Posts by Bill 7

'Negatively strange' antihypermatter made out of gold

How many femtoseconds did the new stuff last?

Those little specks usually go "poof" pretty quick, so I doubt it's still hanging around to bother us.

WTF is this country called America?

"Baffin", not Boffin

It's a place in Canada, actually.

Boffins 'write directly to memory' of living brains

Seriously, it's not serious

Too bad every fly has exactly the same neurons doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same place; makes it easy to hack. Every mammalian brain is different; we can't yet even figure out what a given neuron really does, much less how memories are formed, much less how to change them. Bummer....

Rich people cannot feel pain, don't care if they're liked

Numbers please?

The effect, however strong, is obviously not all-or-nothing...could you please post some numbers about how big it is? A 20% boost? 50%? 70%? Barely takes half a line more of text, and makes the article useful as well as entertaining.

Why teachers fear Callum, Chelsea, Connor and Crystal

Insufficient statistics?

Anybody notice that 3000 respondents is pretty thin for basing conclusions on hundreds of different names? I can't find the study details, but just suppose that each respondent listed 10 "worst" names, and there are 1000 names total to choose from. That's 30000 total votes, or 30 votes per name on *average* (i.e. an implicit random error of about 20% on each). But the rare names will have fewer counts, with an even greater uncertainty...is that why the most fearsome ones tend to be rare, because randomness happened to boost their relative scores?

Regardless, I can't imagine trusting the final sorted list too much with errors like that floating about: the top-ranking ones could just be dumb luck, until we know the details.