links for 2009-05-10

"Seven guys wait for these other two guys to play catch but this other guy is jealous because he wants to play and so he's trying to stop them with a stick." should've won.

"Major League Baseball suspended Manny Ramirez of the Los Angeles Dodgers on Thursday, after investigators turned up documents suggesting that the slugger was using human chorionic gonadotropin. Typically a fertility drug for women, HCG is also used to complement steroid cycles. Ramirez, however, claims he was using the medication to treat a "personal health issue." What issue might that be?"

"I enjoyed physics at Duke University tremendously. No-one in the basketball programme thought it was possible to do a physics degree while playing basketball, but I never got to a point where I thought I would not be able to do it, even when I was studying quantum mechanics. I will admit, however, that trying to fit in hours of physics homework while playing basketball and studying English at the same time was a huge time-management challenge. "

"I recently came up with what I think is an intuitive way to explain Bayesâ Theorem. I searched in google for a while and could not find any article that explains it in this particular way.

Of course thereâs the wikipedia page, that long article by Yudkowsky, and a bunch of other explanations and tutorials. But none of them have any pictures. So without further ado, and with all the chutzpah I can gather, here goes my explanation."

"But while everyone is focussed on âreal timeâ I think it is starting to reveal a more interesting problem. One Iâve been thinking about for quite a while but have been unable to get a grip on. All of these services have different intrinsic timeframes. One of the things I dislike about the new FriendFeed interface is the âreal timeâ nature of it. What I liked previously was that it had a slower intrinsic time than, say, Twitter or instant messenging, but a faster intrinsic timescale than a blog or email. On Twitter/IM conversations are fast, seconds to minutes, occassionally hours. On FriendFeed they tend to run from minutes to hours, with some continuing on for days, all threaded and all kept together. Conversations in blog comments run over hours, to days, email over days, newspapers over weeks, academic literature over months and years."