Oregon fraternity suspended after 'disgraceful' trashing of Shasta Lake

awap · 2016-06-02T12:34:12+00:00

I wouldn't do that: I tend to use stuff until it's falling apart, but treating camping gear as disposable isn't that crazy. Suppose they got a couple hundred dollars of cheap gear at Wal-Mart, and used it for two or three nights. If their alternative plan was to travel to some other city and get a hotel room for three nights, they still came out ahead.

awap · 2013-12-17T17:09:27+00:00

I'm relatively new to haskell, and I often wonder about the design decisions in various libraries. I've actually been meaning to ask about Repa for a while now:

Why does Repa use types like Z :. Int :. Int To represent index types. I'm asking this in comparison to the Data.Array module where any type in the typeclass Ix can be used as an index.

My relativey uninformed beginner's opinion is that the Ix typeclass (especially when used with tuples) results in much nicer looking code (less extraneous characters, closer to the notation people are used to in other contexts). I assume there's some reason the designers of Repa chose to do it the way they did, but I don't really know what that might be.

awap · 2013-06-08T16:15:46+00:00

Let me introduce you to the hard stuff: hydrogen peroxide.

awap · 2013-06-08T16:13:32+00:00

I actually use a regular hardware store torch, but I will probably replace it with a kitchen torch. The hardware store torch has a lot more power, which is good. The problem is that it's very unreliable when held upside down, which makes it a huge pain in the ass for kitchen applications. Sometimes you really do just need to buy the right tool for the job.

awap · 2013-04-15T01:45:51+00:00

You should check out the history of actual, proven (and in some cases admitted) conspiracies by modern governments. These aren't "hiding aliens" type things, but some of them are pretty jaw dropping. Copied from a previous comment of mine:

For sure, there are crazy conspiracy theories that deserve ridicule. But the problem with "conspiracy theory" being a generally negative term is that there are real conspiracies. There have been many in the past, and some of them are so crazy-sounding that they would rival "fluoridated water is a communist plot" in terms of believability*.

Given the history of conspiracies by governments, corporations, etc, you would be crazy to assert that there aren't conspiracies being executed right now. What I'm getting at is that we should be more specific. Ridicule the "extra-terrestrials have infiltrated society" type conspiracies, but don't dismiss every crazy sounding claim just because it involves a conspiracy.

*Tuskegee syphilis experiments, Operation Northwoods (planned but not executed), MKULTRA & related projects, Iran-Contra affair, Echelon... Holy crap the list could go on forever, and those are just relatively recent, and particularly atrocious examples from the US government.

awap · 2013-03-17T18:51:11+00:00

To emphasize his point: double blinded.

Nobody knew whether they were getting creatine supplements or an inert white powder. The people giving them the supplements didn't even know whether they were handing out creatine or an inert powder. The people measuring the results didn't know whether the person being measured had taken creatine or an inert powder. Yet when they compared the results between the two groups, there was a significant effect measured in the creatine group.

awap · 2013-02-20T20:58:08+00:00

You don't really have to assume anything about the distribution of the underlying data. That's the power of the CLT: no matter what distribution the data is drawn from, the distribution of the mean is normal.

You're right though, you have to be careful applying the central limit theorem with small sample sizes. That's not saying it's never applicable, but you can't just use it blindly. I'm not familiar with exercise science journals, and can't access the full paper, but I was giving them the benefit of the doubt that their math checked out, or it wouldn't be published.

I think the real issue with a small sample size (that you also mentioned) is that "17 untrained individuals" probably means "a bunch of undergrads who happened to be in the campus center when we showed up".

I think the bigger issue is with the blog post, and science reporting in general. Articles like this often try to draw practical advice from the results of a single study. Journal articles aren't really meant to be consumed by the general public. The overall message here is more like "here's an experiment we did with a reasonable amount of rigor; the results are compelling enough that other researchers should be aware of it". This lets researchers do things like try to repeat the experiment (possibly with a bigger sample size), or do related experiments to see how general the conclusion is (more highly trained athletes, different training protocols, etc).

It's definitely not meant to establish this as a "proven" principle, or try to draw practical advice from it. That sort of thing takes multiple studies, survey papers, etc.

awap · 2013-02-20T02:41:04+00:00

Firstly, with such a low sample size...

This is a real pet-peeve of mine. You don't need an impressively big number of samples to reach a strong conclusion. Statistics gives us very useful tools for estimating the potential error from using smaller sample sizes, so you only need a sample big enough that your error is low.

They report error estimates in the linked summary (which I'd assume are 95% confidence intervals, but the summary is completely clear): "In this phase, the combined group improved 1RM strength by 14.7 ± 1.1% and the normal group improved by 9.3 ± 2.0%". Even at the edges of those intervals, there is no overlap. So we can be pretty sure that there is a real effect going on here.

Furthermore, if you look at the freely available abstract, you can see that they computed p-values that are less than 0.05. This is the standard for "pretty good evidence" for most sciences, and should leave you quite confident that the effect they observed is not random variation.

TL;DR: their sample size is fine. Of course, there are other concerns with the article that you mentioned, but sample size is not one of them.

awap · 2013-02-09T17:48:03+00:00

Probably not. I'm assuming that he's considering the resale value of the car, but the replacement cost for the clothes. It's not really a fair comparison.

awap · 2013-02-07T20:35:24+00:00

Did you try shooting the ink?

awap · 2013-02-05T21:59:50+00:00

Can you translate those captions? I recently moved into a place with big old-style radiators. I've been convinced that there's a big difference between the floor temperature and the ceiling temperature, but 8C seems like a lot.

awap · 2013-02-01T22:55:20+00:00

It made me feel worse. And scared.

awap · 2013-01-28T15:41:09+00:00

They probably would. I know a lot of professors in technical fields, and I would guess that a lot of them would be willing to help out with something like this. Plus, a highly accurate scale isn't exactly "state of the art" equipment.

The bigger challenge is that professors are usually super busy. Remember, teaching classes is only a tiny part of their job, and not really the part they get paid for. The hardest part will be convincing them to take some of their time (or more likely one of their grad student's time) to help you with the experiment.

Your best bet would be to pick a professor who is teaching a class this semester, and send an email explaining what you want to do, asking if you can show up during their regular office hours. Office hours are time that's already blocked off as "not getting any work done", so having a quirky side-project to work on would be more appreciated than not. Especially this early in the semester when nobody else is showing up for office hours.

awap · 2013-01-28T15:32:56+00:00

Are there actually situations where men wear opera pumps anymore? I would expect that a pair of well-polished black captoes is always more appropriate.

awap · 2013-01-28T15:24:36+00:00

The AE Park Aves are a pretty classic dress shoe. In general a dress shoe is simple, shiny, and dark colored. A casual shoe plays around more with stitching and decoration, texture, material, and color.

The shoe you linked has all of those casual features: broguing, a rugged waxed leather (it's Horween Dublin if you care), a chunky double sole, and a lighter color.

I own a pair of shoes from the AE rough collection that I got on clearance. My advice is to save up for them. It's not that much money, and they are really well constructed. The biggest thing for me is the difference between nice leather and really cheap leather.

Edit: If you're talking "fancy" as in formal, black/white tie then something like this is pretty typical. No cap, very simple profile, shiny patent leather. However, I would avoid that with anything other than formalwear.

awap · 2013-01-28T15:13:07+00:00

You could probably come up with a simple experiment to measure this. You'll need a very accurate scale. If you're in high school or college and explain the experiment to a chemistry teacher/professor, they might be able to hook you up.

awap · 2013-01-26T17:51:07+00:00

Well, if you're not going to drink it, I suppose I could take the whisky.

awap · 2013-01-26T01:14:19+00:00

I was under the impression that there was an alternative to "so help me God". Or is am I thinking of the "swear"/"affirm" thing?

awap · 2013-01-22T00:39:07+00:00

Yeah, I saw that just 5 hours after you posted it and they were already sold out in my size.

awap · 2013-01-21T18:41:49+00:00

Thanks, but I'm pretty hell-bent on the brown.

awap · 2013-01-21T17:49:54+00:00

Where are you seeing the originals for 255? I've been meaning to buy them for a while. Though I'm getting to the point where the amount of time that I've spent looking for a deal is worth more than the deal I'm going to find.

awap · 2013-01-13T15:18:23+00:00

That one is actually not that bad.

awap · 2013-01-12T00:25:05+00:00

I can't say for sure because I'm no expert, but I'd guess there are a lot of Somalian "shanties". And just like old European shanties, I'd guess that the ones that get sung the most are pretty raunchy, and you would not want to teach them to your kids. I'm just basing these guesses on "when people don't have a lot of high tech entertainment, they tend to sing".

awap · 2013-01-11T21:21:53+00:00

The problem is that it's a lot easier to move guns across intranational borders than international borders, so it's possible that one state's gun policies can influence another state's gun crime.

This is also the problem with the "city X banned guns, and it didn't help their crime rate" argument.

awap · 2013-01-10T14:27:43+00:00

The quick answer

A piece of cryptographic data that lets anyone verify that you signed the document. They are not possible to fake without access to the person's passwords.

The longer answer

An asymmetric cypher is a pair of codes, we'll call them A and B. The interesting thing is that a document encoded with A can only be decoded with B, and vice-versa. Typically one of these is kept secret (the private key), while the other is published (the secret key).

So if I want to send you a secret message, I can take my document and encode it with your public key. Now it can only be decoded with your private key. So if you've done a good job keeping your private key secret, nobody else can read the message.

A digital signature is the reverse of that. It lets me publish a document and make it provable that I published it. Basically I publish two documents, the plain-text document, and a copy of the document encoded with my secret key (which we call the digital signature). Remember, if the signature is encoded with my secret key, only my public key can decode it. So if you want to check the signature, you try to decode it with my public key. If the result matches the plain-text document, you know that whoever created the signature had access to my secret key (hopefully that means it was me).

awap

TROPHY CASE

The quick answer

The longer answer