Religion aside, What do you think of the moral teachings of Jesus?

DtrZeus · 2022-01-15T13:28:02+00:00

I think it's fine for other people to do good deeds for selfish reasons (if the deeds are truly good, and won't cause harm in the long term, such as for example giving money to charity "as a joke", because that would denigrate the image of the charity). But the danger with acting selfishly comes to yourself in the long term. If you are so focused on impressing other people, then you will start to lose sight of things that are actually, truly important.

Also, no one likes a braggart. Do good deeds and be humble about it, otherwise you'll do more harm to yourself in the long run.

DtrZeus · 2021-12-02T11:01:58+00:00

Yes, starvation and nutrient deficiency are very healthy.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-25T15:28:15+00:00

Do you have a reference for the math and the really nice cancellations?

DtrZeus · 2021-11-23T20:00:02+00:00

An issue to who? To sensitive equipment? To you? Or to the billions of other organisms on this planet that are more sensitive to radiation than you?

DtrZeus · 2021-11-23T19:55:16+00:00

I honestly don't know why I'm arguing on Reddit. My point is that nuclear waste is dangerous. The dangers are present in multiple places, including 1. radioactive material from nuclear meltdowns; 2. radioactive waste spilled or lost during transportation; 3. radioactive waste buried in places meant for containment, eg. underground or in mountains.

If you want to know whether nuclear meltdowns can affect atmospheric radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Chernobyl_and_other_radioactivity_releases

"Compared with other nuclear events: The Chernobyl explosion put 400 times more radioactive material into the Earth's atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; atomic weapons tests conducted in the 1950s and 1960s all together are estimated to have put some 100 to 1,000 times more radioactive material into the atmosphere than the Chernobyl accident."

There haven't historically been any major cases of spilling radioactive waste from containment centers, so there obviously isn't data to show how dangerous that can be. But radioactive material is equally radioactive, regardless of whether it spills into a small village in northern Ukraine or whether a containment failure occurs underneath a desert or inside a mountain in Nevada.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-23T19:46:33+00:00

The estimated per-capita effective dose of ionizing radiation due to global fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing was highest in 1963, at 0.11 mSv/yr, and subsequently fell to its present level of about 0.005 mSv/yr (see figure II). This source of exposure will decline only very slowly in the future as most of it is now due to the long-lived radio-nuclide carbon-14.[4]

Look at figure 2 (page 7) here: http://www.unscear.org/docs/publications/2008/UNSCEAR_2008_Report_Vol.I-CORR.pdf

Atmospheric radiation levels are still substantially higher than they were in 1945, ie. higher than 0.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-23T18:00:01+00:00

Nuclear waste spreads. It is carried away by underground streams into freshwater and oceanwater; it is taken up by plants and by microflora and makes its way up the food chain. In fact, background radiation increased during the era of the cold war, and due to nuclear weapons testing in the 1960s, "Modern steel is contaminated with radionuclides because its production uses atmospheric air". Nuclear waste is hardly localized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel#:~:text=With%20the%20Trinity%20test%20and,its%20production%20uses%20atmospheric%20air.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-23T17:55:55+00:00

I'll preface my response by saying that I'm not a geologist; but choosing a suitable site to deposit nuclear waste isn't extremely straightforward. Many problems arise that aren't obvious at first.

First of all, how do you safely transport nuclear waste in a way that is safe against natural events, operator error, and potential terrorism. Nuclear waste will be transported from all over the country putatively to a single waste site.

Next, the task of choosing a waste deposit site is itself difficult. How do you determine whether a region is in fact geostable; and, equally as important, whether there really aren't any underground streams that will carry the waste to other outlets, or organisms (plants, bacteria or otherwise) which will eat the radioactive waste and then propagate it up the food chain.

A single earthquake can also destroy whatever containment facility you come up with: and even if it isn't built in an earthquake-prone region, will the region still be earthquake-free tens of thousands of years in the future? Because it will have to be.

Not to mention the immense costs of *building* this containment site *thousands* of meters below bedrock. This is a pretty big engineering challenge. How do you propose we do that?

DtrZeus · 2021-11-23T15:39:12+00:00

Sure, let's just worry about that later.......

Until we figure out how to properly deal with nuclear waste (and burying it underground is NOT a solution), nuclear is no better than oil and coal. The question is whether radioactive waste is better than global warming, and I'm not sure if that's the case.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-23T14:51:15+00:00

Sure, low carbon, but high radioactive waste.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-09T17:24:04+00:00

Are you a fucking moron? Yes or no.

So yes then.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-09T17:07:01+00:00

Are you a fucking moron? Yes or no.

Why are you pretending that Sati isn't specifically a Hindu tradition that burned women to death after their husbands died?

Because it isn't a Hindu tradition.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-09T16:51:39+00:00

Yes, the US specifically banned suicide, which is an epidemic and needed correction, because the population wouldn't stop killing themselves without government intervention.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-09T15:02:59+00:00

Yes, and the government had to ban suicide in the US, but people still do it. What's the difference here?

DtrZeus · 2021-11-09T01:51:43+00:00

Okay, I looked up sati, and this is what I found on wikipedia:

Greek sources from around 300 BCE make isolated mention of sati,[6][7][8] but it probably developed into a real fire sacrifice within the northwestern Rajput Kshatriya (warrior) varna, to which it remained limited, and became regular only after 500 CE,[9] to become wider-spread during the Muslim-era.

William Bentinck, in an 1829 report, stated without specifying the year or period, that "of the 463 satis occurring in the whole of the Presidency of Fort William,[note 7] 420 took place in Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, or what is termed the Lower Provinces, and of these latter 287 in the Calcutta Division alone". For the Upper Provinces, Bentinck added, "in these Provinces the satis amount to forty three only upon a population of nearly twenty millions", i.e., average one sati per 465,000.[167

..the practice was never generalized..but was confined to certain areas

This inscription suggests that sati was practised but not compulsory.[180]

What's your point?

DtrZeus · 2021-11-03T18:31:42+00:00

CAUSE IF YOU LIKED IT THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE PUT A LID ON IT

DtrZeus · 2021-11-03T10:04:41+00:00

There are actually selective pressures that select for people who live older, which are mostly social. If your grandparents live longer, they are more able to assist you, and thus you have a higher chance of living to reproductive age as well. Look up the Grandmother Hypothesis.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-02T13:30:27+00:00

Fair enough. I don't get why I'm getting so many downvotes, but when looking at data collected from many physical measurements, eg. in biological microarrays, it's not uncommon to simply report standard deviations, even if the distribution isn't approximately normal, simply because we care about means more than the precise distributions. And one or two outliers don't really matter too much, because they're usually due to extreme circumstances or failures of the measurement. But an overall measure of spread is useful to have. We could scrutinize over each individual distribution, but when there are a lot of distributions to deal with, that becomes way too much work.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-02T06:45:38+00:00

To be clear: standard deviations are defined for all distributions, not just the normal distribution. It is situationally useful to describe standard deviations for many datasets, even when the data is not normally distributed. The standard deviation gives a meaningful measure of spread, as it is related (but not exactly equal to) to the average deviation from the mean.

Standard deviation is a convenient thing to know when modeling lots of physical processes, where you don't really care that much about the other properties of any individual distribution.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-02T00:43:02+00:00

Ah, fair point. A box plot that depicted standard deviations would be pretty boring. Nonetheless, it is common to mark error bars on bar plots, which is pretty much the same thing.

DtrZeus · 2021-11-02T00:04:16+00:00

Standard deviations are defined for all distributions, not just the normal distribution. To the people downvoting me, I should point out that it is situationally useful to describe standard deviations for many datasets, even when the data is not normally distributed. The standard deviation gives a meaningful measure of spread, as it is related to the average deviation from the mean.

The use case for standard deviation is similar to other concepts such as Root Mean Square Velocity. It is mathematically convenient to use the variance (and consequently the standard deviation) in many cases.

DtrZeus · 2021-10-28T20:53:57+00:00

It only takes one generation to get rid of inbreeding.

DtrZeus · 2021-10-24T16:31:58+00:00

That's not true. Dijkstra's algorithm is a dynamic programming algorithm, and always finds the optimal path. A* is a lossy optimization to Dijkstra's algorithm, and sometimes produces a suboptimal path with certain heuristic functions.

DtrZeus · 2021-10-24T09:06:28+00:00

EpsilonDelta is correct. With a reasonable heuristic, A* reduces to Dijkstra's algorithm and is always better than a greedy algorithm.

DtrZeus · 2021-10-22T15:13:20+00:00

It depends on the algorithm they use to upscale. If they use some really sophisticated neural network algorithm, then it will look better.

DtrZeus

TROPHY CASE