A person who is somewhat upper-class will conspicuously signal eir wealth by buying difficult-to-obtain goods. A person who is very upper-class will conspicuously signal that ey feels no need to conspicuously signal eir wealth, by deliberately not buying difficult-to-obtain goods.A person who is somewhat intelligent will conspicuously signal eir intelligence by holding difficult-to-understand opinions. A person who is very intelligent will conspicuously signal that ey feels no need to conspicuously signal eir intelligence, by deliberately not holding difficult-to-understand opinions.
I disagree with this. Just kidding.
As a result, introverts are not driven to seek big hits of positive emotional arousal—they’d rather find meaning than bliss—making them relatively immune to the search for happiness that permeates contemporary American culture. In fact, the cultural emphasis on happiness may actually threaten their mental health. As American life becomes increasingly competitive and aggressive, to say nothing of blindingly fast, the pressures to produce on demand, be a team player, and make snap decisions cut introverts off from their inner power source, leaving them stressed and depleted. Introverts today face one overarching challenge—not to feel like misfits in their own culture.
This.
I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?
Crushing on Paul Graham tonight.
My buddies and I are doing a Harn campaign right now and one of the mechanics involves accruing stat “checks” over time. Every five stat checks you get allows you to roll a single d6. So if you have 15 checks you get to roll 3d6.
The goal is to roll over your stat, which will raise it by one.
So the question of, “when is the best place to roll?” came up. We all know that having more dice makes it more likely, but we wanted to know exactly how much more likely in order to make an informed decision.
Not being overly strong in statistics, I put together the following Ruby code to arrive at the answer using experiment instead of theory.
[sourcecode language='ruby'] # Define the sum class class Array; def sum; inject( nil ) { |sum,x| sum ? sum+x : x }; end; end # Define the experiment parameters number_of_d6=9 number_of_runs = 100000 goal = 19 successes = 0 failures = 0 # Program logic number_of_runs.times do rolls = [ ] number_of_d6.times do rolls.push rand(6)+1 end if rolls.sum >= goal successes += 1 else failures += 1 end end # Output print “You ran the experiment #{number_of_runs} times using #{number_of_d6} d6.” print “\n” print “You succeeded #{successes} times.” print “\n” print “You failed #{failures} times.” print “\n” successrate = successes / 1000 print “Your success rate is #{successrate}%.” [/sourcecode]
There is an additional considering that I’m thinking of adding later, which is that when you miss your attempt you lose half the checks you put into it. So it becomes something of an EV equation.
Anyway, if anyone has any comment on how to do this statistically I’d love to hear from you. ::
I’m not so into RC stuff, but this thing is highly compelling. It’s a remote control helicopter with four blades that you control with your iPhone. Plus, it has a camera that projects augmented reality over what the helicopter is seeing. The coolest part? You can shoot the stuff you’re seeing.
Yeah.

Yes, the Notepod is the Moleskine of the digerati, an ingenious little sketchpad shaped like an iPhone. The front of each sheet features “52mm by 77mm of blank space floating in darkness,” and the back of each piece is a blank grid of graph paper, perfect, as the site says, “perfect for notes or jotting down the phone number of a hot geek.”
The Moleskine of the Digerati? I think not. I expect this fad is already half played out, and it just started a few days ago.

Image from ffffound

Image from ffffound

From ffffound, the image site of doom.
tcpdump Tutoriallsof Introductiongit Primerfind Command lsof Commandtar Referencelsof TutorialDaniel Miessler | 1999-2012 | Share Alike
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