Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014

I'm curious as to why he's given up on lesswrong. My knee-jerk reaction would be "because the attitude on lesswrong is now incredibly bad and fully counter to the goals he had for the place", but I'd like to know in his own words why he's less active in the LW community.

the sequence is posted entirely on his Tumblr

It's also posted in a weird way? Despite following him when he first advertised his Tumblr, I don't see it on my Tumblr dash (but obviously following the links works).

Given up? Fiction/fanfiction writing advice belongs on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and other social-hangout sorts of places. LW has more of the flavor of wannabe academia.

On the other hand, I'm kinda saddened that Eliezer appears to have given up on LessWrong

Less Wrong is not as shiny a beacon as it once was. It started fading by the time I got here. However, I'm not lamenting, because for me it remains a beacon nonetheless. For example, So8res, a.k.a. Nate Soares, still posts here regularly enough. He's a MIRI researcher. What's great about that is the flow of causality: like Luke Muehlhauser, he didn't end up posting on Less Wrong because he works for MIRI; he's working for MIRI because of what he's posted on Less Wrong. That's all inside of the last year alone. He doesn't post here as frequently, but his posts are still why I come here weekly. Now, I don't mean to use the MIRI as an applause light. Honestly, I don't know too much about their work outside of what I've gleaned from off-hand discussions here on Less Wrong. However, the folks running it sure seem interesting, and just how one user was able to transform his own life with Less Wrong, then became the best new contributor to the site in 2014 by recording that transformation, and then working for the MIRI is an example of what others of us can achieve as aspiring rationalists. Maybe Eliezer is lamenting that the rest of us aren't producing content as awesome as his, and are instead waiting for him to come back. I figure he'll come back if we double down in realizing he started Less Wrong so we could learn to be awesome, not tend to his every word, and follow through on 'going forth and creating the art'.

I wouldn't be terribly weirded out if he had been writing it on say yudkowsky.net, but Tumblr of all places? What the what?

I'm honestly not too sad about that. After The Redacted Incident, I think the community lost a lot of trust in Eliezer. (I know I did.) If he wants a space where he can moderate according to his whims, LessWrong need not be that space. Frankly I trust the mods here more than I trust him to make good mod decisions.

I think the basic difference is that people B and E just don't care and are less likely to notice these things because they're not interested in them.

Replace your person B with a person B' who is also of average fitness but recently started a new fitness regime and has been busy quantifying himself. He will notice his mild hypoxia as soon as A.

A and C are much closer to the limits of their respective physical bodies than B. A - due to his high motivation (he is a maximizer, while B is a satisficer, if A didn't have a motivation to maximize his results, he could do the same (or better) as B), C - due to his limited physical abilities. Therefore, they have lower tolerance for the worse environment. In other words, if we plot physical abilities on x axis and the expected/desired result (i.e.result that they have a motivation to achieve) on y axis, we would probably obtain a convex function whose graph is below the line y=x (which corresponds to pushing the physical limits of the body).

I'm really not seeing either of your examples, unfortunately. What's stopping average fitness person from noticing their times aren't as good in the same way olympian-level person would notice that their times aren't as good? What's stopping him from noticing his morning jog or whatever is tougher?

Why wouldn't average reader have more difficulty parsing badly punctuated writing as well? Why wouldn't they be able to parse it in different plausible ways too?

I'm just not seeing it.

Edit: To go into more detail:

Person A, B and C are secretly transplanted into a low oxygen universe.

Person A noticed their 200m backstroke time is consistently 4 seconds slower than usual.

Person B notices they have to take walking breaks more often than usual on their morning jog, and took 5 minutes extra to complete their usual route.

Person C has more difficulty doing basic tasks.

Person D, E and F are each given 10 badly punctuated sentences to read.

Person D finds they can parse 4 of them in different plausible ways.

Person E finds they can parse 2 of them in different plausible ways, and can't parse 2 of them at all.

Person F can't parse 4 of them at all.

I see these examples as being just as plausible if not more than yours.

A not quite nit-picking critique of this phenomenon is that it's treating a complex cluster of abilities as a unitary one.

In some of the (non-Olympic!) distance races I've run, it's seemed to me that I just couldn't move my legs any faster than they were going. In others, I've felt great except for a side stitch that made me feel like I'd vomit if I pushed myself harder. And in still others, I couldn't pull in enough air to make my muscles do what I wanted. In the latter case, I'd definitely notice the lower oxygen levels but in the former cases, maybe I wouldn't.

So dial down my oxygen and ask to do a road race? Maybe I'll notice, maybe I won't. But ask me to do a decathlon, and some medley swimming, and a biathlon? I bet I'll notice the low oxygen on at least some of those subtasks, whichever of them that require just the wrong mix of athletic abilities.

For the reading one, I can believe this if I'm doing some light pleasure reading and just trying to push plot into my brain as fast as possible. But if I'm reading math research papers, getting the words and symbols into my head is not the rate-limiting step. If there are some typos in the prose, or even in the results or proofs, it doesn't make much of a difference. There might be some second-order effects--when I try to fill in details and an equation doesn't balance, I can be less certain that the error is mine--but these are minor.

So maybe sharpen your claim down to unitary(-ish) abilities?

In medical literature, it's not uncommon to read about "U-shaped curves."

Anyway, I am reminded of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3lQSxNdr3c&t=0m24s

Although I suppose it's pretty similar to the "Goldilocks Principle."

This may be a case of regression to the mean, with the thing which parameters regress being conscious and not caring about these particular parameters.

The actual key difference in the second example is that people D and F are using their system II, whereas person E is relying on his system I.

There are quite a few cross-posts - at least in Discussion. If it's on-topic and you clearly indicate the cross-post (linking to it) I appears to be OK. Note that I can't judge your post as I'm neither deeply interested nor versed in this topic. Length and topic do seem OK though.

Let the hype curve for certain recent advances in computer technology flatten out; the references will vanish again.

Apparently, yes, there is:

http://amityjournal.leeds.ac.uk

http://spr.sagepub.com

What you are talking about has a name and is a well-known issue in user interfaces. A related concept is POLA.

IME, "intuitively obvious" is a red herring for any halfway interesting interface. This was best captured by a coworker of mine decades ago about a feature: "It does what you expect, but you have to expect the right things."

What I strive for in an interface is consistency (both internal and with existing conventions) which maximize the chances that someone will already have learned the relevant interface conventions (or trained their intuitions, if you like).

Video games will often teach you as you go along. It doesn't sound like you played that game from the beginning, so you didn't see all the earlier rooms where shooting something above a door was the solution to a puzzle.

I have an intuition that there's a trade-off between intuitiveness and efficiency. The most efficient ways, e.g. hotkeys, to use an application are usually not the most intuitive, but I'm glad that they exist in parallel with the more intuitive control features and the best apps employ both approaches.

I usually find apps that try to be both maximally efficient and maximally intuitive at the same time overly simplistic.

Swiping applications off the screen doesn't actually close them. It just removes them from the list.

The Android OS transparently closes applications based on memory pressure. You're never supposed to have to do it yourself, and it'll transparently reopen them to their previous state based on persistence files.

It usually works. Of course, sometimes apps get it wrong.

As far as the Zelda game goes, seeing the ladder means that if you don't get out of the cave it's probably the solution. From there you can think of possible ways to interact with the ladder. Given the tools at your disposal trying to shoot it with the bow becomes one thing to try.

As far as closing programs go, the obvious first step is to search a list for open programs. Then you try the various ways you can interact with them. What does swiping do? What does long-clicking do?

In general there no closing applications in Android in the way that exists on Windows. The average user is not supposed to need that functionality. Android applications are supposed to be designed in a way that doesn't need the user to close them.

You would probably find http://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/] either extremely frustrating or very rewarding side all of the solutions are very opaque and require you to get pretty creative with things to try.

I don't think that swiping is obvious either, but I just googled "how to close an app" and voila.

Also, portal 2 is another puzzle game with very cleverly hidden solutions.

There are apps for that :-)

http://www.quantified-mind.com/ provides a good test suite for mental tests.

I've seen worse excuses to get drunk :)

I recently did some sim racing while mildly intoxicated. I'm fairly consistent with certain car and track setups so my performance doesn't vary many tenths of a second per lap. Suprisingly getting buzzed seemed to improve my performance by several tenths for about half an hour and after that it plummeted to fairly embarrassing levels. I've felt this temporary performance boost in other tasks as well, but wouldn't have expected to measure it in a difficult motor task requiring quick reflexes and good eye-hand coordination.

If you want to be comfortable for an extended period the key is to have insulation everywhere.

• Find boots that keep your feet dry and warm, use thick socks. You can cheap out on everything but boots, buy good boots.

• Get two layers on your legs, long underwear and pants might cut it, but ski pants make a night and day difference.

• Find a coat that is not drafty, if it is not warm enough, layer sweaters and long sleeve shirts until it is.

• Toque (I've heard them called beanies) and scarf. Always cover your head and neck.

• Gloves or mitts, go overboard on these nothing ruins your fun like cold hands. Wool is always warmer than it looks.

I touched on layering a few times, if you are not familiar with it it is the secret to staying warm (and comfortable, if the day warms up you just shed layers). Layers trap warm air and become more than a sum of the parts, for your core you don't need high quality attire, just something to block the wind and a few layers to trap air.

0 degrees Fahrenheit

For our readers who like to use SI units: That is about -17.7°C

The trick to surviving in colder climates is layering. T-Shirt plus shirt plus pullover plus a good winter jacket should do the trick. Some people like to layer trousers but for me a good pair of jeans does the trick. Look for good winter boots as feet loose a lot of heat. Cover your head with a hat, wear a scarf. Experiment with these things as there is comfort and aesthetics to be considered. Wear gloves or start getting used to walking with your hands in your pockets. If you do wear gloves take them off to shake someones hand, anything else is extremely rude.

One approach is to acclimate. I live in central NY and walked home from school (~30 minutes) every day of the year in t-shirt and jeans. My body adapted to the cold so, even though my ears and, to a lesser extent, fingers were being frozen off, I was sufficiently warm.

The one thing you don't want to do is overdress so you wind up sweating. In particular, you're going to want to wear less than you would if you were just standing around outside. If you're going to be at different periods of activity, then layering is a must so you can layer down before the activity and layer up after. If not, layering is still a good idea.

Boots should be insulated, waterproof, and thick-soled. Mittens have less surface area than gloves and therefore keep hands warmer. Hats should cover ears. Pants should go most of the way down boots and belong on the outside, so if you walk through snow, it doesn't get caught on top of the boot and fall in, and generally benefit from being waterproof. Avoid cotton (it absorbs and holds onto moisture and loses all insulative properties when wet.)

This is likely overkill. You are going from indoors to plowed streets to indoors. There's things that you must do if you're going to survive multi-day winter camping trips, but "put on things to cover parts that are getting cold" is all you really need.

You're overthinking it -- just get a jacket.

If you want to geek out about stuff like that :-) the recommendations depend on how heavily you sweat and so how good must your clothing be at getting rid of excess moisture produced by your body. The usual recommendations here go along the lines of "don't wear cotton" (aka "cotton kills") and "have a breathable shell".

In the case of Baltimore, if you don't anticipate walks in the rain, get a fleece and a down jacket, zip up or unzip as needed. If you do, you'll need a waterproof shell (Gore-Tex or equivalent). Or an umbrella.

Simple, durable and sufficiently stylish, good from -10 down to -40 Celsius if I'm moving:

• wool coat, long so you don't necessarily need long underpants
• thick wool sweater with buttons, t-shirt or shirt with collar underneath
• loose leather mittens with wool lining, fingerless gloves underneath
• wool cap that reaches the bottom of your ear lobes, wool scarf
• slightly thicker jeans than usual, no long underpants needed with long coat
• thick leather boots with plenty of room for your toes, wool socks on top of normal socks if really cold

Dressing warm enough depends on your own thermoregulation. If you frequently feel cold, doing sports can help you in a natural way to feel warmer.

Feeling warm enough is quite valuable. In addition to simply bad, feeling cold leads to bad body language, that can make you come across as closed.

When it's really cold I have found long underwear to be important. A jacket simply does nothing against lowing heat via your legs.

Polartec as a base/insulating layers all over the body, anything {wind,water}proof or +1 layer on top of them if i'm planning to go slow (like, 15l/m²/day) steam-permeable waterproof membrane if the rain or powerful wind is probably an issue. Does the job better than wool as it doesn't get wet. Balaklava on my head. // Russia/St. Petersburg here.

Layering is good, but it's much easier to apply to the torso and arms than the legs. So a coat that goes at least down to your knees is very handy. I also recommend wool socks and mittens, since unlike many fibers wool is just as insulating when wet. Source: used to live in Boston.

American Northeast proof: layers, as other posters have said. My strategy is, from bottom to top: sneakers (I don't have boots at the moment), thick socks, long underwear or pajama bottoms, pants, T-shirt, sweater or sweatshirt, waterproof winter jacket, balaclava, beanie or other warm and flexible hat, hood over the hat. This is enough to get you through the coldest day of the year almost everywhere people live, but since I mostly walk between heated building, this lets me strip down to long pants and a T-shirt if I need to.

If it's windy out, you might want to cover your face with something, such as a scarf.

When choosing clothing, pay attention to what type of fabric it is made of. You want something that is warm, but also that can dry quickly. If you get snow on you, it will melt at some point, even if you can brush most of it off. Twill is pretty good for pants and dries faster than denim. Knit fabrics like yoga pants aren't warm enough to be used in the freezing cold by themselves, but they can be ok as a layer underneath. Polartec is a nice fabric for hats. It is soft and warm and breathable and dries quickly. A waterproof and windproof outer layer on a jacket helps keep out the wind.

You might want to have more than one set of hat and gloves so that one set can dry while you use the other set. Having a place set to dry them helps, even if it's just a coat peg or hanger in a closet.

It helps to anticipate just what conditions you are going to face while you are out, and prepare for that. There won't necessarily be just one approach needed. If you are going to be out for both day while it is sunny and while it is cold at night, you might need to take more clothes with you. It might be as simple as an extra set of gloves that are warmer, to put on at night.

Checking the weather prediction, and thinking through in your mind all of the environments you will encounter, and at what times of day, can help with clothing choice.

For footwear traction matters, and how much maintenance is required to deal with the salt from the roads.

If you will be spending time sitting outside, much warmer clothing is required. Snow pants are helpful for this.

Snow pants and ski jackets sold at ski hills, or at stores that have skiers as clientele, are usually warmer and of higher quality than ones found in department stores. They are designed for people who spend an entire day outside in the cold.

Change yourself so you will better tolerate the cold. At the end of your showers lower the water temperature as much as you can stand for a few minutes. Keep doing this until you can handle a shower of just cold water.

First of all, don't neglect your university's resources. Network like hell. Find out where other recent graduates ended up. Ask all professors who will give you the time of day if they have industry connections they would refer you to. Go to the career center. Go to career fairs. Print out tons and tons of resumes.

Speaking of resumes, what are your skills other than theoretical physics? And how wedded to doing physics in your job are you? If you can reasonably put R or MATLAB or even SQL on your resume, let alone proper programming languages or projects, you'll be opening up worlds of opportunities as an analyst or data scientist. Learn about how to use LinkedIn. Optimize your resume for visibility to keyword-based recruiters.

I strongly recommend a job search approach where you try to get as many responses as you can, THEN prune down. You'll get interviewing experience and you'll get to see some options you might not have considered.

My experience is that the salary for your first job is more important than you think, because future salaries are always anchored off your previous one. So for the first job in particular it's worth going for a less nice but higher paying job (also, hedonic treadmill).

Keep your applications targeted. I'll normally apply to less than 10 places, but each will be one where I've read about the company and tailored my cover letter. I've found this more effective than spamming out my CV to a lot of places.

I've had success with and without recruiters, so I can't really say one way or the other there. That said, the best return on effort when looking for tech industry jobs is definitely Hacker News' monthly "who's hiring" thread.

Some companies will be shockingly unreasonable. Just be prepared for that to happen, and respond appropriately; don't assume there's some kind of EMH in play where anything a company does has to be sensible.

Get two offers. Don't stop looking just because you have an offer or two. You have a lot more leverage when you have multiple offers.

Trust your gut. If a place feels unpleasant, it probably is unpleasant. If the person who interviews you rubs you the wrong way, the company culture probably will (this is not true for initial phone screens, which tend to be done by someone unrelated to anything). Make sure you speak to the person who's going to be your direct manager - how you get on with them is probably going to have a much bigger impact on your workplace happiness than anything else.

There's problems getting a physics job around the Washington area? I'd think with NASA, NSA, DoD, several large research universities (including the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab), and all the large government contractors (Lockheed Martin in Bethesda MD, etc.) it would be relatively easy to find something.

.

I'm sorry for your loss.

I suspect dementia is one of those cases where cryonics isn't of much help since much of the brain is long gone before the person is legally dead. It wouldn't have even occurred to me to suggest cryonics to my grandfather with whom I was very close and who died of Alzheimer's disease.

Sorry for your loss.

Bohmian mechanics and the Many Worlds interpretation make identical predictions (at least, as long as we ignore anthropic considerations). I haven't yet read the article, but if it is claiming that this experiment is some sort of vindication of Bohmian mechanics, then I suspect it is wrong.

I have seen this some time ago when it was mentioned on slashdot. By now there should be lots of nice videos illustrating those on YouTube. One is this.

What I really like about this is that it allows to gain conflict-free intuitions about QM via macroscopic processes.

See also De Broglie–Bohm theory. I do not see a clear reason why MWI must be preferred. For me the deciding point is which can (better) be generalized relativistically. Apparently there are bohmian mechanic-based approaches

ADDED: The latter article contains the interesting conclusion: "if Bohmian mechanics indeed cannot be made relativistic, it seems likely that quantum mechanics can’t either".

Arthur Clarke's idea of reduced gravity prolonging significantly human life. Sadly, the available evidence does not quite point in this direction. But for a sci-fi story it might be quite OK (e.g. it is discovered that microgravity prevents Alzheimers').

Highly valuable technological processes that only work in zero g.

Space factories for spaceship. It's much cheaper to build something heavy in space and have them launch from there. Of course you would have to mine asteroids instead of sending construction materials from the Earth.

Security concerns. If you want to test some form of nanotechnology, you better do that in space and nuclearize the whole thing (provided that nanotech is still extremely dangerous).

MIS (millionaires in space): once you live in outer space as a status signal, it's easier to befriend other rich weirdos in space.

At the moment asteroid mining is one of the best. Quantifies of various rare metals are limited on earth and we have companies working on making asteroid mining a reality.

Earth has laws that prevent certain economic transactions from happening. Various biotech and genetic engineering projects might get outlawed on earth. Human cloning that happens in space stations might make for an interesting story.

There might be nanotech that needs very high precision. Today an electron microscope is effected by a train braking a few kilometers away.

Nanotech could allow you to build cheap very big mirrors that redirect solar energy from one point to another. If you bundle it enough you could have a laser weapon that takes very little time to hit targets. The energy from the mirrors could also be used for electricity generation. On earth but also maybe on Mars.

What are plausible economic reasons to have a fair number of space stations?

The other country's is slightly bigger.

(If not clear from the choice of 'status competition' as the most plausible economic reason, I think that all reasonable economic activity in space will not involve humans in space.)

Extremely wealthy libertarian seperatists.

Space stations? As in, stations with humans in them? Pretty much none. Your best bet is to postulate some sort of alternate history in which electronics and computers never took off. Or you can go in the other direction, and postulate tiny space stations which house computing hardware running uploaded humans.

As others mentioned: mining, special manufacturing exploiting microgravity.

A lot of competition and innovation in the area of data transfer protocols and encryption and localization and espionage increasing the need for engineers that can build, test and maintain new communications directly from orbit, which is cheaper than launching prototype after prototype.

A fad for having a marriage and honeymoon in space, making luxury space hotels commercially viable.

Companies having headquarters in space as the ultimate signal. Especially if it gives them an advantageous legal environment.

China wanting to outshine the US, so heavily subsidizing the stuff above for it's citizens / companies.

Space junk becoming enough of a problem that specialized repair and disposal jobs become viable, mostly financed by the satellite insurance companies.

Some of the things above increasing the number of space flights, and so decreasing prices and making a few more uses become viable.

Manned ones? . I can think of reasons to have lots and lots of industry and science in space, but reasons to have lots of bodies up there is harder....

Uhm. Someone develops a launch mechanism that is very, very cheap for small and durable components. - Railgun-to-orbit kind of deal. This necessitates assembly in-orbit of anything that doesn't fit inside a launch-shell, but also drives down the cost of keeping labor up there alive way down because water, air and food fit just fine. Result: Big boom in space activity, lots of engineers and master craftsmen in low earth orbit building probes, space radio telescopes and so on.

Not really a reason, but if you postulate that the cost goes down dramatically (to the cost of an average car or something, relatively speaking), then you may have more reasons to work with.

Strictly economic? There are none.

At least a tiny bit plausible? The same sort of legislation that made renewable energy profitable in some countries. That is, huge taxes on earthbound industry and big subsidies for spacebound.

Rich people treat the space stations as cabins.

Alternately, artist colony for the next generation of super-wealthy artists like Damien Hearst (spelling?) need to go for "artistic inspiration" (scare quotes due to Hansonian signling).

• mining helium-3 for fusion power plants. (ETA: it seems a popular movie used this idea already)
• something bad happens, existential risk is suddenly taken seriously and demand for space survival skills increases
• rich people building their own colony with their own rules to escape government involvement

How many stations are you considering a "fair number?"

A valid reason would be the scarcity of resources. Further technological progress will be severely constrained by which chemical elements are available cheaply and which are not. Lots of interesting and useful chemical elements are not available in sufficiently concentrated ores, or they are rare in all of earth's crust, having sunken down inside earth's core during its formation.

These elements thusly are produced only as by-products of other elements which are more concentrated in their ores. This is valid not only for most of the lanthanides, but also for elements like indium, tellurium, gallium, germanium and the platinum group metals.

Asteroids might hold rich deposits of these elements because the elements could not sink down into their cores, and even if they did, most asteroids are small enough.

So if we don't want to substitute that indium tin oxide in our smartphone touchscreens with cheaper elements, we'll have to mine asteroids.

Edit²: Here's a relevant review article (Vesborg, Jaramillo 2012)

I will hazard a guess that actually some people he went up to in the street were Christians -- but they didn't make it into the actual programme. Sure, Sweden isn't very religious. But if the figures in Wikipedia are to be believed, about 18% of Swedish citizens believe in a god, whereas somewhere between 1% and 5% are Muslims (and I bet the Kopimists are way, way, way under 1%; I bet the Kopimist wasn't encountered in random vox-pop interviews).

Conveniently, So8res just posted a guide discussing this very issue in section 6.

Here is a page of all of MIRI's publications, you can click Decision Theory and it will show all of the relevant papers. It might not be quite what you're looking for, but it might help with working out what MIRI are up to and what they have done in the area.

There might also be something in the rough workshop writeups.

If I were you, once I had exhausted online resources, I would consider contacting MIRI themselves (via email perhaps) if I had any more questions, they're definitely the people to ask.

Two standard texts are Easton and Hardy's The Ethical Slut and Taormino's Opening Up.

What specifically do you want to know about them?

The Ferrett often has interesting things to say on the subject.

It's in progress apparently, but I'm told money won't speed it up. If you edit you can help I think.

For some of my life (till the 70s or 80s), weatherman jokes were a staple of humor, and the joke was simply that the weatherman was wrong. I haven't heard a weatherman joke for a long time.

The bizarre thing is that I'm sure the jokes existed, but I can't remember any of them.

Nate Silver (of 538) has some space that he's dedicated to this effort in The Signal and the Noise. Randal Olson's reproduced some of that related to current-day abilities, which show that we're currently able to give better-than-random results for a few days in advance, but not much better after that. And, unsurprisingly, data beats expertise when it comes to accuracy.

A good deal of the data-collecting tools have been developed or implemented relatively recently, and that seems to correlate with improvements to short-term forecasting, to the point where a five-day forecast in 1991 was roughly as likely to be accurate at a three-day forecast in 1981.

They've improved enough that they can probably be trusted to determine whether you should bring an umbrella tomorrow, but the historical numbers and especially expertise-based numbers were inaccurate enough to explain the origin of the meme.

Nate Silver's The Signal And The Noise has a chapter about this. The short answer is yes,, weather forcasting has gotten better, but comerical forcasts have a known "wet bias" in favor of predicting rain. The reason for this is that people get more upset at forcasters when they say it won't rain and it does than when they say it will rain and it doesn't. Acording to Silver, the National Weather Service's forcasts are the most reliable, followed by various large comercial services (e.g. weather.com. etc.), with local news forcasts being the least reliable.

Disclaimer: I am not a meteorologist, but a friend of mine is and I had discussed this with him some time ago. Paraphrasing from memory, I might make mistakes.

Only in recent decade or two we got enough computational power to run huge weather models (such as Aladin) comfortably, with live updating on incoming data. However, the model is only as good as the input data - if the meteorological weather stations are positioned every few kilometers, the prediction is extremely good, but if they are more sparse, the errors increase. The complexity of terrain plays a role too - on a flat plain, weather stations might reasonably be spaced tens of km's, but a small hill means they have to be spaced much more closely to get reasonable results.

There is also sometimes very helpful "local knowledge" - e.g. whatever the abrupt weather change in Germany, you can be reasonably sure in 3 days it will happen in Slovakia.

Taking this into account, professional weather forecast is very reliable for a day or two - enough to leave your umbrella at home. However, interpretation by news forecasters glosses over finer details, such as "sunny, high temperature with 10% chance of rain" will be interpreted as "sunny, high temperature, a little of rain" and give false signals.

The weather forecasts really were rubbish in the past.

To give one notorious example, a weatherman on Britain's main television station once mocked a member of the public's claim that the country was about to be struck by a hurricane. That very night, Britain was hit by one of the most severe hurricanes of modern times, killing 18 people.

Given not complete reliability I would really like to get weather data via an app that gives me confidence intervals of various sizes.

A right is a shortcut in consequentialism (or another normative ethics) turned into a lost purpose. Different rights can and do contradict each other, since they were derived in different circumstances. Thus you can argue for or against anything, by stretching the domain of validity of a suitable right. It all depends on how connected, influential and persuasive you are. Hence lawyers.

Let's take the example of the "Right to Life, Liberty and the Security of Person". Can a "Right to Cryogenic Treatment" be argued from there?

The right to life is a pretty recent idea.

The US constitution for example have a right not to be deprived of life without due process. It has a right to not to be tortured (cruel and unusual punishment) no matter what.

In the US some cryonics folks have registered a religion that allows them there cryogenic treatment without interference. Freedom of religion is actually a constitutional right in the US. In the case of abortion "pro-life" is also a position mainly argued from a position of religion.

The France state is strongly secular and you don't get many expectations just because you register a religion. Especially one without tradition such as the one of the cryonics folks. The French state doesn't allow any religion to block autopsies simply by claiming that they have a special burial ritual that forbids autopsies. That's why there's a different situation concerning cryonics in France.

At the moment no court considers a cryonic person alive. If it would then the whole scheme of using insurance contracts that trigger on the death of a person wouldn't work to finance cryonics in the first place.

Most of Ritalin's recent comments have been on political subjects, namely the internet standards for undeveloped nations thread. Anybody who makes lots of political noise gets a downvote or two per comment; see, for example, Azathoth123 and advancedatheist.

Quite a lot of posts have one or two downvotes. On LW single downvotes sometimes happen for reasons that are hard to understand. The reason those posts jump to your attention might rather be that nobody upvoted them and they are therefore in total negative karma.

Search is your friend.

I picked 'one post per year', but I think I've only used Twitter for periodic 'Tweet such and such to people and get in game bonuses or sweepstakes entries.' So maybe 'I let a bot post for me' would be a useful option.

How to count work related usage? I do not have personal account, but now I am testing tweeting as part of social networking PR. Perhaps I should vote twice, one personally and once in the official authority.

when I'm having conversations, it's probably one every few minutes or faster but there are lots of hours where I don't make any tweets

I hardly ever post (somewhere between one post per month and one post per year), but I read my feed almost daily.

If you're really interested, Twitter itself publishes a lot of data (along with discussion) on how it is being used.

I have a twitter account, but don't use it to post - I follow others, although actually I don't check the site regularly because I find the site generally offputting - I checked "one per year" because that seemed closest.

I chose "one post per day", although in practice it's more like "a few posts a week". Had "one post per week" been a choice, I would have rounded to that instead.

nerd-sniping suggests that you can stop what a person is currently doing to a good extend. Giving someone another way to procrastinate on facebook doesn't really fall under that category.