Deep Thoughts
Why is trainspotting so popular in Europe? Is it as popular elsewhere?
How many times can you ride BART across the Bay before you go deaf? (Hopefully a lot.)
What is the probability of stepping in something undesirable without paying attention (e.g., in the SF Bay Area)?
What would happen if someone started posting code on GitHub to bring down GitHub (GitLab, etc.)?
When we say Internet, we are often referring to google.com, i.e., whatever Google has indexed. “Look it up on the Internet” really just means “Google it”–nice brand position for Google a la Kleenex’s equation with tissues (“Hand me a Kleenex, please”), etc.
Ketchup–the working wo/man’s dressing.
When a company is caught cheating (e.g., VW, PG&E), perhaps the government should assume ownership and have oversight and channel future profits into the public sphere (i.e., they have lost the “privilege” to be private).
One way to fight AI job loss and increase societal happiness: Shorter work week.
It is impossible to measure absolute zero. At some point the measurement device will add more energy to the system than what there is to measure. Absolute zero is purely theoretical concept; one of many which constitute the fragile foundation of our mathematics and physics.
Bankability represents use-value; price represents exchange-value.
Impressionism is realism with poor vision (heh heh).
Shall the birds of fortuity alight again?
The traveling salesman problem is at the root of all navigation optimization algorithms.
Any smoke detector on the market should be proven to have an extremely low false positive AND false negative rate in terms of when it goes off. Also, it should not go off as if there is a fire when the battery is low (especially in the middle of the night, ugh).
Perhaps the difference between love and lust is analogous to that of the symbiotic and parasitic.
Writing legalese and raising a child are like programming (writing code) – you must define the terminology before you can work with it.
The free market is like a Ouija board – seemingly driven by a random assortment of the people’s collective will but ultimately guided by those with the most power (and will to power).
Would you rather be stuck in a pool with a shark or in a cage with a tiger? I would choose shark and attempt to punch it in the nose.
I wish websites could sense the “angry click”, e.g., when closing (“x-ing”) out of an ad.
The statistics on propensity for suicide are inherently skewed. There are all the people who would have done it had they not previously died of some other cause(s).
Redesign the political system such that every position is filled by randomly sampling from the general population. Need sufficient checks and balances in the event of bad apples, as any sustainable governance (or other complex) system must have.
Reddit is self-imposed cultural indoctrination; the perfect tool for the capitalist regime to maintain its hegemony. CMV.
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you? Well, if it were me–even tho’ I ain’t dun’ gon’ dun’ nuttin’ wrong doggone dang-nabbit–I’d lawyer up and say nothing except, “May I please request a lawyer, kind officer sir/ma’am?”
I wonder what it feels like to be a famous person before becoming famous. Dunno & hope I never will.
How long would it be before we run out of oil if we take transportation out of the equation altogether (i.e., accounting only for the oil used for other applications)? (So, what is the fate of all those applications?)
Can you hollow out something–e.g., an object–that is already hollow? –Credit to H.T. (My answer: Yes, e.g., if the hollow item already has something stuffed inside it, with the presumption that hollowness is an intrinsic property of said hollow object.)
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? (My answer: No, because sound is only recognized/identified/defined by a necessary, conscious observer/listener.)
What if all consciousness is subliminal? Like a Ouija board–perhaps every thought in your brain is ushered in large part by the hands of randomness: Namely, those of your entirely unique set of circumstances in life (nature and nurture vs. time). I suppose the real question is–like with Ouija–whether there are additional systematic, non-random forces and wills to power at play in the mind.
Another instance of getting what you measure: Google searching with quotations, e.g., articles containing “drop in demand” in x, y, or z will yield a search result suggesting that there is–you guessed it–a drop in demand. It is just like the sampling bias problem intrinsically affecting statistical policing algorithms–if the police are already targeting minority people/areas and that is the data used for machine learning, then guess what result is going to come out? It is going to predict crime in/tell you to go after the same people/areas that were previously targeted!
How do fruit flies get everywhere when food is left out? Drosophila are like macro-level bacteria–they are ubiquitous. An adult (including a pregnant female) Drosophila cannot fit through a window screen. My theory: Baby fruit flies enter and mate, or the pregnant female lays eggs on the window screen (ha!). Dunno–probably neither, cuz I’m not an expert. Where do Drosophila go to die when you finally rob them of their sustenance and they starve? Have you ever seen a dead Drosophila corpse with no explanation except likely starvation? Do they turn cannibalistic at some point? Sometimes desperate times do call for desperate measures. What happens if they evolve to bite and hurt us?
It is kind of freaky: I have noticed that my percentage of used memory (out of the total available free memory) hosted by a cloud email provider has correlated exactly with my age. I am not sure what it means, but it has been going on for many years. I dunno–if, all of a sudden, my used % starts rapidly approaching 100%, I may start worrying about my general well-being (time to get a primary care doctor and a checkup!).
Games involve an awful lot of probabilities and random sampling.
Who polices the police? (Not mine.)
Do you ever get hit with the memory of a certain taste or smell out of the blue (i.e., when there are no actual, physical tastes or smells to be experienced)? Like the taste of a cold, freshly-poured-from-a-tap, half liter of Hefeweizen in Munich, or a cup of chilled coconut rum out of a wooden mug in Costa Rica?
Imagine getting grounded by your parents during a shelter-in-place. Double whammy!
I wonder why quotation marks, e.g., “’” vs. “’”, maintain their formatting when text is pasted into a plain text document.
What cools down a bowl of soup the fastest: Removing the solids or the liquids? I am guessing the answer involves calculations of thermal mass, coefficients of conductivity, and whatnot.
Historically, we only had a physical house to maintain. Nowadays, we have both physical and digital houses to maintain. Thus, times are indeed more complex now than before - at least twice as complex (or more, scaling w/ the number of “houses” requiring constant attention & maintenance). Perhaps, in the social arena - metaphorically parallel to the second law of thermodynamics -, time is us moving towards (mostly ever-)increasing complexity.
Brita LP should probably overbuild their replaceable water filters knowing that everyone keeps using each one at least 20% more than it is supposed to be used (i.e., for 20% longer after the pitcher says to replace it).
Incidentally, I agree that the library system, hair and nail salons, restaurants, bars, all sorts of non-essential businesses, etc. should not be open (as they all presently are) during a global pandemic. (Also, I agree that we need welfare to compensate lost revenues, health care, mortgage/rent/loan support, etc.) The only alternative is to actively make our collective situation worse.
What is technical debt? It is all that remains to be done when you decide, “Screw it.” on a project and stop working on it and move to something else–anything else–even if it is something brainless like a Netflix film or true crime podcast.
What is the total collective natural gas waste from pilot lights on heaters?
There is a fundamental difference between working on tools themselves (e.g., computer hardware and firmware, IT infrastructure, client-server models, computer languages) vs. computer programs (applications) which leverage the capabilities of said tools.
Rhetorical question: Have you ever met a corporate employee who is both genuinely happy to be working and also highly intelligent? I have not.
If no one designed or built prisons, there wouldn’t be any. If no one designed or built ads, there wouldn’t be any. Responsibility lies in the eye (and hands) of the beholder.
False Positive Paradox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive_paradox/
“Suppose a disease has a prevalence of 1/1000. A test for the disease has a true positive rate of 100% — it never misses someone who has the disease. It also has a false positive rate of 5%. A patient takes the test and the result is positive. How likely is it that he has the disease? To find this out, we need to know what percent of people who tested positive have the disease. Suppose 1000 people are tested for the disease. Since the prevalence of the disease is 1/1000, we know that, on average, 1 person in that group of 1000 will have the disease. That person will test positive (100% true positive rate). We also know that 999 people, on average, don’t have the disease, and that 5% of them will test positive (false positives). That’s 999 x 0.05, or approximately 50 people. That means that 51 people will test positive (1 true positive and 50 false positives), and only one of those people will actually have the disease. Therefore, 1/51, or about 2% of the people who tested positive actually have the disease. So, the patient’s chance of having the disease is about 2%.”
So, for a prevalence of 1/1000 and false positive rate of 5% (which does not seem too bad), only 2% of people who are tested positive out of a population of 1000 will actually be positive!
Deep Thoughts by Jack Handey
Curated by M.T.S.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis.
If you saw two guys named Hambone and Flippy, which one would you think liked dolphins the most? I’d say Flippy, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong, though. It’s Hambone.
If you go parachuting, and your parachute doesn’t open, and your friends are all watching you fall, I think a funny gag would be to pretend you were swimming.
Children need encouragement. If a kid gets an answer right, tell him it was a lucky guess. That way he develops a good, lucky feeling.
Instead of trying to build newer and bigger weapons of destruction, we should be thinking about getting more use out of the ones we already have.
Just because swans mate for life, I don’t think its that big a deal. First of all, if you’re a swan, you’re probably not going to find a swan that looks much better than the one you’ve got, so why not mate for life?
I can’t stand cheap people. It makes me real mad when someone says something like, “Hey, when are you going to pay me that $100 you owe me?” or “Do you have that $50 you borrowed?” Man, quit being so cheap!
I believe in making the world safe for our children, but not for our children’s children, because I don’t think children should be having sex.
If you’re in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it’ll make everyone think how stupid war is, and while they are thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.
Most of the time it was probably real bad being stuck down in a dungeon. But some days, when there was a bad storm outside, you’d look out your little window and think, “Boy, I’m glad I’m not out in that.”
Somebody told me how frightening it was how much topsoil we are losing each year, but I told that story around the campfire and nobody got scared.
How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol? How about the pillow? It has more feathers than the dove, and it doesn’t have that dangerous beak.
Instead of studying for finals, what about just going to the Bahamas and catching some rays? Maybe you’ll flunk, but you might have flunked anyway; that’s my point.
It’s funny that pirates were always going around searching for treasure, and they never realized that the real treasure was the fond memories they were creating.
I like to go down to the dog pound and pretend that I’ve found my dog. Then I tell them to kill it anyway because I already gave away all of his stuff. Dog people sure don’t have a sense of humor.
For centuries, people thought the moon was made of green cheese. Then the astronauts found that the moon is really a big hard rock. That’s what happens to cheese when you leave it out.
Other People’s Deep Thoughts
When I lose my glasses, I just think, “If only I could find my glasses, I could find my glasses.” –Jimmie Whisman, Small Town Murder, Episode 2
Why do they call it “head of cattle” when they count the number of cows? e.g., How many head of cattle…? Isn’t it implied that the cattle have heads? –Jimmie Whisman, Small Town Murder, Episode 53
What are the people of Wyoming doing? Are they Wyomers? Are they Wyoming? –Jimmie Whisman, Small Town Murder, Episode 53
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- 06 Apr 2022 » Notable Software
