> some futuristic chip implant in your head to prevent you from committing it

Just curious, are you thinking of The Alliance?

> Never blame on malice what can be blamed on incompetence.

So, does the early bird get the worm or do good things come to those who wait? We're maybe too inclined to just assert these sorts of things as fact. (This includes me.)

Except this piece of wisdom is extremely valid. Assuming everybody else is both supremely competent and consistently malicious goes against most people's experience. You give humanity far too much credit by assuming everyone is an evil mastermind.

On the other hand, assuming everyone is an evil incompetent...

I agree!

Someone who attributes to incompetence too regularly is one we may call a "chump" or a "sucker" and is an easy mark for charlatans of all stripes. If I don't get taken for a fool occasionally, maybe I could have a little more human faith. If I get taken for a fool all the time, I should get pissed off more.

He messed up the quote a bit, omitting an important qualifier: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" -- Napoleon (allegedly) I don't think I need to explain how this shifts the meaning.

Would every drawing have to loop? Pi doesn't. I personally don't actually know if there's something about this specifically that would force every drawing to loop, though.

Or you could consider both.

Even if you can't measure someone's creative thinking ability very well, that doesn't mean that it can't improve with practice.

I think strait is right. "Elite achiever" only (directly, anyway) has to do with performance, not intelligence.

I was hoping that the neutrinos were actually going faster than light. Confirming established theories is boring, but breaking them is exciting.

Do you know any specifics of how the standard model breaks down at high enough energies?

The one we know for sure about is related to gravity -- you normally ignore it in particle physics, but there's a point where you can't do that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_scale

Now, it's quite likely interesting stuff happens before that point! (Such as the extra Higgs suggested by supersymmetry.) And there are also other, complicated reasons to suspect that the Standard Model breaks down, to suspect that it is really what we call an "effective field theory".

That's all ignoring issues like dark matter or the neutrino mass, which are not predicted by the standard model. But it's kind of interesting that the model (in a certain sense) naturally limits its own predictions.

This (probably) won't discuss the technical problem, but http://www.bitcoinity.org/markets will let you track Bitcoin prices.

thanks for the reply. I always have bitcoinity open. (dark theme FTW).

The answer to the question I was trying to ask is https://coinbase.com/network/blocks which enables me to check in on how far behind the future legitimate blockchain is (7 blocks at time of writing).

This page is out of date by a bunch of blocks.

http://blockchain.info/ is updated live.

As you can see, the 0.7 chain has already overtaken the 0.8 chain, and clients are now resubmitting transactions into the 0.7 chain.

Bitcoin seems to be picking up again. From Mt. Gox:

    > Last price:$45.00000
    > High:$48.46900
    > Low:$36.65000

Edit: It could go back down a lot. We'll see what happens.

Prices have been above $36 for barely a week, 5th/6th rally saw high volumes; the recovery (8th to 11th) was weaker and did not break the high. The volume of both sell-offs was comparable, but the today's low is higher. I reckon it might flatten out around $40 for a bit, then pick up again.