Interesting Links for 17-02-2015

[andrewducker]

• Labour cried wolf on the NHS three years ago - and could pay the price for it in May
  They've also done the same in Scotland "Stay in the UK, the NHS is safe!" "Vote for us at Westminster or the NHS is DOOMED!"
  (tags: nhs Labour )
• Hot New Trends for 2015 - Don't get left behind!
  (tags: trends viaDrJon )
• Russian researchers expose breakthrough U.S.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Yaaay! Links posted automatically from the new system!

In reverse order, oddly. But otherwise - yay!

(My mum's up all week, so I'm not going to get much coding time, but the system, as a whole, works. So now it's all bullet-proofing and making it look pretty.)

[fub]

W00t!

[erindubitably]

Nicely done!

[andrewducker]

Thank you :->

Not that it looks any different from yesterday's links. Yet :->

[gonzo21]

Heh, that pay once and play thing will never take off. Consumers enjoy being screwed.

God, Labour are just a disaster. The fear mongering thing won't play in scotland, because they're now seen as being pretty much the same as the Tories, so when Labour say 'The tories will destroy the NHS!' I think the only thing we hear in our heads by reply is 'Yeah, but so will you.'

I think we need to hear what Labour will actually commit to doing. But they've got a big problem now, because traditional Labour voters are now abandoning them in droves (catastrophic abandonment if the Scottish polls are accurate) and they can't appeal to the Left without scaring off middle-englanders.

So yeah. Jiggered, is the word. That Tory minority gopvernment is looking more and more likely.

Labour cried wolf on the NHS three years ago – and could pay the price for it in May

[cartesiandaemon]

Also, their strategy for everything else has been "decry the conservative's plans, and then do basically the same thing as soon as given the chance", so I hope they're better at this than the conservatives, but I don't have faith a labour victory will actually fix the problems :(

Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

[cartesiandaemon]

And even though Scott's article is more informative, I have to link again to this write up (I can't remember if Scott referenced it or not, you've probably linked to it before) of a biggest-number duel: http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N64/64largenumber.html

[simont]

I was going to mention David Metzler's YouTube lecture series on the topic of 'Ridiculously Huge Numbers'. It's rather long - you have to actually be properly interested in the topic to watch it all the way to the end - but it takes a bit of a different angle from either of these other articles. Where Scott Aaronson seems to have mostly focused on computational characterisations of large numbers, and the contest you mention was won by a formal-logic characterisation, Metzler instead works gradually towards a hierarchy of fast-growing functions defined recursively in a simple way and indexed by countable ordinals, and then shows how to pick an appropriately ludicrous ordinal to go with that hierarchy.

Of course, that raises the question of which of those strategies would win!

[octopoid_horror]

"It’s hard to see how games like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush will be able to compete when these new games are offering an all-encompassing experience for a simple flat rate."

They'll be able to compete by appealing to people who like to pay to win, obviously!

If everyone hated IAPs then some of these games wouldn't make money hand over fist through that very process!

[andrewducker]

Oh yes - the article clearly wasn't taking itself seriously.

But I do like that there's somewhat of a backlash now, and people deliberately looking for games that aren't IAP.

[octopoid_horror]

The best tablet games I've played don't have any IAP, so I am unfussed :-D

(Sorcery, Out There, Hitman Go, 80 Days)