No. That is a really long ad for a book by a "Zodiologist and Kaczynski theorist"

"The odds of any single criminal bearing all the qualities outlined above has been conservatively estimated at more than one in two billion" According to whom? Even if accurate, that isn't particularly sound evidence of anything.

>Aside from looking at the ink, none of these things actually have to do with reading..

Actually they do, comprehension and memorization are parts of reading. Events (like reading) that engage more senses engage us more deeply and enforce comprehension and memorization.

I will gladly admit I thought Lucifer's Hammer was great. One of my favourites from my favourite author.

Let us not forget that this concept doesn't just apply to Christianity, or religion in general, though.

Monet struggled with the Académie des Beaux-Arts fot painting the way they thought people should paint.

There is a long history of Ballet dancers in the USSR who struggled because they good communists.

Today character assassination is the norm for for so many people (especially in the arts) who don't strictly adhere to progressive politics.

I attended an art school for time where I was frequently shunned for dressing well, (apparently you can't be an "artist" if you wear slacks and dress shirts,) and adhering to Christian principles.

Look at the movie Moms' night out. Highly panned by critics because because the characters are not "feminist" enough. Yet highly rated by the audience.

Your theory that the Mom's Night Out movie was panned only because critics thought it wasn't "feminist" enough can just as easily be turned around to say that the Christian audiences praised it only because the movie panders to them. All the praising user reviews I've read come from a very politically motivated and reactionary viewpoint.

There is a reason that the top players happen to very good at math.

This is not a rule. A lot of the players don't use much math--basic pot odds. They develop a feel for when they're making the right play, and openly admit to being "feel" players.

I do believe they would be very good at doing on-the-spot calculations in their head, they're often just not very trained in math.

Anyhow, surprisingly little in poker is math-dependent, particularly in normal ten-handed games. The cognitive load is mostly about factoring in thousands of variables, past hands, and potential hand combinations of your opponents.

This isn't the case at the top end of the field.

There used to be prominent winning players who were unaware of the math behind the game, but the theory nowadays is they mostly just lucked into naturally playing in a style that happened to be better than the field during the period of time they played (i.e., years ago back when the game was less sophisticated).

Nowadays, those players are often the weak players who the players more skilled at theory can comfortably beat.

There's an eerie parallel to the early stock traders here.

Your statement is true about the "feel" players, but even those players will perform EV analysis away from the table because by estimating percentages of certain tendencies you can figure out what the right play is in tricky situations, and over the long run that ends up saving more money than anything else

@zep

Of course feel players are doing EV analysis, but that's 99% about estimating hand ranges properly. The math is certainly the most simplistic part of the analysis.

EV = "Earned Value"?

Could you outline the process or point to a place to read up on it WRT poker?

@General is right. Here's a great link about what this process generally involves and why you would do it: http://www.pokerology.com/lessons/calculating-expected-value...

Thanks, I know expected values, thoughts this was a game-theoretic analysis adding in potential winnings as a weighting or some such.

My guess would be "expected value," which is an entry-level topic in anything related to probability and randomness.

Just remember free speech and an open mind are encouraged. Unless you disagree with the LGBT agenda.

I remember Escape Velocity very fondly, not only was it fun it was the first mac application I dug into. I made it so my ship could launch cows.

Wouldn't the AI in Asimov's "The Last Question" top that chart.

Probably not. If I recall correctly, Culture Minds could create mass from nothing, travel significantly faster than light, existed mostly in "hyperspace", and were actively working on the ability to travel between universes. (As shown in "Excession") And they did it in < 10000 years, whereas the AI in "The last Question" took until significantly past the heat death of the universe to figure out the whole "mass from nothing" problem.