Philosophy of Everything

I think that nobody should be coerced to vaccinate, himself or his child. I vaccinated my child because I considered that it is better like this. However, each person should have the right to choose for himself, ideally after knowing the true known risks of vaccinating and not vaccinating. There is this theory that people that refuses to vaccinate prevents the full eradication of many diseases. They say that refusal to vaccinate not only affect the people that decides this, but also the people that vaccinate themselves but are in the small percent of people where vaccine is not effective. I say we should take this risk of having not-vaccinated people in society. Here are some arguments:

I watch my photo archive and I realize that my memory does not recall a lot of things. Even photos from couple of years back seems like pictures of events that happened to someone else. I remember when I took that picture, however it's like I see this for the first time. The memory has a strange way to forget things. I still can't believe that my boy was that small. I know rationally, however I cannot recall the perception of him being that small. Pictures are not only anchors for memories, sometimes they are the only memories. Our children are the first generation that can have, over years, a history in images of their entire life. Of course, we also have some pictures from childhood, but they are too few to create an image of continuity. Most of our childhood pictures are black&while and in studied positions (because of their scarcity) and looks more like taken from a movie/theater than from real life. The general availability of color digital pictures, sometimes incl...

We have a population of animals. Each individual can be associated with a certain "value", expressing his "fit level to the environment". We want to design a simple algorithm in the animal's genes that would make the individuals to mate close to optimal. Let's say that resulting value for the mating is the product of the "value" of the two involved individuals. We will study the case when each individual can only be involved in mating with a single other individual. In this conditions, the close to optimum mating is reached when mating is realized between individuals with very close values. Mathematically, we have a set of positive numbers (the values) and we want to create the pairs of numbers so that the sum of products of each pair will be maximal. This happens when we sort the numbers and we pair each number with the one next to it.

My kid is close to 4 years and started to exhibit a very human brain process: before sleepping, he starts to remember random ideas and expresses them. Sometimes they are not only memories and plans he had over day, some are really new and original ideas - even that many are yet childish of course. It is not something that could be related to a sudden thought association, he just has "ideas". It does not happen only before the sleep, it just happens more often then. Before the sleep it is also easier to eliminate hypothesis like "this thing remembered him about that other thing". This process could show some light about how brain and neurons works, and possibly helping to design more human-like artificial intelligence. I would speculate that the same process that makes ideas and memories to pop up out of nothing, to be the process that permits the most amazing thought processes in humans.

We have this requirement: "Create the smallest program that will print the full text of the play Othello by William Shakespeare". I should warn you that the requirement hides a trick and you will hate the solution. The program does not need to run efficiently. Actually, it does not need to run in reasonable time. It just has to be very short. And to be proven to answer the requirement, eventually... No external random source is allowed and no input from user.

I will argue below that sorting of a big array, using only comparison, is inherently harder than solving the problem of choosing the best next move on a chess game. One could say that it is not fair to put in competition a big, however finite, problem like chess with an arbitrary big problem like sorting n elements. Fair enough; the interesting thing is that sorting becomes inherently harder than chess for an "n" that is way smaller than you would expect, like sorting 3000 elements. At least in theory... Sorting takes a minimum of n* log 2 (n) comparisons,  more exactly  log 2 (n!) This is about sorting "by comparison only" and can be proven in 2 step. You can skip to the "chess" part if you already know this. 1. Sorting can be done in  log 2 (n!) comparisons, that is just slightly less than n* log 2 (n). We are used to consider sorting an O (n* log 2 (n)) problem. Actually there are algorithms that can do the sorting with little less t...

“There are two types of people in the world, those who divide everybody into types and those who do not”. I am part of the second type ;) Is the text above true or false?