27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Redundancy in the English Language
Whenever we communicate, rules everywhere restrict our freedom to choose the next letter and the next pineapple.I Because these rules render certain patterns more likely and certain patterns almost impossible, languages like English come well short of complete uncertainty and maximal information: the sequence “th” has already occurred 6,431 times in this book, the sequence “tk” just this once. From the perspective of the information theorist, our languages are hugely predictable— almost borin... 1 
notes
notesMonte Carlo method for building words and sentences.
30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Means of Quantifying Violence
Now let’s turn to the present. According to the most recent edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2,448,017 Americans died in 2005. It was one of the country’s worst years for war deaths in decades, with the armed forces embroiled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together the two wars killed 945 Americans, amounting to 0.0004 (four-hundredths of a percent) of American deaths that year.57 Even if we throw in the 18,124 domestic homicides, the total rate of violent deat...Folksonomies: violence quantification
Folksonomies: violence quantification
1 notes
notes30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Violence Must be Considered Proportionally When Compared ...
In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But should we look at absolute numbers, or at relative numbers, calculated as a proportion of the populations? The choice confronts us with the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of one hundred to be killed or 1 percent of a population of one billion. In one frame of mind, one could say that a person who is tortured or killed suffers to the same degree ...Folksonomies: violence quantification
Folksonomies: violence quantification
1 notes
notes24 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
How Metric Measurements Relate
In metric, one millilier of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to ehat up by one degree centigrade--which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it.
Whereas in the American system, the answer to "How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?" is "Go fuck yourself," because you can't directly ... 1 notes
notes16 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
Dyson Spheres
The material factors which ultimately limit the expansion of a technically advanced species are the supply of matter and the supply of energy. At present the material resources being exploited by the human species are roughly limited to the biosphere of the earth, a mass of the order of 5 X 10^19 grams. Our present energy supply may be generously estimated at 10^20 ergs per second. The quantities of matter and energy which might conceivably become accessible to us within the solar system are ...Folksonomies: astronomy extraterrestrials
Folksonomies: astronomy extraterrestrials
1 The energy and time required to dismantle a planet and turn it into a biosphere surrounding a sun.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Predictability and the Base Rate
Whenever a statistician wants to predict the likelihood of some event based on the available evidence, there are two main sources of information that have to be taken into account: (1) the evidence itself, for which a reliability figure has to be calculated; and (2) the likelihood of the event calculated purely in terms of relative incidence. The second figure here is the base rate. Since it is just a number, obtained by the seemingly dull process of counting, it frequently gets overlooked wh...Folksonomies: predictability
Folksonomies: predictability
1 notes
notesKeith Devlin explains why the accuracy of tests and measurments must take into account the base rate for the phenomenon.
30 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Why Marriage is Not Like Prostitution
What's more, most males could not possibly afford to buy a
woman's reproductive potential if courtship were a simple economic exchange. What would be an appropriate market price for a nine-month pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, the exhaustion of breast-feeding, and twenty years of maternal care? At least half a million dollars at a basic salary of $25,000, one would think. How much do men spend on courtship in the first few months? Perhaps a tenth of 1 percent of the proper market price. Th... 1 notes
notesNo amount of gifts and showy displays can pay for the investment a female would have to make in offspring.
13 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Dyson Spheres
The purpose of this report is to point out other possibilities which ought to be considered in planning any serious search for evidence of extraterrestrial beings. We start from the notion that the time scale for industrial and technical development of these beings is likely to be very short in comparison with the time scale of stellar evolution. It is therefore overwhelmingly probable that any such beings observed by us will have been in existence for millions of years, and will have already...
1 An extraterrestrial civilization grown to a certain population will need to harvest the full resources of it's environment. By converting a planet like Jupiter into a shield around the system's star, the civilization could maximize the use of the sun's output.
14 APR 2012 by ideonexus
Energy from the Sun to Earth
It is a feature of the way the world is made that two protons together have less mass than two protons separately. This is a startling but indisputable fact. Weigh two protons separately, then weigh them together: the numbers don't match. The numbers differ by about 1 percent. This curious difference is not to be explained by some law of nature; it is a law of nature, as basic to the way the world works as any fact in our possession. The mass discrepancy is equivalent to an amount of energy g... 1 notes
notesStarting with the LAW that two protons together have less mass that two apart.
22 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
The Enterprise's Impulse Drive
Moving back to the sub-light-speed world: We are not through with Einstein yet. His famous relation between
mass and energy, E=mc 2 , which is a consequence of special relativity, presents a further challenge to space travel at impulse speeds. As I have described it in chapter 1, a rocket is a device that propels material backward in order to move forward. As you might imagine, the faster the material is propelled backward, the larger will be the forward impulse the rocket will receive. Mater... 1 notes
notesThe ship uses hydrogen fusion to propel helium atoms at near the speed of light, but this hypothetical form of propulsion would require incredible amounts of hydrogen to work.
