Parents algorithm always works, the one described has a massive failure mode - people slowly learn that they are likely to say 7 and self-censor by picking another number. Or maybe in a different culture the distribution changes (say China and the numbers 4, 8).
Well, if you're really interested in generating random numbers using a group of people, then yes, this may be a problem.
But you should take this as an illustration of the more general problem of generating uniform random numbers from a distribution that is not.
If you think about it this way, author's solution can be applied in a number of practical scenarios. For example, if you want to generate a hash values for objects using properties that are not uniformly distributed. Or if you want to generate random numbers from a physical artifact that is not perfectly uniform.
You might be right, but my guess is that 7's reputation for luck isn't famous enough to make a difference, and in fact it's common because other numbers seem too "unrandom".
We could test by asking people to pick numbers less than 100. I bet people would focus on odd numbers, especially those greater than 50, not ending in 5 or not having both digits the same.
I definitely overpaid on Mechanical Turk per response, given how lightning quickly the data came in. (I decided to pay $0.10/HIT for 50 responses and got 68 responses in 8m26s.) I suspect that offering a nickel would have gotten the survey filled in under half an hour still...
Even though we don't have long term experience the way we do with cooking, the description of the process on Wikipedia seems to suggest that it doesn't have much in the way of chemical effects on food. I'm definitely not an expert, and this is just an initial take, but I don't really see any mechanisms that could plausibly be dangerous.
In order to illustrate what I mean by a way that something could plausibly be dangerous: My understanding is that the molecules in most plastics contain chemicals that are known to be harmful. So even if we determine that it is not possible for them to break down into harmful chemicals in the body, it was plausible that they might.
Am I maybe missing some what that this process could be harmful?
The pressure may cause the container to release molecules into the food. Plastic that is normally considered food-safe might not be food-safe at these pressures.
> We've been eating heat cooked food for millennia.
"We" have been eating raw food for millions of years, far longer than cooked foods, which are a relatively new phenomenon in our biochemical evolutionary history.
We can measure what it does. We can examine the inputs as well as the outputs.
Why are anti-science arguments from emotion/fear so common around new types of food technology? What is it about food specifically that triggers what appears to be a deep-seated fear of change in people?
Health has become a sort of religion for many. Health, food and religion frequently go together in old mythology and now new.
"Good for you" and "bad for you" spread like old myth, factions fight, people have incredibly strong beliefs sometimes which have at least a little basis in reality sometimes they are worse than harmless.
These days it just isn't because some mystical being said so.
The dimensionality of human health, nutrition, and environment over time is many orders of magnitude beyond a Python script. We know and (accurately) measure far far less than you think.
Except this presentation explicitly states that they don't really know what it does to proteins, only that the changes are "complex".
And you can turn your argument around. Why everytime "science" is involved, the immediate presumption is that it's safe, especially when it's done for profit and when we know you can pay to get whatever "science" you want. Remember the many studies funded by the food industry that showed that sugar is perfectly safe and that fat is the dangerous thing?
It wasn't that someone had installed a light switch and they couldn't find it....they just didn't a have a switch.
> "It has to do with the fact that we haven't progressed far enough with our lighting system that we can control it," Horst Amann, airport technical director, said on Wednesday during a rare public appearance.
I meant to equate the lighting with the UI. To a casual user (a traveller) everything looks fine and probably pretty fancy, but a lot of the more intricate functionality simply isn't there yet.
