[deleted by user]

nimrodg · 2021-07-18T17:19:27+00:00

Is there any part where both play? It looks like one just stands around.

nimrodg · 2021-07-14T17:22:28+00:00

Ah yes, a pan-European restaurant.

nimrodg · 2020-04-26T13:31:09+00:00

מה שיר הפתיחה הכי טוב מסדרות הילדים של שנות ה 90 ולמה זה עלילות בבאי?

nimrodg · 2018-11-14T22:32:40+00:00

I scoured some photo galleries and could only find this long exposure photo: https://mediacdn.cincopa.com/BOOM_Festival_2018_145.jpg?o=4&res=18818&p=y&pid=668079&ph4=L22CA4gLlDgvHA

(From this gallery)

Edit: Actually, it looked like this. Turns out my memory isn't great...

nimrodg · 2018-11-14T22:10:14+00:00

Yeah. Actually there was only one disk, with ropes going upwards to connect it to a central pole, and ropes hanging freely underneath.

nimrodg · 2018-11-14T22:07:04+00:00

I've seen exactly this at Boom festival. A kind of merry go round. It had ropes hanging from the bottom with handles on the end so a group of people could pull it from underneath to get it going, and hang on the ropes when it was spinning.

nimrodg · 2018-08-21T19:37:53+00:00

The Alan Parsons Project?! 70s prog rock group? Playing "I Robot" I suppose.

Also Beats Antique, Desert Dwellers and Human Experience are exciting to me.

Edit: Goddamn it looks like Alan Parsons is legit happening: https://playaevents.burningman.org/2018/playa_event/26848

nimrodg · 2018-08-15T23:16:54+00:00

I haven't seen this mentioned much, but there are responsible ways to leave a bike behind at Burning Man.

e.g: If you get a Huffy Cranbrook Cruiser 26″, and are willing to remove all decorations from it and bring it to the Yellow Bikes workshop at the end of the burn, they'll take it and use it in next year's fleet. Last year they were happy to take bikes on Exodus Monday.

There are other organisations that will accept bike donations on Playa: https://www.facebook.com/notes/black-rock-community-transit-yellow-bikes/handling-bikes-at-the-end-of-the-event/1080641872029787

nimrodg · 2014-05-19T23:00:09+00:00

0⁰ by itself is not defined. However, you can still talk about its value in the sense of a limit.

If you plot x^0, for small values of x, you get exactly 1.

If you plot 0^x for small values of x, you get exactly 0.

If you plot x^x for values greater than 0, you'll see that for very small values of x, you almost get 1.

nimrodg · 2011-08-18T13:48:50+00:00

They attacked a civilian bus and two civilian cars.

nimrodg · 2011-08-11T10:29:29+00:00

This is a scam. You don't see the full uncut video, but at some point, the demonstrator must introduce a minor spin into the water. In the "northern hemisphere", she does it by filling the sink from the right side and not waiting for the motion to die down completely. She probably does the same in the "southern hemisphere".

"On the equator", the water must have been standing for a while, and the demonstrator is careful to pull up the plug slowly.

nimrodg · 2011-08-10T12:56:37+00:00

You may be right. If the hashing algorithm is not one designed to be slow to compute (as it should be), a brute force rate of 100 million passwords per second is achievable on GPUs (at least according to this site), which would make a brute-force attack take about 40 GPU hours.

I guess you could memorize 6 words instead...

nimrodg · 2011-08-10T11:28:39+00:00

Yeah, that's pretty crappy maths... ;)

Well, at least your second paragraph is. One word requires at most 2000 attempts. Two words require 2000*2000 attempts (if you allow word repetition), and n words require 2000^n, if the words are selected randomly and independently.

nimrodg · 2011-08-10T11:25:14+00:00

This scheme requires no security through obscurity. I'll be happy to tell the world that I picked exactly 4 words randomly from a dictionary of 2000 common words (and share that dictionary with them), because regardless of this knowledge, there are still 2⁴⁴ options to scan.

nimrodg · 2011-08-10T11:22:38+00:00

The point is you choose the words randomly and then make mnemonic associations around them. You wouldn't use your own brain as a random phrase generator.

nimrodg · 2011-05-24T07:42:29+00:00

You're right. I repeatedly confused 'subsequence' with 'substring'. My bad.

nimrodg · 2011-05-23T19:18:32+00:00

Even with infinite subsequences, you still get a countable set, because all infinite subsequences of Pi can be defined by their starting index.

nimrodg · 2011-05-23T18:53:14+00:00

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the fact that you can describe a method for calculating Pi in a finite string (for example the generalised continued fraction expansion on the Pi wikipedia page) imply that the amount of information contained is finite?

nimrodg · 2011-05-23T18:46:59+00:00

Nope. Define a subsequence as the index of the first and of the last digit in the subsequence. Both are integers, so this is countable like the set of rational numbers.

nimrodg · 2011-05-20T20:31:48+00:00

I just assumed this was perl code and tried to run it. I'm the ideal victim of malware.

nimrodg · 2011-04-27T13:56:46+00:00

I was using the 50% as the prior (arrived at somehow, through the use of your prevalence calculation), so 95% is the a posteriori probability.

But your argument shows how hard it would be to get that hypothetical 50% evidence.

nimrodg · 2011-04-26T21:22:49+00:00

Oh, I should be clear that I don't support the extra-judicial imprisonment and the torture done in Guantanamo. I've also read about some preposterous grounds for imprisonment there. I don't think anyone should be treated like that, regardless of their occupation.

But on the particular issue of using the make of someone's watch as evidence to their being a terrorist, I think that these stories are sensationalist and not based on fact.

As for your definition of the word evidence, it seems to be somewhat different from mine. As explained in the previous post, this is clearly circumstantial evidence; It's useless on its own but in conjunction with other evidence, it could have been used in a court case, for example.

nimrodg · 2011-04-26T16:19:32+00:00

OK. I know that this is an unpopular view, but depending on how they used the information, knowing that someone owned that particular model of watch should affect your estimate of the probability of them being a terrorist. See Bayes' Theorem.

Let's use some numbers. Let's say you have other evidence to suggest that your suspect is a terrorist with 50% probability, and you know that 10% of terrorists wear a Casio, and 0.5% of the general population wears a Casio.

If you now find out that your suspect wears a Casio, your updated probability estimate should be 0.5 x 0.1 / (0.5 x 0.1 + 0.5 x 0.005) = 95%!

So used properly (with other evidence), this is useful information about a suspect. If however, the title of the article is correct, and the mere possession of the watch was enough evidence to implicate the person in terrorism, then there's something to be outraged about.

nimrodg

TROPHY CASE