JDEW

The old joke that mathematicians can't distinguish a donut from a coffee mug (because of topological "equivalence"/homeomorphism) [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mug_and_Torus_morph.gif

Why not? I’ve lived there for years, and although it’s not perfect, I think it’s very easy to get around both walking and cycling.

You know what’s expensive? Treating 100s of millions of people for pollution related illnesses.

Following of the “Uber for x” trend of the 10s, we really need an “X but without VC pressure” trend for the 20s…

I was thinking the same.

> ...they fraudulently possibly told their comrades...

> ...by flying to the heavens.

These sentences, among others, strike me as odd/unnatural, but I'm not a native speaker.

Narrow banks. The FED didn’t like the idea…[0]

[0] - https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2018/09/fed-nixes-narrow-...

…sure, but the discussion is about _where_ taxes a levied, and _how much_ taxes should be levied.

From what I gathered:

Intraday returns: the difference in price from market open to market close

Overnight returns: the difference in price from market close to the next day’s market open.

They are only talking about stocks and they are traded on markets with opening hours < 24h.

Paper [0], Quanta Article [1]

[0] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10774 [1] - https://www.quantamagazine.org/father-son-team-solves-geomet...

Sorry, can't resist: you probably mean pi radians (and by convention you don't even need the word radians). Pi degrees would imply your outlook barely changed at all.

This is probably a comment worth ignoring, but I still feel inclined to say that journalism is a cornerstone of democracy on which, love it or hate it, we in the west have chosen to build our societies on. So yes, it is important and certainly requires skill.

> The economy is more resilient…

Sure, but OP said “continues to decline”, not “completely collapses.”

> Salesforce let go of fewer than 1,000 employees Monday, according to a person familiar with the move.

> At the end of January it employed 73,541 people.

“…employees Monday”,

“…January”

Is this grammatical? Is it coherent? Or was this generated with GPT-3?

Isn’t that what he writes in the second to last paragraph?

> But one of the most bizarre aspects here is it doesn’t actually matter how aware that person is of what they’re doing. The concept of a “genius mastermind” is itself outdated, because it assumes that someone needs to be in control. The shameless person is simply a host for a set of ideas, which, like any virus, will continue to propagate as long as there are willing hosts to receive it.

I feel the same about these electric scooter services like Bird, Lime, etc. Most European cities are very walkeable and so you’re not “getting another car off the road” as Bird will happily tell you. You’re paying for the luxury that you’re 2 minutes faster compared to walking.

You make a lot of valid points but this sentence:

> I say legalize all the “drugs” and let people decide for themselves whether or not to be morons.

Is probably a bit too spicy. You say the government robs us of agency but you know what else does? Addiction. It’s not bad for a government to put regulations in place for dangerous substances. I do, however, agree with the subtext that it should be _decriminalized_.

Wow, such a simple idea but I can totally see how this works (for me).

Struggling with a 'mild' scrolling addiction myself and this might be a nice middle ground between deleting apps alltogether and not having guard rails.

Another way to think about it: privacy stayed constant over time, it just shifted from the family, local communities, and the social oversight (“eyes on the street”) that came with it, to big tech and government.

> We have already noted that quantum physics offers a world view in which the future is not entirely determined. This indeterminacy is not practical but fundamental. It permits us to think that our experience of free will may be real instead of merely subjective. If the outcome of a quantum process is undetermined, there is no fundamental reason to deny that possibility in some neural events which may be a macroscopic amplification of microscopic processes where quantum indeterminacy plays an essential role.

I don't see how free will follows from indeterminacy. Just because you can't predict future outcomes from initial values doesn't mean that there is "choice" involved in the evolution of a system.

> He is excited by the possibility that developing this idea will solve the measurement problem of quantum mechanics as well as uniting quantum theory with relativity. He also thinks, even more controversially, that it could identify meaning in the universe.

Sigh

> But Barbour seems happy to swap the roles of science and the arts. He even suggests that art might provide a better guide to the true nature of the universe than science.

What did I just read?

> ...he writes that human moments of deep creativity “might be subliminal inspirations from the whole universe,” and that a performance of a great operatic aria can capture something of the cosmos as neatly as any mathematical equation.

Riiiight.

If I would get a dollar for every story along the lines of "Lone genius... famous university... mumble mumble... quantum gravity... mumble mumble... meaning of life..."...

(Not necessarily criticizing Barbour, whose work I haven't read)

And if you need _even more_ motivation after reading the above:

> Insurers were offering a product that paid you, when you died, the greater of (1) the amount you put in and (2) the return on some risky investment. So he'd buy two of those -- one long the risky investment, one short the risky investment -- and be guaranteed a big profit. The catch is you have to die, but he solved this by enlisting dying patients in AIDS hospices to put their names on the contracts.

This column truly is a classic.

Two paragraphs down:

> Sadly, thanks to the bureaucrats of public service industries, local councils, banks, building societies, _insurance companies_ and government departments, we have learnt to accept an official style of writing that is inefficient and often unfriendly.

> But in the last few years, many of these offenders have started to put things right, either rewriting their documents clearly or training their staff in the art of plain English, or both.

So, it’s a work in progress. I agree that the order is confusing though.

> For some psychological reason, a thing that looks unfinished gets much higher quality feedback than something that looks polished.

Does this really imply “humans are broken”? We all have limited resources and I think this could just be a first order prioritization mechanism. Of course one has to be aware of the bias but that’s a different problem.

Yes but competing in a cooperation is different than cooperating in a competition.

> Otherwise, if you ever need to create a sample that contains a single word/syllable, you cant. It is weird how much sound that contains clearly distinguishable syllables for the human ears still is not separable when you go to edit it.

Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. Thought it was insightful.

So the conclusion we should draw is that a well run data center is better than a badly operated cloud?

Citation needed.

Literally two lines later:

> But decaying wood and organic material releases carbon back into the air. A climax forest is close to a steady state: The rate at which it removes carbon from the air is roughly equal to the rate at which it releases this carbon.

Trees keep on growing, yes, but it’s the old, decaying material that releases CO2 back in the air again, compensating tree growth.

Edit: clarity.

Well isn’t that the magic of software? The costs to run something flatten out as you increase usage, whereas the licensing costs increase linearly.

You can read NYT articles in a private browser window.