I’ve read half of the best novel finalists: Raven Scholar and The Everlasting are both great, but Death of the Author is one of the worst books I’ve read in years.

At best, B’s bank knows that B had some bills that once passed through your hands. But they have no way of knowing if you actually spent the money at B’s or if there were other transactions in between.

Even if the bill was scanned when you withdrew it at the ATM and again when you spent it, there’s no way to know if the bill changed hands in the meantime through unrecorded transactions.

If I get cash in change from a vendor who doesn’t know my identity, and spend it at another vendor who doesn’t know my identity, what is there to tie the serial numbers to?

So he’d have deported Einstein, then?

if a living organism moves both in time and in space, the genome stays the same, while the proteins in the body might change due to different gene expression

That sounds like a reaction norm—all the various phenotypes a single genome might potentially develop into under different environmental conditions. Which doesn’t seem quite analogous to Noetherian properties like momentum and energy, which are conserved in the sense that they can change inside a system as long as there are balancing actions that preserve the property for the system as a whole.

Noether’s theorem specifically establishes a connection between conserved quantities and continuous symmetries. What’s the continuous symmetry associated with the genome—something analogous to changing time or location that can be varied continuously while leaving biology unchanged?

The original “lingua franca” was actually a mix of dialects from Italian sailors—in the middle ages and the renaissance, most people in the rest of the world referred to all western Europeans as “Franks”.

I can’t see how Lamarck’s theories can be seen as aligned with more “dynamic” theories like the extended evolutionary synthesis. The idea that an organism’s evolutionary potential is completely embodied by its current traits (even including epigenetically-transmitted traits like niche construction) renders it purely reactive: inert clay whose every change is dictated by the external pressures of natural selection.

A separately-transmitted genome with some components hidden from selection is the only way for organisms to evolve dynamic strategies for reacting to selection in ways not completely determined by their expressed traits.

Strait of Iranaway.

You could go further. A 50/50 coin is arbitrary; what if you used a weighted coin instead? That is, both you and the superintelligence know that you’ll pick the single box with probability p, but neither of you know the coin’s outcome until you flip it.

What’s the ideal value of p in this case? Is it not arbitrarily close to 1?

It’s small enough you can use it for innocuous purchases, but unfamiliar enough that most people wouldn’t recognize any defects.

Does the index just measure the internal biodiversity of the garden itself, or does it take into account the diversity of neighboring gardens and the region as a whole?

A group of gardens that are each individually diverse, but are all identical, might be less diverse as a group than if they each had a different single species that was otherwise missing from the region.

Pope Leo leads most public figures in the US in approval ratings.

In theory, could the Pope run for president (given that he’s a U.S. citizen by birth, etc.)?

It doesn’t take much to boost the price of a stock by 400% if the stock is already practically worthless.

Nixon was operating under constraints and expectations that led to some positive things in spite of himself (e.g., environmental regulations, improved relations with China). It was the Ford administration that saw the advent of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush Sr., that defined the later trajectory of the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II administrations.

And while he was a much better human being than Clinton, I’d date the Democratic party’s neoliberal turn to Carter’s administration.

This is the fear that induced me to get a gravity hook.

Now see, strokes are a different matter. Studies from China (where naturally-occurring fluoride levels in some places can range from 1.2 to 4.5 mg/L, far exceeding the U.S. recommended level of 0.7 mg/L) have indeed found a correlation between very high fluoride exposure and stroke risk.

To fight forces like big oil, we need to be able to focus our efforts appropriately. Indiscriminately attributing everything to big oil serves their purposes as much as complacency does.

Those kinds of issues would come into play if they were trying to establish a correlation between two things—it’s notoriously hard to eliminate confounding variables, spurious coincidences, etc.

But it’s far more straightforward to establish a lack of correlation, which is what this study does.