— Marvin Minsky

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Today, safe flight inside clouds is possible using gyroscopic instruments that report the airplane’s orientation without being misled by centrifugal effects. But the pilot’s spatial intuition is still active, and often contradicts the instruments. Pilots are explicitly, emphatically trained to trust the instruments and ignore intuition—precisely the opposite of the Star Wars advice—and those who fail to do so often perish.
— Gary Drescher "Good and Real"

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By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race. Before the introduction of the Arabic notation, multiplication was difficult, and the division even of integers called into play the highest mathematical faculties. Probably nothing in the modern world would have more astonished a Greek mathematician than to learn that, under the influence of compulsory education, a large proportion of the population of Western Europe could perform the operation of  division for the largest numbers. This fact would have seemed to him a sheer impossibility. The consequential extension of the notation to decimal fractions was not accomplished till the seventeenth century. Our modern power of easy reckoning with decimal fractions is the almost miraculous result of the gradual discovery of a perfect notation.

— Alfred North Whitehead  "An Introduction to Mathematics"

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My experiences so far with healthcare.gov and the State of Missouri.

Summary:  No one can tell me if or when my 4-year-old daughter will be covered.  State of MO doesn't know how to process applications from healthcare.gov.  Healthcare.gov can't continue on her application until State of MO processes her application.  No insurance for her!

1.  Fill out application.  
2.  Receive approval for wife and I.
3.  Receive notice that my daughter must first have her application submitted to the state of Missouri Healthnet.  Healthcare.gov submitted this automatically.
4.  Deadline for coverage to begin Jan 1st, 2014 is December 23rd, I originally applied at beginning of December.
5.  Since deadline is approaching, I call healthcare.gov.  They tell me to call MO Healthnet.
6.  I call MO Healthnet and they tell me that they aren't receiving any applications from healthcare.gov and they won't until next year.
7.  I call back healthcare.gov.  After 30+ minutes on phone, they tell me they cannot do anything about her until MO Healthnet approves or denies.
8.  I cannot select the optimum health plan for my wife and I until I know how much I will have to pay for my daughter since I'm not made of money and can only budget a certain amount per month.

Nice system, federal government and State of Missouri.

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1.  Theory that the red fox uses the magnetic field of the earth to help catch field mice under the snow.  According to this it hardly ever catches mice.  Except for when it's facing North when it catches mice 75% of the time.
2.  That fox can frickin' jump!  
3.  It's hilarious what happens at the end of those jumps.

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Graphene aerogel is the least-dense of the aerogels at 160 grams per cubic meter which is .13 times as dense as air.

A chunk of graphene aerogel resting on a plant thingamajig.

Graphene aerogel is the least-dense of the aerogels at 160 grams per cubic meter which is .13 times as dense as air.

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Well, if two planes are going to crash in midair, I guess it's good for them to be full of suited-up skydivers.

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(Copy pasted from a post I made on an Android forum I participate on)

So, last night I was helping my wife set up her new Moto X (which she's had sitting in its box for a week. Real phone nerds, us.)

The setup experience was not what I would call smooth. I had to swear up and down that if she got a new phone all her old apps would be on there. I knew that Google would restore apps when she signed in so we were all good.

She boots up the phone, gets to the part where she enters her password (Motorola already had her account on there as part of Motomaker), and up pops a dialog telling her about an update to the phone. She tells it to remind her later. After she clicks "OK" or whatever on that dialog it dumps her to the home screen with no account set up, and when I talked her through the process of adding her account in settings, of course it doesn't restore all her old apps.

Not a great experience for a phone novice and she probably would have just given up since she doesn't want to spend a lot of time messing with the thing.

Kinda disappointing, +Motorola Mobility.

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Includes a video.

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Malaria in 3-D
Using an imaging technique known as high-speed holographic microscopy, Laurence Wilson, a fellow at Harvard’s Rowland Institute, worked with colleagues to produce detailed 3-D images of malaria sperm — the cells that reproduce inside infected mosquitoes — that shed new light on how the cells move.

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Be suspicious of beliefs whose consequences you like and enjoy as these beliefs are the ones you're most likely to hold in error.

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