No, it's 31.10g per ounce. The price of gold is always quoted as troy ounces[1]. You used the figure for the avoirdupois ounce which is used for anything that isn't a precious metal[2].
Though it doesn't really affect the argument you're making since 28.35g and 31.10g are pretty close, but how do you not know about troy ounces as a "former jeweler" (as it says in your profile)?
That's like a doctor saying body temperature is 105F or 40C.
I do know - but customers don't for the most part. So I just used standard and didn't worry about the pennies. It's a lot easier than trying to explain to them that there are two kinds of ounces.
> but customers don't for the most part. It's a lot easier than trying to explain to them that there are two kinds of ounces
It's that kind of stuff that makes people think that jewelers and gold buyers are crooked. Some customers--perhaps only a minority--do know the difference, and they will become suspicious and tell others.
Whenever a professional of any kind (car mechanic, doctor, tax preparer, vet) tells me something that is contrary to a known basic fact, then alarm bells go off in my head. I start thinking that this guy is either incompetent or trying to cheat or trick me in some way, and I will tell friends to watch out. Fortunately it doesn't happen all the time. I generally trust doctors for example.
In one of your other comments, you said, There are a staggering number of honest jewelers and gold buyers out there. But stories about obviously crooked people are what makes everyone say "see, these guys are ALL crooks".
Maybe the jewelers and gold buyers--like used car salesmen--have gotten the reputation they deserve.
And this is why I generally avoid these discussions. Someone will ALWAYS find a way to say you are wrong even when you are making an error in their favor. And for the very very few people that do know the difference, when you explain why you do it the way you do, and they will get more money for it, they tend to appreciate it. Not all, but most.
An observation on what the super-rich never do for their legacy:
There's something that super-rich individuals can do that vastly richer governments, organizations, and companies can't do. They can make long shot bets. That is, they can invest in something that needs a large concentration of capital (an idea, research, enterprise, discovery) that carries very long odds but could have massive world-changing effects if it succeeds. Those are things that neither governments (too many people need to agree) or companies (no short- or medium-term profit) can normally do.
I'm avoid giving examples here because it'd detract from the point. Besides, there's an infinite number of such long shot bets.
It's sad and ironic that people are more risk averse with what happens to the money after they pass away than when they're alive.
Yeesh, that's a high horse you're on. He donated his money to causes that he finds important, as you say. It's not always about the "big picture"; the little things can change people's lives in the here and now, and that's worth something. The world has room for both sorts of philanthropy.
Thanks to the taxes that at the same time keep people from investing the very same money in a much more distributed way to the investment / consumption / research they'd prefer while avoiding the bureaucratic overhead.
Please don't thank the government unless you think they know better how to distribute this money than the people they claim to spend it for.
> "... taxes that ... keep people from investing ... in a much more distributed way ... [than] they'd prefer ..."
There's an implicit assumption in there that reducing taxes will cause people to 'invest' more -- i.e. something like the trickle-down effect. I believe there's enough evidence to show this isn't how things actually play out (people still keep their cash).
Also governments, need to set up/support entities that do figure out how to disburse funds appropriately. Like Research Councils in the UK or the NSF in the US who have established processes to do exactly this. How is that less distributed than a rich person deciding for themselves? Also, there are fundamental areas of research that would be completely ignored if we relied solely on the wealthy to solve problems.
> "Please don't thank the government unless you think they know better how to distribute this money than the people they claim to spend it for."
That assumes that people have enough knowledge about where it should be spent. I strongly disagree with that. You cannot achieve fundamental scientific breakthroughs this way.
> There's an implicit assumption in there that reducing taxes will cause people to 'invest' more
Typically, in times when interest rates are positive and default rates acceptably low (i.e., normal times), people put their money in a bank and the bank invests it. So the amount invested stays the same and the money doesn't appear or disappear, it's just invested by someone else. So I don't see this implicit assumption here.
> Also governments, need to set up/support entities that do figure out how to disburse funds appropriately.
Exactly and the money to sustain such councils is not used for research but for bureaucracy. And as you already mentioned, these 'well established processes' are not exactly simple and may happen to consume a rather substantial amount of the money supposed to be used for research. Not in all cases but in enough to produce events like this: "EU Resarch Council slams bureaucracy" [1]
> Also, there are fundamental areas of research that would be completely ignored if we relied solely on the wealthy to solve problems.
I disagree - if it is important to someone, then it will get researched. Of course, the very poor will not receive so much attention but then again that's not the case today either.
This discussion is actually more about trust in government and who is better able to identify the needs of a society. I just want to express that I disagree with your view.
I don't really think this is true. There are lots of famous super-wealthy people who've funded sciences (e.g. Nuffield, Wolfson, Rockefeller -- those are just three charities I work with). There are lots of famous super-wealthy people who've funded the arts, in particular things like avant-garde and classical pieces.
You held off giving an example, but could you give me one -- one that's qualitatively different to the stuff that wealthy people do often fund?
If Bill gates acting on is focused on building ~3 ITER style fusion reactors starting in say 2000 and without the overhead of multi-national organizations or all that PHD research he could have a reasonable chance of building a working fusion reactor 30 years before we are likely to.
Granted, Bill has done the world a lot of good, but I suspect that's the kind of project shutupalready was referring to.
Or for a higher risk example a few billion might get you a multi stage scram jet for getting stuff into LEO which could be huge. Or for an organization idea, build an ion drive tugboat for moving satellites around in orbit. Then if it works you take the revenue from that and start building ever more space based infrastructure with the long term goal of getting some people living on other stars.
PS: If you accept huge projects might just flat out fail there are plenty of possibilities. Human level AI?
> but I suspect that's the kind of project shutupalready was referring to
Yes, those are precisely the kinds of projects I was thinking of. (I was worried that if I gave examples, the conversation would derail into the viability of fusions reactors, ion drives, human level AI, or whatever.)
Giving helper dogs to disabled people can be such a long shot. Thanks to the dog, perhaps a meeting takes place that would not have taken place otherwise. This meeting could be the start of anything - perhaps a romance, that leads to the birth of the girl who will discover ... well, we will know eventually, won't we. Thanks to this man's long shot bet with his legacy.
> Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap."
Why wouldn't they put this video in the BBC article?
They may not have kept it. The camera system may keep a certain amount of prior footage that is automatically flushed at a certain age, or that the users clean out when it gets large. This is recounting a story from a few weeks ago.
> When conveying nuanced ideas, I believe they will be much closer in length, with perhaps a small advantage for French.
I've looked in bookstores at expert translations of French novels to English, and English novels to French, and in either case, the English is shorter. This seems contrary to your claim.
> had a hypothesis about drug addiction, designed an experiment to prove his hypothesis. Performed the experiment, measured the results
That's the very definition of the Scientific Method, so I don't understand what problem you're pointing out:
"The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures ( hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions." -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
(That the experiment has not been replicated as you claim could be a bad sign, but that's a separate matter.)
I think what the parent means is that a motivated experiment designer can (even accidentally) create an experiment that has a high false-positive rate, thus providing very little Bayesian evidence given a positive result. Ideally, you'd have the experiment designed by someone who actually wanted to falsify the hypothesis (or at least a neutral party), such that the non-null conclusion, if arrived at, would be really strong Bayesian evidence.
This is subtle but important distinction. It is absolutely possible to do a confirming experiment that can give misleading results. There is a nice explanation in the wikipedia article under "Confirmation Bias".
A striking example is the (2,4,6) test. From wikipedia:
"Wason's research on hypothesis-testing
The term "confirmation bias" was coined by English psychologist Peter Wason.[66] For an experiment published in 1960, he challenged participants to identify a rule applying to triples of numbers. At the outset, they were told that (2,4,6) fits the rule. Participants could generate their own triples and the experimenter told them whether or not each triple conformed to the rule.[67][68]
While the actual rule was simply "any ascending sequence", the participants had a great deal of difficulty in finding it, often announcing rules that were far more specific, such as "the middle number is the average of the first and last".[67] The participants seemed to test only positive examples—triples that obeyed their hypothesized rule. For example, if they thought the rule was, "Each number is two greater than its predecessor", they would offer a triple that fit this rule, such as (11,13,15) rather than a triple that violates it, such as (11,12,19).[69]
Wason accepted falsificationism, according to which a scientific test of a hypothesis is a serious attempt to falsify it. He interpreted his results as showing a preference for confirmation over falsification, hence the term "confirmation bias".[Note 4][70] Wason also used confirmation bias to explain the results of his selection task experiment.[71] In this task, participants are given partial information about a set of objects, and have to specify what further information they would need to tell whether or not a conditional rule ("If A, then B") applies. It has been found repeatedly that people perform badly on various forms of this test, in most cases ignoring information that could potentially refute the rule."
Yes their rules might be more specific than the general rule, but that is not a problem. Their rules were a correct subset of the more general rule (if what you are describing is accurate). Now if they are claiming a broad hypothesis and only providing a set of data that asserts a subset of the hypothesis, that is a problem. They are being misleading one way or another. If the researcher is presenting a hypothesis and misses out on data (for whatever reason), then somebody else will (ideally) point this out. Nonetheless, just acting like this misrepresentation can happen therefore don't trust some particular study is little more than baseless criticism.
They tested the hypothesis that heroin is addictive by itself, the one supported by the self-administration experiment, and got pretty unexpected results. As far as the scientific method is concerned, their experiment looks ok to me.
It's interesting to note that the criticism of the Rat Park experiment uses exactly the same reasoning Rat Park designers used against self-administering experiment, namely that one of seemingly innocuous parts of experimental setup (isolation and genetic variance respectively) was causing a major results bias.
I guess that's one way to interpret the phrase "designed to confirm," but it's also a fairly natural way to describe a legitimate test. I might, for example, say that I "designed an interview process to confirm that candidates are qualified," and of course it's clear that the process will either confirm or deny.
The issue is that there's a conflict of interest when the same person who proposed the hypothesis is the same person attempting to prove that hypothesis. This sort of bias is why meta-analysis exists.
Not to detract from your observation, but just as an aside, I wanted to mention that less than an hour after your comment, googling for "cow thiophenol romanesque establishment" (with or without quotes) lists this very page as the first result. Google must be indexing certain sites (like HN) very frequently.
> The tiny tab allows gravity to cause all the pullers to hang in the same direction as they fall into a rail toward the left.
The explanation above makes it sound like the pulls are getting re-oriented (flipped around) which is not what I see in the video.
I think a clearer explanation is this:
The pulls are aligned 50% tab-right (good) and 50% tab-left (bad) as they approach the feeder chain (or rail at the left as the OP calls it).
The tab-rights fit into slots in the feeder chain and proceed to the next assembly step.
The tab-lefts don't fit into the slots and simply drop away into the rotating pan below (from which they presumably return to the pot and make another attempt at the feeder later on).
Was it really necessary to involve a smartphone at all?
> color change [is] picked up by a set of photocells in the dongle, and the results are then sent to an app
The logic to discriminate a color change could have been handled by a 75-cent microcontroller. Add a cheap display or a couple LEDs to show the test result, plus a cheap AA battery, and you have a self-contained gadget for less cost than creating the smartphone interface.
Pregnancy tests and all sorts of sophisticated chemical test strips don't involve a smartphone.
I'm thinking that the smartphone hookup is either:
(1) a way to add future functionality like maintaining a database of the tests or uploading test results to somewhere (with all the privacy implications and risks of those), or
(2) a marketing ruse since we all know that a smartphone app that does X is way cooler than a old-fashioned self-contained gadget that does X.
An an example of how easily people fall for coolness of having a smartphone do something that doesn't actually need a smartphone, check out this comment to the original article:
"I have been resisting the smartphone trend for years because they are expensive and there was no unique use for them: everything a smartphone did I ALREADY own a gadget for. This changes the game. Now I want a smartphone."
1. The comment you're talking about is from, essentially, someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. This isn't really meaningfully a "game changer" in terms of "Should I buy an iPhone?"
2. Computers are already used to analyze many of these types of diagnostic tests. It may have been easier to port those systems to a smart phone than to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller. Expertise is a cost.
3. There are massive benefits to having this hooked up to a smart phone, and as you have mentioned, much of it goes to extra functionality. During the Ebola outbreak, case reports often had to be dealt with in paper forms processed by hand, which slowed both reporting and contact tracing. From a public health perspective, being able to link test results (deidentified or not) with a central repository at a ministry of health is a big deal.
Imagine the use case of this not as one person and a smart phone testing themselves. Imagine it as one person and a smart phone testing 4 villages over the course of the week, in conjunction with actually getting people treatment.
> 1. The comment you're talking about is from, essentially, someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.
Yes, of course, the person who made that comment is clueless about technology -- just like 90% of the population. The comment shows that most people think it's really cool that the diagnostic device uses a smartphone and don't realize that the smartphone wasn't needed at all.
> 2. ... than to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller.
Nobody needs to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller. You use a tiny cheap off-the-shelf microcontroller (like the PIC) and program it. Based on the information available in the original article, the program might be as simple as light the red LED (positive) if the color sensor indicates it's above a certain threshold and light the green LED (negative) if below a certain threshold. But even very complex algorithms can be ported to microcontrollers.
> 3. Imagine it as one person and a smart phone testing 4 villages
I did say databases and uploading were a possible reason for the smartphone, and do I agree that a smart phone does make sense for the use case of testing a whole village. This doesn't change my original point that a smartphone wasn't really necessary, not even to reduce costs, and might in fact be more expensive than a standalone device. The original article makes a big deal of the smartphone connection without explaining the real reason why the smartphone is there.
> ought to be prima facie evidence of ineffective/incompetent counsel
A much more likely explanation is that the writer and her lawyer know perfectly well the difference between gross and net, but this was the best deal they could get, and it was better than nothing.
Writer and her lawyer: "We demand 3% of the gross."
Studio head: "I'm not offering any percentage of the gross."
Writer and her lawyer: "OK, we'll settle for 2.5% of the gross."
Studio head: "I told you: nothing on the gross. Zero. If you don't like that, get lost. I'll hire another writer."
Writer and her lawyer: "Well, OK, how about 3% of the net."
That doesn't make any sense, though. 3% of the net is not better than nothing. Why would you bother to ask for it? That just makes your contract legally valid, in the sense that consideration is offered, without getting you any benefits.
They aren't being weasels. Everyone in Hollywood already knows there isn't any net. It's rare to get gross -- generally the only time that happens is when the star power is such that it would make a significant difference in the box office. Bradley Cooper gets net, no name writer from Pfugerville gets net, if any points at all.
No, it's 31.10g per ounce. The price of gold is always quoted as troy ounces[1]. You used the figure for the avoirdupois ounce which is used for anything that isn't a precious metal[2].
Though it doesn't really affect the argument you're making since 28.35g and 31.10g are pretty close, but how do you not know about troy ounces as a "former jeweler" (as it says in your profile)?
That's like a doctor saying body temperature is 105F or 40C.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_ounce
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoirdupois