If you’re referring to the “many-worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, I think DeWitt just made a mess of Everett’s original, much stronger “relative-state” formulation. But in either case, the apparent branching is caused by quantum events, while the alternate timelines we imagine as possible outcomes of prior decisions are more often due to our inability to perceive all the (non-quantum) conditions that led to those outcomes not happening.

That depends—are you a bird?

Not unless they make it across the Bay Bridge. By then it will already be too late for those of us in the East Bay.

He was the son of an influential congressman who also got a medical degree from Duke. You think that might have affected his chances of admission?

From predictions that would differentiate between competing models.

I’d say it’s equally important to figure out what to observe—to arrange experiments that reveal information you don’t yet know, instead of just confirming what you do.

Make the Pope announce his conversion to Buddhism (and declare it an infallible doctrine of faith, ex cathedra).

Wake up.

I imagine a continual running Gollum/Sméagol dialogue between the domesticated dog personality and the suppressed wolf personality.

Robert’); DROP TABLE Students;

Instead of trying to detect and block it, just disincentivize it.

Most AI spam on social media tries to exploit various systems intended to predict “good” content on the basis of a user’s past content by tracking reputation/karma/etc. Bots build up karma by posting a massive amount of innocuous (but usually insipid) content, then leverage that karma to increase the visibility of malicious content. Both halves of this process result in worse content than if the karma system didn’t exist in the first place.

Avoiding nuclear war long enough to destroy the world with our normal economic activity.

Is your Kindle e-ink?

The general issue with e-ink-based readers and scrolling is that e-ink is designed to be mostly static, with sporadic (preferably partial-page) refreshes; but scrolling needs to have a very high refresh rate that updates the whole page simultaneously if it’s going to be usable.

So instead of a simulation, maybe we’re living inside of some other type of thing we’re hard-wired to be unable to even think of—and maybe “simulation” is the idea we’re hard-wired to replace it with.

Seems like they could have avoided this by having the Sandy Hook families join the bid with an arbitrarily high dollar amount—which they’d immediately get back as creditors.

Obligatory Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

My understanding of quantum algorithms is that they set up parallel computations in such a way that incorrect solutions cancel out and correct ones reinforce each other. They indicate the existence of multiple universes to the same extent that the double slit experiment does.

All information was passed down orally by people specially-trained to serve as “oral repositories”—in various cultures they were called bards, makars, aoidos, and various other terms. Important information was often set in verse to aid memorization.

There was a transitional period when writing and printing were used, and an even briefer period when these were supplemented by encyclopedias on CD-ROM before the birth of Wikipedia.

There are lots of kinds of “leftisms” with lots of different attitudes toward landlords—but to take Georgism as a concrete example that exclusively focuses on land ownership:

Georgists would say that the portion of the rent equal to the market rent of the unimproved lot—including the value generated by the presence of the surrounding community and infrastructure—should go back to the community rather than the landlord, but the portion of the rent contributed solely by the presence of buildings and other improvements should go to the owner of the improvements.

If it’s a public forum and a topic of general interest, I bear in mind that every commenter likely represents a number of lurkers and later readers with a similar point of view—and those others deserve a decent response, even if the commenter currently expressing their viewpoint doesn’t.