet, because he's experiencing time at a different rate, his stopwatch has only ticked off 0.5 seconds. So from his perspective, the light has traveled 149 896 km in only 0.5 seconds, i.e. it is moving at 1c.

His stopwatch would say that 1/sqrt(3) seconds [0] had passed, but because the racetrack appears to be moving towards him at 0.5c, it get Lorentz contracted to (149896)*2/sqrt(3) km. Both observers agree that the "moving" observer is halfway down the racetrack when the light pulse finishes, so this means that the "moving" observer sees the light pulse travel a distance that is half of the racetrack's apparent length.

So he measures the speed of the pulse to be (0.5*(149896)*2/sqrt(3) km) / (1/sqrt(3) sec) = 149 896 km/sec.

[0] The formula for this is very non-intuitive. Look at the first equation block here.

In pure mathematics, exceeding three dimensions is effortless. Calculations involving four or more dimensions can easily be solved. But just because the mathematical model can do it, doesn't mean that the physical reality it attempts to model, can also do it. A model is designed to represent reality, but it is not itself reality. I suspect that all such mathematical models of the universe, which point to other dimensions, will eventually be shown to be purely mathematical.

And just because you suspect something is false doesn't make it so. If we only allowed simple, intuitive ideas to take hold, we never would have invented quantum mechanics.

Also, a philosophical point of order: models are how we interact with reality, which we cannot directly perceive. Some models have more direct sensory support than others, but it's just an arbitrary, subjective matter of degrees as to when it passes from "mathematical model" to "truth".

David Wong called this effort shock. Basically, most (U.S.) kids today vastly underestimate how much effort it takes to accomplish anything worthwhile.

The SoC contains potassium benzoate.

- I know quantum computers can do fast factorisation (ie. break the RSA assumption), but can they also break the DDH assumption (diffie-hellman, elliptic curve crypto)?

I quick browsing of the wikipedia page for Diffie-Hellman key exchange leads me to believe that what makes breaking it difficult is the discrete logarithm problem, which is precisely what Shor's quantum algorithm solves efficiently. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no quantum algorithm for finding rational points on a general elliptic curve (the hard part of breaking elliptic curve crypto).

To summarize: quantum computers break DH key exchange and RSA, but not ECC.

Jobs' health has been deteriorating in the past few years. If there's anyone has the financial resources to become a cyborg to stave off death, it's him. All he needs is a respirator helmet, a glowing iPad stuck to his chest, and a swooshy black cape to go with his turtleneck.

Though, if Jobs is DV, who's the emperor?

First, obviously as we exist, there was not an equal amount of matter and anti-matter created at the big bang. Furthermore most kludges that have been devised to explain this discrepancy have been less than stellar ....

Without the kludge, the theory predicts a universe devoid of stars, which is quite a bit less stellar.

Yeah, I'll bet that last bit is hard. I've heard that it's routine for the FDA to approve double-blind studies, but I don't think that would be statistically significant in your case.

"has a pattern" != "repeats eventually". It is well known that Pi is irrational and thus its expansion in any base is never eventually periodic.

If you want to solve the problem, work on a zero cost certificate authority.

If DNSSEC became ubiquitous, would it make CAs obsolete? All you need are some new fields in your DNS records to store a public key, and presto, you can have encrypted communication with an IP address that you know is correct.

Could someone explain why this woudn't work?

All boundaries are mental constructs.

Post-modernist deconstructionism is arrant crap, and should be lumped in with other intellectual goo like "creation science".

The way our brains lump things into "objects" evolved to help simplify our mental models of the world so that we could function at a higher level, but that doesn't mean it's truly representative of the real world. Quantum mechanics seems to model the universe very well at certain energy and length scales, but it's extremely non-intuitive; i.e. our evolved, common-sense ideas fail us. And in other areas of physics, everyday objects become merely collections of atoms that are stable at an arbitrary energy scale. You can keep playing this game all the way down to today's "fundamental" particles. But even then, (I believe it's true that) in most models, a particle is only a certain subset of the degrees of freedom of the universe. Objects only seem appear when you make choices about what you consider to be an object. Making the choices is implicitly defining the boundary that defines the object itself. It is almost completely subjective.

Thus, there is a scientific basis for all those Zen statements about how there is no difference between you and anything else in the universe: it's all just arbitrary energy and entropy scales. I can destroy any object by merely deciding not to consider it an object anymore! ;-D

... when in reality the borders exist mostly in human minds.

All boundaries are mental constructs.

So 1 LoC = 14,000,000,000 BTU or 14,770 gigajoules.

Because of this, the previous claim that (in terms of information) 1 LoC = 10 terabytes, and that a Joule/Kelvin is a unit of information, one can calculate that the temperature of the Library of Congress to be 14,770 * 10^9 J / (10 * 2^43 bits) * bits / (ln(2) * k_B) = 1.75461 * 10^22 K.

Not a very useful unit of temperature.