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What would be in an encyclopedia of encyclopedias?

Origin:  Web Question

Well, web questioner, the encyclopedia of encyclopedias is what's known as "The set of sets."  This is a pretty cool question, because it asks about what you would find inside the knowledge of all knowledge or the list of all lists.

Follow the conversation at ## or tweet us @@.

You can see immediately where the problem starts.  If you enumerate the list of all things, is the list itself on the list?  Would the list with this item added show up as a separate entity on the list?  Is the list infinite?  Are these WTF Questions instead of WTF Answers?

The answer is that the set of all sets, and the encyclopedia of all encyclopedia entries would be infinite.  Let me demonstrate:

Take an encyclopedia entry on flan:  "Flan is a delicious custard dessert often served overturned, covered in a caramel."  Now, add that to the encylcopedia of encyclopedia entries.  "Flan (Modern Encyclopedia of Cuisine) : Flan is a delicious custard dessert often served overturned, covered in a caramel."  Here's the rub, you now need an entry for Flan (Encyclopedia of Encyclopedias - Modern Encyclopedia of Cuisine) and then you need one for (Encyclopedia of Encyclopedias - Encyclopedia of Encyclopedias) and then....  it just keeps on going.  That's the problem with recursion, and to a lesser extent, chaos theory.  At certain points it's possible to achieve infinite particularity through recursion.

Wibbly-wobbly timey wimey recursioney-wursioney eleven dimensional spacial folding.  It's pretty technical.

But, this leads us to the even COOLER question:  Does the list of encyclopedia entries not about encyclopedia entries contain an entry for the encyclopedia of encyclopedia entries not about encyclopedia entries?

I'll give you an example: If you have the list of encyclopedia entries not about encyclopedia entries, you have our familiar entry about flan.  If you don't write an encyclopedia entry about the entry on flan, then you have to add an encyclopedia entry on the entry about flan to our list.  That's how paradoxes work, and it's why people talk about Bertrand Russel and not about Ramanujan.  Russel's stuff was more fun to think about in one's spare time.

1729.  Look it up.

More to the point, would the tag of all entries I'm not proud of contain this entry or not?  You decide.

[wtfanswers-blog]

How do we determine who is the best?

Well, I'm cheating a little here.  The question submitted regarded the Elo rating system, and I'll get into that, I promise.  But, what the real question asks, is how do we determine if I'm better than you?  What if we each have five guys on a team and we want to know who is the best at team sports?  What if there's no clear objective?  How do we do it then?  This is a real cool math question, so you'll have to bear with me for awhile while I explain the formulae.

E=MJ^23

One on One

Well, finding out who is the best one-on-one isn't all that difficult.  If I beat you, I'm better than you are, QED.  Well, not so fast.  What if we play ten times and I win 6, does that necessarily make me better?  There's a few issues with this.

1) Sample Size

In order to determine if the sample size (in this case, the number of games played) is statistically sound, we have to calculate p.  P is the probability of a result happening under a certain set of circumstances, and is actually pretty easy to calculate once you understand the formula for figuring it out.

The Formula:  Pr = (Observed Circumstances | Hypothetical Circumstance p)

In our case, let's say that we hypothesize we're about evenly matched.  If we think that, then our hypothetical circumstance in Pr = X/H is 0.51.  So, we calculate as follows:

First, we find the chi-squared number for the games I will win:

X^2 = [Sigma] ((X-H)-0.05) / H

Here, we've got X^2 = [Sigma] ((6-5.1)-0.05/5.1 = 0.324

We have only two options, so for statistical analysis, our degrees of freedom = 1.

This means that our p value is 0.5691 (It should be noted that this result won't look right later, because p values don't work with under five observed instances).  We get this using the distribution table below:

This is for fact checking, not for numbers fetishists.  There are other blogs for that.

This means that there's a roughly 6% chance in any 10 games, regardless of skill, that we could get this result.  This number is pretty damned important, for reasons I'll go into in a few moments.

So, let's up our sample size to look at the significance of this.  Here, I'm only going to list the resultant numbers because I showed the calculations earlier:

Sample size: 100 games (I win 60, you win 40, I'm 0.1 more likely to win the tying game in a set of 10)

Chi^2 = 3.421 ; Degrees = 1; p = 7.18% that this was all random chance 

Sample size: 300 games (I win 180, you win 120, I'm 0.1 more likely to win the tying game in a set of 10)

Chi^2 = 9.724 ; Degrees = 1; p = 0.018%. 

What's this 0.00% mean?  It means that our hypothesis was wrong.  These results can't explain me being only 0.1 more likely to win the tying game.  Therefore, p tells us that something went wrong in our initial assessment.

So, to leave some chance in the equation (so that this is interesting) and to make the results statistically significant, we're going to assume a sample size of 100 games.

2) Why One-on-One isn't so easy after all

What did our results tell us?  It told us that even after 100 games played, there is still a 7% chance, or 7 game spread, that the results were completely chance.  That means that the impact of chance in the equation adjusts the win/loss rates from 60/40 (a rather decisive win probability) to 53/47, which, if you ask me, means evenly matched.  If there were any stakes on winning, you'd be a fool to bet on this, considering that the rake is going to be more than your expected winnings over time.  The House always wins.

It's not lupus.

Team Game - Individual Performance

To calculate the individual performance in a team game, we have two models used.  We have the PER model devised by John Hollinger of ESPN's NBA coverage team, and the Elo model used by Chess and many online videogames.

1) PER

PER stands for player efficiency rating.  In a nutshell, all statistics were curved in such a way as to make the efficiency for all participants equal to 15 (this is an arbitrary number, but it works with the stats).  The further a participant rises or falls from the 15, the more deviant he or she is from the league average.

Let's not even discuss John Waters.

The formula for PER is too long to even begin to discuss here, and is really a marvel of statistics.  However, even the PER formula has to be normalized for variance in the competitive sport, which means it must be adjusted for different playstyles or else the numbers inflate and deflate the worth of players who work to the stats instead of the game.

You - could - apply PER to any sort of competition.  You would just have to look at the average player's contribution in every relevant statistical category and then calculate the deviations from the norm as a product of the overall average.  This is highly simplified, but let's take competitive hot dog eating.

Let's say we've got a competition with 7 hot dog eaters.  They can eat 38, 22, 7, 8, 4, 10 and 16 hot dogs.

The average competitive eater can eat 15 hot dogs in 5 minutes.  The average player also typically scarfs down one more bun before saying "nope, I can't do it." Eight minutes are allotted, and you get bonuses for eating extra buns, but not eating extra hot dogs (three point shots vs long two point shots).

Let's say Joey Chestnut eats 38 hot dogs in 7 minutes.  He can eat 3 extra buns, but it takes him longer because he drinks some water.  

The standard deviation for hot dog eating is 11.8 hot dogs over the time period.  Joey Chestnut is about two standard deviations above the mean in hot dog eating, at 1.94.  This means we add +1.94 in his hot dog eating prowess.

However, he took 7 minutes to eat the hot dogs.  This puts him at a small disadvantage with the rest of the group. The standard deviation for time is 1.15 minutes.  Joey is 1.73 deviations below the average hot dog eater in time taken.  HOWEVER this stat doesn't factor into his PER because he doesn't penalize his team by taking any more time.  

Finally, he eats two more buns than the average contestant, for a statistical deviation of 1.06.  This places him about 1.88 standard deviations above the norm in how he eats buns.  We'll say buns only count for 0.34 hot dogs, so what we'll do is weight the standard deviation to 0.34.  This is 0.34*1.88 = 0.64 raise in his rating.  This gets us to + 2.58.

If Joey is 2.58 times the average hot dog eater, his PER is 38.7.  This is an astounding result, and adequately captures how great of a stomach Mr. Chestnut has in real life.  38.7 is a result so high, that it would take MANY seasons of competitive eating to surpass it.  He's like the Mozart of gluttony.

And Nathan's is his "In the Hall of the Mountain King"

2) Elo

Forgoing a history lesson on the Elo rating system because we're at about 3000 words right now, I'll just tell you how it works.  Elo is a logarhythmic function of expected win percentages.  It works something like this.  Each 100 rating you are above someone, you're about 12% more likely to win a game over them.  Everyone is weighted to 1200 on average, and we go from there.

The key here, is that there is still statistical uncertainty up until about 450 Elo above your current rating (Roughly the same as our evenly matched hypothesis from earlier).  This compounds greatly when you factor in the possibility of team play.

I ran the numbers for a group of 5 players at 1400 elo (72% winrate) vs a group of 5 players playing at 1200 elo just to see how the teams factor into things over 100 games.  I'm weighting it so that the members of the 1400 group win an average of 72% of their games: 60, 79, 71, 75, 75.  I'll put the same numbers into the 1200 group.

The p value from earlier is equal to 3.14.  This tells us that there is little probability that this result occurred by chance under our hypothesis.  What this means is that chance is minimized in the elo system, but there is a 3.14% chance of 100 games giving you a random +22 win difference when you're 200 Elo worse than your competition.  (Same for -22 win difference).

Ain't nothin wrong with pi chance. 

However, let's go back and analyze the stakes again.  If we're saying that you get rewarded for winning and penalized for losing, in your rating, this chance is huge.  To figure out the exact impact of the chance, we'll use an arbitrary system where you get 12 rating points per win and lose 14 per loss against equal competition.  This is very nearly where Elo's system arrives at in the equations that he originally used.

If you split the games 50/50 out of a set of 100, you will lose 100 points.  If you perform as expected at 200 elo higher than your competition, you will gain the 200 point ratings differential in 42 games with this equation:

(Wp * Wr) - (Lp * Lr) = G       

In this case, G = 4.44

Winning % * Reward - Loss % * Reward = Average gain per game.

This is pretty striking as the number of games required to get to your proper rating is huge.  We also haven't forgotten that 3.14% margin of error in p from earlier.  It works out to a 4 game swing either way for each 100 games.  If we calculate that:

(.68 * 12) - (.32 * 14) = 3.68

Then, we're looking at an observed circumstance over 100 games of 55 games taken to rise to your proper Elo rating. 

The conclusion from this is that the system cannot properly handle an individual rating with certainty before 55 games are played as it cannot distinguish a 72% winrate from a 50% winrate before this time.

So, after comparing three ways to measure ratings systems, I'm going to go with PER as being the best.  After a statistically relevant sample (Anything more than 5 participants), it can determine a dynamic and evolving rating of participants and compare them across eras.  Elo can't do that and 1v1 can't do that either (For the reasons I mentioned previously).

TL;DR - Number's don't lie and math columns aren't interesting.

[wtfanswers-blog]

Why does bleeding cause so much trauma?

So, to be specific, we're asking, "Why do people faint or become unsettled at the sight of blood?"  There are actually a number of possible explanations to this scenario, and I think the best way to address this is with a larger question, is sympathy mental or physical?

The Stakes

Mmmmmm... Steak!

So, to start, we should probably categorize the stages of emotional response to an action.  Setting aside the quantum mechanics of time (that's another post), we're left with some steps that look roughly like this:

If it's not overly complicated, you found it somewhere else.

Let's review what this flow chart says, because it draws a few interesting conclusions.  The first conclusion is that there are potentially two terminus points.  The second conclusion is that there is a brain chemical response that occurs before the terminus points, which signals us to the possibility that the reaction is located in the nervous system rather than in the physical faculties or reactions.  The third conclusion is that the brain chemicals responsible have to come from a certain source.

We're going to have a few competitors for that source.  I think prevailing wisdom is that seeing blood triggers a "fight or flight" response, and that type of reaction is seated in the adrenal gland.  The second theory that I've read states that the reaction is housed in chemical reactions with the muscle electrical receptors.  The final theory, and I think the coolest one, is that the brain's response actually occurs in the subconscious lizard brain.

The Chemistry of Emotional Reactions

When asked how the mind works, in five words or less, on live television, the prominent linguist and bioresearcher Steven Pinker replied, "brain cells fire in patterns." This simple statement belies a wealth of activity that really describes what's going on in our noggins.  In detail, when the photons reflected off the actual occurrence hit your eye's rod and cone cells, your nerves translate that to an electrical signal processed by the brain.  The electrical signal travels up the neurons and through the proper synapses until it reaches the spot the system told it to go. 

When you see something gory, your eyes shoot the image up to your brain, where the information bounces around in your prefrontal cortex until it image matches with what your long term data says about what it means.  This is actually something that humans and advanced primates are much better at (as of 2012) than even the best computers.  No computer contains the contextual data from evolution to sort the incoming stimulus to the emotional association (really this just means that it's trying to predict the average person's response with certainty).  Therefore, we humans and higher mammals are pretty unique in our ability to sort out especially difficult images and know to run the fuck away from them.

One day...

Why this reaction?

There is a purely speculative interesting branch of Neuroscience devoted to the study of mirror neurons and how they allow empathy.  One of the theories I found while researching this post was the possibility that the mirror neuron reaction is releasing chemicals that signal the body to mimic or visualize the source of the pain coming from the gore.  There are a few documented cases of this popping up in history on a widespread level.

Most of the pathological response to these symptoms has been categorized as hysteria, or in less sexist terms, conversion disorder.  Conversion disorder is a state where the reaction from these mirror neurons is so strong that a whole group can disassociate from their actual physical condition through empathy and become one with the status affliction of the group, be it mania, depression or even pregnancy.

Several mass conversion events have occurred, and despite how hilarious it can be to read about them, they're really no joke.  Some dancing manias killed dozens of people in Medieval Germany, and the Hmong Sleeping Death killed many people in the United States in the 1960's and 70's.  This really goes to show the power of brain chemistry in seating a response to the physical body.

If the response were the product of mirror neurons, we'd expect to see especially sympathetic and empathetic people reacting more strongly to the sight of blood.  That isn't the case.  In fact, there is a tolerance that is built up through working in trauma, in combat, or in any other industry where human beings are regularly dismembered, to gaze upon the rended flesh and dismiss it as unimportant to the situation at hand.  Thus, I don't think that we can say the response here is the product of empathy.

The Non-Human Response

Actually, according to most reputable sources, the culprit of this reaction is the fear reaction, or the vasovagal response if you happen to be really into this sort of thing.  What's really cool about this response is that it doesn't happen inside the part of the brain that you think of as your brain.  It actually happens inside a nerve in your brain stem, deep inside the oldest, most subconscious recesses of your central nervous system.

It makes your heart beat, and it makes you barf!  What a multitasker!

If this reaction happens to be seated in the vagus nerve, it actually invalidates our flow chart tree from earlier.  You see, stimulation processed by the vagus nerve, and carried by it, never reaches conscious thought, it just travels through your body's nerve endings and gets to where it needs to get. This is likely because evolution thought it best to make sure you never had second thoughts about running from something that wanted to eat you in the days when endoplasmic reticuluums were cutting edge technology.

This is quite contrary to what should be happening, and that's why only a few people still faint at the sight of blood.  Think about it, this is an imperative to respond to something that could be dangerous or is otherwise essential life information... and the response is to literally fall over and stop.  We actually have to pause and re-analyze the circumstances here, because after all of our analysis, it really is the bleeding that causes the trauma and not us.  So, the next time you find your friend helpless, dismembered and in a pool of blood from a horrifying occurrence, make sure to chastise him for all the trouble he caused your vagus nerve.

TL;DR - It's not your fault.  It's not your fault.  It's not your fault.

[wtfanswers-blog]

Could God Microwave a Burrito So Hot that He Himself Could not Eat it?

This question closely mirrors a paradox of omnipotence put forth by the philosopher Augstine in the dark ages. The question at the heart of the paradox is whether an omnipotent being can create something that he cannot do.

I just can't do it anymore.  I just can't.

There are really two possible answers to this question, either God can do it or God cannot.  I'll discuss them both here, because I find each of them unsatisfying.

God can't do it:

If we assume that omnipotence means that God can do anything that is logically possible, we assume that the limit of omnipotence is that God can't perform contradictions.

Not a real contradiction.

A logical contradiction is a series of events that differs from impossibility in that both sets of the events cannot be true.  For instance, eating the sun is impossible, a human simply just cannot possess the ability to ingest the star at the center of our solar system.  However, a three-sided square (meaning an object with four equal sides), is a logical contradiction.  In this example, the contradictory phrase boils down to whether God can do what he cannot do.  If you assume both parts to be true, they cannot simultaneously occur, and the Almighty burns his mouth on the chicken and beans El Ranchero Burrito that he got at Walgreen's.

Sacrelicious.

God Can Do It.

This puzzle was put before the legendary University of Michigan philosopher George Mavrodes back in the 1970's.  His solution was inelegant, but it was very simple, and it boiled down to the proposition that God can perform logical contradictions.  His answer was that God could create a stone so heavy that he cannot lift it, and then lift it.  There is no limit to what omnipotence actually means, in Mavrodes's view.  God could microwave a burrito to universe-starting temperatures, say "wow, that's too hot" and swallow it with an almighty OMNOMNOM.  In this view, God can square circles, make twenty sided triangles and stop crime in Detroit.  

The argument, at large, boils down to whether the human logical capacity is relevant in discussions of divine power.  If you believe that logical truths and falsehoods apply to God, then you have to say that this lies just beyond the reach of the Almighty, but you feel comfortable saying it.  If you believe that they don't, then the Universe, I think, is a much more interesting place to live if you have faith.

TL;DR - Logic is strange.

[wtfanswers-blog]

Why Does Everyone Seem to Like Bacon?

First, the real reason everyone came to this post.  Food porn:

Vegetarians please type alt+F4 now.

Bacon is one of the five six seven main food groups, along with proteins, fats, grains, fruits, vegetables and dairy.  The astute among my readers may notice that the salty, fatty, cured meat goodness that is bacon falls into a few of these food groups.  Thus, we can cursorily conclude that bacon supplies all, or nearly all of what the body needs.

Bacon is, in essence, a pickle.  It's a cured meat product that has been preserved, and usually smoked to withstand the lean season of the autumn and winter.  Bacon's origins as a preserved meat is grounded firmly in European and African cuisine where dried meats and pickled meats were used in climates that were either not hospitable to the raw product or where the raw product was in short supply.

You have probably heard of the phrase "eating high on the hog," which is commonly used to note the wealth of an individual or class of people.  Traditionally, the cuts of meat that are located higher off the ground on the body of a pig are more tender and tasty because they do less work.  Examples of these cuts include pork tenderloins, jowls and ham, which are all very fatty, quite juicy and to true American carnivores, heaven on a plate.  American cut bacon comes from the pork belly, whereas fancier, European bacon cuts are often taken from the tenderloin and fatback cut of the critter (think porterhouse steaks as the beef equivalent). These cuts are both very fatty and extremely perishable as a result of this.

Therefore, a need to preserve these cuts arose in the days before refrigeration.  This left two paths for puttin' up this succulent slab of pork: the barrel path and the smoking path.  Northern European cultures, like those found in Ireland, England, France, Germany and throughout Scandanavia had an entrenched smoked meat tradition where meat was preserved over slow-cooking fires of hard woods that release antiseptic compounds that will mingle into the surface of the meat.  Southern European cultures, like those of Provence, Spain, Portugal and Italy did not particularly embrace the fire-burning concept, and instead pickled many of their meat products, giving us sausages like Chorizo and pork products like Pancetta.

Bacon is the holiest matrimony of these two concepts.  The type of bacon readily available at the American supermarket is both smoked and brined, rendering it properly spiced, properly seasoned and ever-so-full of savory cogener compounds, including Vanillin.

It is a not-so-curious concurrency of events that there is a meaty taste, a salty taste, a sweet taste, a sour taste and a bitter taste in this modern obsession.  The human tongue's tasting apparatus possesses the ability to distinguish between five flavors: umami (meaty), salty, sweet, sour and bitter.  Bacon fulfills every sensation which one's tongue can expect to taste, and every desire within the eater's clogged and choked heart.

Thus, my conclusion is that bacon, born of necessity and functional in its utility is the perfect food for the human palette. What else delivers on two food groups, a complete animal protein, fats, salt and sweetness but the wonderful preserved goodness of pickled and smoked pork belly?

TL;DR - Everyone seems to like bacon because they should.

[wtfanswers-blog]

Why Are Mints so Minty Fresh?

Botanically speaking, there are quite a few distinct species of plants belonging to the genus Mentha.  There's peppermint, spearmint, chocolate mint, and literally over a dozen others.  There are few commonalities between these plants aside from the leaves that contain R-Carvone and Menthol.

Does not contain R-Carvone

Interestingly enough, both R-Carvone and Menthol are chemical compounds exhibiting stereoisomerism.  In essence, there are two chemically identical molecules of each R-Carvone and Menthol.  Each of these two sets of molecules has a left handed side and a right handed side molecule.  One of those molecules is completely non-reactive to the human sensory apparatus, but the other is actually reactive.

The molecules are both fat soluble and both extracted from mint in the essential oil of the plant leaves.  R-Carvone is also found primarily in Caraway seeds.  

Which you may be familiar with from your rye bread

The actual minty goodness perceived by the sensory apparatus is derived from the interaction of these chemical compounds' benzene groups with the TRPM8 receptors in human skin.  TRPM8 is a protein released by the skin to inform the body's nerves that it is currently perceiving a cold or cool sensation.  When the essential oil comes into contact with the receptors on the skin of the tongue or in the skin of the hands, you get a rush of TRPM8 that your brain interprets as cold much akin to the sensation that you get when you eat the capsaicin in hot peppers.

So, to answer the question, mints are minty fresh because the reactive cold feeling is associated with crispness which is, in turn, associated with verdant vegetation.

TL;DR - Mints aren't fresh, you're cold.

[wtfanswers-blog]

Why is North Korea So Crazy?

The meta issue implicit in this question is, "Why do nations fight?" For all of human history, people have fought over their personal differences, but it is not always clear that this is why nations fight.  For thousands of years of history, it was pretty clear that nations fought over either 1) land resources or 2) socio-religious differences.  The 20th and 21st centuries have somewhat turned this whole thing on its head, when you consider that, with the exception of World War I and WWII, every multi-national conflict in the past two centuries has been based on economic development and monetary policy.   Then, the proper way to frame this conflict becomes clear, it's really the rumblings of a civil war between the Korean people under two sets of institutions.

Who are the North Koreans?

North Korea is a nation on the (you guessed it!) Korean Peninsula bordering Russia.  It's roughly the area of Tennessee, or a tad bit bigger than Portugal depending on how you want to conceptualize it.  It has 24 million citizens, all of whom live in a perpetual state of technological deprivation since the nation, according to most reports, is stuck in the 1970's.  All of the buildings in Pyongyang (the capital) look like Mies van der Rohe specials.

Form following function, that's why it looks like crap.

Kim Jong-Un, the leader of North Korea is the world's youngest head-of-state.  According to their own beliefs, they have been at war since 1950 with South Korea, and really democracy as a whole.  It is important to remember that North Korea's leadership over the past seventy years has been almost comically myopic.  The highest office in the land is still held by this guy (who has been dead longer than Seinfeld):

Dear Leader has double the average number of incisors.

According to North Korea, their standard of living similar to Carribbean nations, Singapore and Botswana.  According to the non-partisan Human Development Index, North Korea is perhaps the poorest country in the world, living in a state of perpetual famine.  The poverty rate, according to many reliable sources, is 50%.  Meanwhile, South Korea is the twelfth nicest place in the world to live and is considered a miracle economy of Asia.  North Korea's gross domestic product (yearly) for 24 million people is roughly Paul McCartney's net worth.  South Korea's gross domestic product is worth approximately one thousand times more. To give you an idea, if the average North Korean is the average American, making $50,000 a year as a Ceiling Tile Installer, the average South Korean is making as much as an NFL Quarterback.

The Root of the Problem

As I said earlier, this is not a fight between two nations, but between two institutions.  Nations fight themselves over repression, a lack of civil rights and a denial of meaningful redress.  The disharmony in the North is a result of a lack of these things while the South possesses instruments and institutions that can provide these human rights.  Essentially, it's a conflict of economics but on a more immediate scale, considering that there is not equality of opportunity in North Korea that can incentivize growth of capital in the way that South Korea can.

My theory is that North Korea is posturing for war as a final attempt to be the victorious nation on the Korean peninsula.  In 1951, North Korean forces had actually captured Seoul, which lies within a day's walk of the 38th Parallel. North Korea, since 1980 has diverged from South Korea.  It has been only 20 years that South Korea has been holding elections, and North Korea still sees the potential to take control over the economy of the peninsula.

This reflects a broader struggle.  North Korea, and to a lesser extent, China, are the only two large-scale Communist governments left on earth.  This is the last opportunity that the group-thinking idealogues from the Communist regimes will ever have (in modern times) to expand their territory, influence and wealth.  China has already backed off the philosophy of Communism in favor of more plurality of wealth, which is why it has stepped away from its military posture.  

However, North Korea is not analogous to this situation.  North Korea's wealth base, citizenry, institutions and military are all just inferior.  There is no objective statistical measure that places North Korea into the collective of nations that can utilize the inventions and innovations of the digital age OR the military technologies stemming from the advent of the splitting of the atom.

This is why North Korea is acting as it is.  The ruler no longer has control over the nation (on account of his newness and youth), and the idealogues running the country are attempting to go out with a bang.  If they can manage to parley this aggression into better economic conditions or a short-lived reunification of the Korean peninsula through war, they will see it as a success.

TL;DR - North Korea is a really awful place to live.

[wtfanswers-blog]

What is Justice?

Justice is defined as the quality of being fair and reasonable. I think this is a bad heuristic. Justice is the standard by which a society entrusts a (hopefully) neutral party to determine the entitlement of a wronged person to compensation from an offense. There is a whole lot of finesse required to set a standard and a code of conduct that is minimally subjective (fair), but is reasonable.

I think society is a science, and that its instruments are able to be evaluated scientifically.The scientific method states that given a question (What is Justice?) one can form hypotheses and test them with empirical data to see if they respond with a positive correlation to the predicted outcome (being reasonable). (flow chart of scientific method with testing and conclusions) The way to scientifically test Justice is to treat our standards as hypotheses that will demonstrate outcomes that are reasonable given any input.

I’ve identified four good standards, which I have simplified into more practical definitions:

1) Equality - An individual is entitled to equal treatment with all others who have a stake in something

2) Distribution - An individual is entitled to equal treatment with all others who could have had a stake in something.

3) Possession - Whoever has the least arguable possession over something has the only rights in it.

4) Creation - Whoever created something has rights in something until those rights have transferred.

To use empirical evidence to test these hypotheses, I will turn to the most well known example of justice in western literature, King Solomon’s wisdom. The story goes that two women went before the King holding a wee baby.

 The King ordered the baby split in half, with half given to each woman. After his proclamation the mother of the child relented so that the baby would live, in what would assuredly make a phenomenal grim-dark reboot of the Parent Trap.

Hypothesis 1: The Equality Theory

Each parent is entitled to equal shares of the baby since each has a claim in the child.  This can be expressed mathematically with E=1/P where Entitlement (E) is inversely proportional with the number of interested parties (P).  In our case, since there are two parents there two interested parties and each gets one half.

Half a baby is the same as no baby at all.  Going from one baby to no babies is not a reasonable way of determining who gets a baby.  We need to test additional hypotheses.

Hypothesis 2:  The Distribution Theory

All possible members of the community into which the baby is born who could have parented the baby should receive an equal share of the baby.  The formula for this approach is that E = 1/C where Entitlement (E) grows inversely to the number of possible parents in the community (C).  In the United States of America, the number of adults aged 15-64 in proportion to the general population is expressed (nearly) by the ratio 2:3.  Offhand, let's say that there are 200,000,000 adults to a population of 300,000,000.  Of these 200,000,000, 100,000,000 will be men aged 15-64 and we can infer that 3.5% are gay and an additional 0.5% are infertile, leaving us with 96,000,000 eligible sires.  Of the 100,000,000 remaining women, roughly 3/4 women between the ages of 15-64 are between the ages of 15-44.  Accounting for the 4% figure of gay women and another 0.5% infertile, we have 3/4 of 96,000,000 to work with, or 72,000,000 women.  As a total this leaves us with 156 million people in the United States who may have possibly parented a child.  This means that the total reproductive populace of a nation similar to the United States of America can be expressed as the ratio 13:25.  The World has a total english speaking population of 914 million people, so for my hypothetical Justice-seekers who are also anglophone, there are 475.28 million eligible members of the community.  E = 1/4.7528E8 which is a very very tiny number indeed.  If the average human body contains roughly 5E14 cells, the average person would be entitled to receive just over 1.05 million of them.  So, there's that.

A million cells do not a baby for either parent make, so we can again dismiss this theory as unreasonable. 

Hypothesis 3: The Possession Theory

The individual with the most clear possession of the baby may claim the baby.  Logically speaking, this can be expressed by the proposition (x): P(x) < E(x).  For all things (x), if one has possession one is entitled to it.  In our example, the baby has been brought before the Court of King Solomon to determine with whom he shall live.  In Western Tradition, possessor is equivalent to the individual having the ability to use or dispose of the thing in question.  Since Solomon currently commands the Court Guards who hold this baby, Solomon is entitled to the baby, even though he is not even a party contesting a right to the wee one.  This result seems rather unreasonable, so we must evaluate our fourth and final hypothesis.

Hypothesis 4: The Creator Theory

The individual with the most clear claim to having created the baby may claim the baby. The human genome is made up of two chromosomes, X and Y.  X is inherited from the maternal side, and Y(possibly) is inherited from the male side.  Males are XY while females are XX.  Logically speaking it would follow that the individual who placed the most genes into the child has the right to it.  Here's the kicker, there is almost certainly no chance that the genes in the child originated with the parents.  Genes have traveled a really long way to get into us, millions of years if you believe these sciency types.

However, the origins of the X chromosome's genes are actually quite easy to delve into.  The X chromosome has in it a mitochondria that maintains its own DNA.  The Mitochondrial DNA, in the words of Bill Bryson, is not quite sure that humanity is a good bet.  It maintains its own separate structures and its own genetic code, making it peculiarly easy to look for since it all looks the same and it looks different from everything around it (like hipsterism).  Heredity looks something like this:

From this, we see that there is a clear 3:1 ratio of X chromosomal DNA to Y chromosomal DNA in the history of the human species, making the X Chromosome the clear winner in determining who gets the child.  The originator of the human mitochondrial DNA is a hypothetical woman nicknamed Mitochondrial Eve who lived somewhere around 200,000 years ago in Tazmania, if I am correctly remembering Battlestar Galactica.  Thus, this woman has the most supreme and indisputable claim over this baby.

Since she's dead and left no certain heirs, historically speaking, the rights in the child should probably go to the state of Tasmania.  It is not wholly unreasonable for someone to be a citizen of Tasmania, so it seems that this hypothesis prevails as being Justice.

TL;DR: There's Always Anarchy.

[wtfanswers-blog]

Where Did Binary Originate?

The computing system known as binary code, in my brief research foray into the subject, originated from George Boole, and later, Alan Turing’s work in mathematics. The initial premise of the code was that you could make a hunk of metal tell you the answer to a question presuming that you gave it the right number of somethings and nothings to instruct it to perform menial tasks. This leads to another question, how in the world do you get a machine to perform tasks by simply telling it yes or no?

From what I can tell, binary is basically a big flowchart that the 20th century used to become the digital age. If you remember back when you were trying to learn stuff (probably 6th grade or earlier for most of all possible audiences) you’ll remember that you wrote a lot of processes out in idea webs and idea trees. Computers use binary code in a way that says “If there’s something here, do this, but if there isn’t do that.” If you compound this process thousands upon millions of times over, you end up finding ways to tell a machine to channel the electricity necessary into a bunch of liquid crystal diodes in such a way as to generate a mildly high resolution photograph of a cat with a caption attached. Interestingly enough, the length of the binary flowchart necessary to display the video sequence of a cat falling asleep and faceplanting off a countertop is so excessive that it actually requires silicon transistors capable of making millions of “something or nothing” judgments in a nanosecond.

If you’re keeping score at home, which, given this particular essay, you should have marked at home team 1, away team 0, you’d realize that the 11th inning of this base two game has to look at linguistics. Binary comes from the latin bis- which means two. Backtracking a little bit, binary is a base two counting system, basically how you would expect people to have developed numbers if we had flippers instead of fingers. If you’ve ever conceptualized numbers you probably have thought to yourself sometime or another that we really only have ten characters for numbers (0-9) and then we restart. There is no slight coincidence here that we also have ten fingers for counting on, and this idea was all the rage in the anthropology community back in the days when people said stuff like “Clark Gable should watch his language.” If you limited the counting system to only two possible numbers before adding a digit you get binary (0, 1). For instance, the number 0 in binary is 0, and the number 1 is 1. We’ve exhausted our digits so we have to add a new digit in order to get 2, which is 10. 3 is 11. So we do it again at 4 and get 100. In the end, base two math is seldom useful for anything but computers and making your wallet look a lot better to women you meet at the bar.

However, clearly the origin of binary dates back about 13,000,000,000 (base ten) years to the origin of the universe. There was the singularity, but there was also nothingness around it. Referencing the earlier work of Turing, a computing device could be tailored to use an input of possible universe states for computing data if you had a temporal framework in which to run your calculations. I imagine this is what Zeus would do in a nerdier incarnation of mythology.

TL;DR - I can haz universe