/sci/ - Science & Math

>>3361236
You should think of the atoms in you brain as lots and lots of those small rocks, always "falling down when thrown", that is, always obeying the laws of physics. Just because it's a very complex system doesn't mean it's free from those laws. It's just a difference of scale.

>>3361229
Randomness doesn't mean it's suddenly a freer choice.

>>3361168
I see what you're saying, but those choices you make are wholly deterministic processes. Your brain could not have changed from state A to state B in any other way, unless you want to introduce randomness. So you could never have chosen differently than you did. That doesn't feel very free to me.

>>3361130
I'm not the one who believes in it, so I wouldn't really have one. But following the meaning of words, "free" suggests that the will would be somehow uninfluenced, which is just not possible.

There is no free will, just deterministic processes in the brain.

Does that LOOK like planning to you?

>>3180286
If a recursive function can't be compared to an infinite loop because it hits a seg fault, then by the same logic no loop can be called infinite, because of heat death of universe. No need to be nitpicky.

>>3180270
I'd say in most cases the main reason to use recursion is to make the code easier to read. However, some things do lend themselves rather naturally to recursion - linked lists/trees and so on.

>>3180242
I have to say, recursion was never a problem for me, even before I knew anything about the stack and registers and whatnot. It just seemed so... elegant. So obvious somehow.

You don't really need to know the particulars of it to understand it, just the general idea that a) a function can call itself and that b) each instance is self-contained as concerns variables.

>>3178055
>dark chocolate
>caviar
Are these really considered acquired tastes? I was fuzzy as fuck with food as a kid and have always liked those two.

Look at it from the bottom-most scale's perspective. It "feels" the weight of you plus the other scale. It does not know what's going on up there, all it knows is that something with your combined weight is pressing down on it. It would show the same if you held the second set of scales in your hands. It doesn't matter what the top scale is doing (weighing you).

If the scales indeed showed half your weight, that would mean the lower one is not experiencing the full weight of you. Where would this weight have gone?

>>3107446
By separating findings and lines of reasoning from the person behind them. Just as you should with any scientist.

>>3072238
Well, it's rather a bit closer than we could have hoped for.

>>3037324
If the only criterion for something being a sickness is that it's not expected, then even things considered positive (like strength or intelligence) would be sicknesses.

Solar power has always seemed elegant to me, at least in theory. It's a power source we don't have to worry about depleting and if it does disappear we have other things to worry about than cheap electricity.

However. As it stands now, solar power seems far to inefficient for now. Wind and wave power are really just solar power once removed, and suffer the same drawbacks.

But in the long term, I think solar power is absolutely essential, unless we get some efficient fusion power going.

There's already a troll thread of this flavour going. Do pay attention.

>For example, Democratic President Barack Obama helped publish an article by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe to apply the relativistic concept of "curvature of space" to promote a broad legal right to abortion.

>>3006144
/sci/ is mind-boggingly easy to troll. Either there is a constant influx of internetically non-savvy people or no one ever learns.

That, or it's some sort of double-trolling or something.

>>2993747
>>2993760
I'm no scientist, but "some of you" doesn't mean "all of you."

>>2957794
>Swedish
>around age 10 I guess
>pass

>>2948484
So... you DON'T have source? Just "current events"?

>>2948462
[citation needed]

>>2944063
Yes. Gears and levers acting according to laws of physics is no different from molecules doing that inside ourselves, just on different scales.

>>2944021
I don't think evolution has stopped, just that it has bumped up step on the abstraction ladder. Only hazy understanding of genetics but it seems that epigenetics and genes controlling other genes arose as a mechanism to make gainful mutations happen faster than over many generations.

To me, it seems that culture is the new playground for evolution as concerns humans. Genes have become less important as we replace our bodily functions with externalized versions of them; cooking and tools and machines and computers and stuff.

So ultimately we hand over our culture to cyborg versions of ourselves or true AI when that comes, since culture can jump the species barriers easier than any genetic material.

Hope that made SOME sense. Felt rambly.