MarkLowenstein

Sorry but I can't abide the scientific ignorance being displayed all over this conversation.

(1) The first article you cite "Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs" only announces that some scientists made a technique to discover such particles. The only ones they found were ones they inserted on purpose to verify their technique. That headline leads people strongly to incorrect conclusions like you have made. That's one of the main techniques of fake news.

(2) Fertility rate has nothing to do with how many people can't get pregnant who are trying. It's just a variation on birth rate.

(3) Mother Jones - here cited many times as factual - shows a picture of a bird with a plastic mesh around it. That is not what "toxic" is. Maybe powerful lobbyists got Canadian legislators to pretend that plastic straws are "toxic", but again that flies in the face of scientific fact.

Plastic is an amazingly inert substance that is unlikely to cause harm outside of physical constriction. In honor of this thread, I'm going to go eat a Lego. You can rest assured that I'll be back tomorrow to collect my downvotes.

My son had some trouble at age 2 or 3 speaking his Rs. I remembered exactly that cartoon (30 years later) and tried to get him to imitate a car noise with it. Worked like a charm!

People often wonder this about psychedelia art. But is it even possible? The alphabet one, for example. It takes awhile to draw the stationary design behind any of those letters, let alone an animated sequence that transitions to the next one. Surely the mind of someone hallucinating would have moved on to many other fleeting visions before even finishing the letter A.

This and the parent post are both right on. I would love that BAC thing. It would take me from 0% likely to ever own an Apple Watch, to almost 50%. It would reduce drunk-driving scenarios because people are going to be monitoring and pacing their bar/party sessions.

But I foresee lots of lawsuits making Apple shy to offer it. No matter how smart Apple is at making it legal, there are always amateurish or vindictive governments that will make laws that cause Apple to risk responsibility.

Important question. If NY were a country, it would only rank behind Hungary, Gibraltar, and Czechia for the highest death rate. And it has been that way or worse since April 2020, even as other states and countries had their worst problems later on.

NY and the even-worse-faring NJ are denser and therefore likelier to have higher total infection numbers and deaths than the Plains states. So I wouldn't even accuse them of mismanagement except that this nursing home strategy seems to have been a bad one. However I think the story here is how the media chose their favorite son in this (Cuomo) despite him actually being one of the worst performers. And the TV-news-watching public dutifully ate it up despite clearly contrary data being available on the web from Day 1.

This is an excellent question. It is a very popular idea that there is some "tipping point", plus positive feedback loops, that are definitely going to make this problem worse, someday. That they are popularly imagined by non-scientists, and that the effects are always promised for the future rather than identified in the past, are cause for skepticism.

Judging by the fact that for the billion years after life has dominated, Earth climate has always stayed decidedly non-Martian and non-Venusian, the evidence is strong that negative feedback loops are more powerful than the positive ones that people may publicize. I would like to see more substantiation behind such assertions.

I love pet theories so I hate to disagree. I've personally said the word "Legos" about 1M times in my life and it's mostly because Legos always come in groups, groups with a lot of items. You have to have a plural word to refer to them.

Also (child of the 70s) I am certain that I was calling mine Legos before I even knew about Eggo waffles. Third - boy I'm really piling on, sorry - I don't think I've ever referred to multiple Eggo waffles as "Eggos", probably because there's already "waffles" for that.

No doubt that you can trace the history to explain it. But is there an inherent allure of the eventual design that steered these decisions toward a result like this? The article gives a very compelling theory as to why it might.

If the effect of "inherent allure" sounds improbable, ask yourself if it might explain why common keyboard commands are nice comfortable ones to type, like ls and dir - and you never find yourself typing qza or xwz. All have good historical reasons, like not many operations starting with Z, but I think if there really was a common "Query Zeta Array" operation, it's likely it would have been renamed or there would be a tool with an easier-to-type name that would wrap it.

Regardless of the spin put on by the video producers, the tool itself is very useful for letting people see reality, which may work to temper alarmism. If the reality is that most of the earth hasn't changed that much, then that is now available for view. And if the reality is that the Brazil rainforests really were a vast sea of dark green not long ago but are already medium-brown-looking today, then that is also now available for view.

I'm curious to see people search for the growth of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch". I'm pretty sure most people will be surprised to find that there is nothing to see. But I'll try it out.

Somewhat, but even the non-insiders still do pretty well. My returns over the last few years are much more than I deserve, and I just have 401k/mutual funds. Maybe they would have been higher without these insiders, but probably not immensely.

I don't claim to be fully educated on NKOS physics. But here's how I see it, if it helps:

A statement like "If A implies B, ~B implies ~A" is true whether or not there is a god, or a prime mover, or even an A or a B. Doesn't matter; the statement is still valid.

Now, you can expand that statement with all sorts of niceties that are equivalent: "If (A and B) implies B, ~B implies ~A". You're limited only by your imagination here, and the number of true equivalences is infinite.

The list of true statements might expand at a consistent rate across a series of complicated, embiggening rules...reminiscent of the Big Bang? And maybe within that expansion you could see a train of As moving to the left sometime, like a photon going the speed of light, which might sometimes beget a "reaction" when encountering an expression like (~B or A) when they meet, that sends a train of Bs heading out the other direction.

If such interactions are complex enough, eventually huge structures can be created, like self-reproducing entities that eventually develop consciousness. To those entities, there is nothing imaginary about what they perceive and experience. Their universe has been created, simply because it was possible.

Disclaimer: I could be all wrong as far as Wolfram's view, but this happens to be my own and I think Wolfram is getting at the same thing.

A lot of us don't like the taste of raw tomatoes. As far as I'm concerned, the closer they are to latex bags of water, the better. I only use them (generally sliced on sandwiches) to bolster my "eating vegetables" status to satisfy social pressures. I'm satisfied, whether I'm getting actual vitamins or not.

I'm American. Possibly there are a lot of people like me here, so the stores are actually providing what the people want.

Fantastic. Not on-board with the ^^^^ syntax - could be improved. But it reminds me of how sequential-character syntax is limiting, like if you were going to make an integrated circuit in strict 2 dimensions, without being able to bridge over traces sometimes in a minimally 3-dimensional way. This is like bringing programming into, literally, a new dimension.

Joel Spolsky on his sergeant major, 3 paragraphs. One of those anecdotes that will stick with you forever.

https://mogadalai.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/what-is-leadershi...

(Not the original source, but the most readable I found.)

I've got two kids in middle/high school, in a 100%-closed-from-beginning school district (still closed).

The worst part of the experience has been the monotony of sitting at their desks all day experiencing communication solely via Teams/Zoom meetings. Combined with the monotony of most extra-curricular activities shut down, and a lot of friends lost to sheltering parents, it's increased the number of spontaneous breakdowns in our house...they're doing okay; they're mostly just disappointed. A big chunk of their childhood has been taken away from them, unnecessarily in some of our opinions.

What will suffer hugely into the future, though, is participation in sports, music, and other common activities. With a lot of them, like playing an instrument, once you break the chain, people usually don't go back. If we had maybe 40% of kids that age before that had no hobbies or interests to fill their time with before, we're going to have more like 70% now. What will they fill their time with?

Here are things that are not good with the standard laptop form. They may seem minor, but I believe these little physical discomforts manifest themselves in a reluctance to use the device.

1. It's oblong with few safe surfaces to touch. To carry it with one hand forces you to hold it from one edge at least for awhile each time you pick it up and put it down. That feels heavy because of the leverage it pulls against that little edge you get to hold.

2. By opening frontwards/away from you, opening feels bad. Compare with opening a tablet that folds horizontally like a book.

3. It's often hard to find a clear spot to fit your laptop footprint at home. Corollary: when most people are not using it, it takes up a lot of desk or counter space. Very few people store it vertically. I store mine vertically under my desk and it gets kicked a lot.

4. It's really hard to just keep it closed and use it as a desktop replacement. Most have power buttons on the inside only, so when you have to wake it up or reboot, you've got to open it a crack and wedge your finger in there.

5. You can't tell how much battery is left, or what time it is, or when your next appointment is, without opening up the lid. Often you have to do one of those things while walking. Opening the lid and checking something on the inside while walking feels terrible.

To add to what the problem is not: the dedication of teachers, like others have said. I've known teachers from all kinds of public schools. Almost to the last, they are not just interested in but desperate for their students to succeed. (Often resulting in grade inflation and ill-advised passing.)

Also, most parents would really rather their kid succeed. It's easier for them that way.

What does it leave? The kids. They resist education because it's hard and involves work; that's only natural. Some more than others, though, and having TV and games competing with school these days makes that number a lot higher than the only other option was rolling a hoop with a stick. Unsuccessful students drag their whole class back with them, because again, the teacher wants them to succeed. So it looks like when you have a critical mass of failing students - 20% maybe? - you descend below the event horizon and the whole school becomes irredeemable.

A guy at work made a no-frills search results viewer that was just a standard Windows UI ListView (table) window with one result per row. Best search page I ever saw, because you could see 40 results at a time instead of 10.

In the 70s and 80s, a common complaint about American Republicans was that they were sanctimonious moralizers. Now another party has adopted that mantle, but a lot of people have yet to catch up with that fact.

Thought experiment: imagine that you told the ReviveRestore people that they're going to change tack and use all of their brains and funding to protect the earth as it is instead. They'd probably all quit, and the earth will still be only as protected as it is now.

There are two levels of slowness being talked about here, both valid. One is that 16ms vs. 60ms response to typing and touch. The other is yours, and I think yours is the more problematic one. Not only do those multi-second waits accumulate through the workday to be a significant fraction of the day, but each one presents an opportunity for the user's mind to wander, or other parallel tasks to be switched to, with a high cost of returning to the current state.

I've been through this application process; I consider it a form of abuse and I'm sure it drives some people away from participation. And then they beg you to volunteer but to do so you have to provide tons more information to prove you're not a child molester.

Anyway I think it's all so they don't get to the final competitions and Little League World Series, only to find out they have to disqualify some team for having an out-of-district player. But maybe it would work almost as well to check only the winning team, after the series, and if they've committed fraud, the other team wins.

I'm hoping that by offering simple and intuitive words we could have success where most have failed (overloaded so that hotter, temperature, colder, heat, heater are all recognized, but all mean the same thing).

Engineers have proven themselves unable to solve this. I will do so now:

(1) have ONE pushable and turnable knob, somewhere - steering wheel, dash, doesn't matter (2) 25-30 one-word voice commands: "volume"/"louder"/"hotter"/"A-C"/"radio"/"front"

Want to turn on the radio? Say "radio", push button. Louder? "louder", turn knob. Cooler? Say "A-C", push button, turn knob. "Fan", turn. Maybe some white noise feedback while turning it, to indicate whether you're in the low range or high range. Done!

You've successfully made the opposite side's point. You cite election-fraud misinformation as "leading to deaths", which is misinformation itself: the 5 deaths at the Capitol were 3 rioters having a heart attack, stroke, and apparently trampled; 1 rioter shot by a security person; and 1 Capitol policeman who died the next day of causes unknown to his own family still, yet erroneously trumpeted by NYT etc. as being killed by a fire extinguisher.

And, armed with this disinformation, you propose to abandon one of the core societal principles which has allowed America to succeed beyond anyone's imaginations. Now hopefully you can see why everyone's alarmed about what's going on.

It's certainly become an inconvenient name to utter around our house, due to the responses it elicits from our countertops. So my daughter came up with the idea of referring to the device as "Amelia" whenever we talk about her. It has worked brilliantly and I suggest that everyone adopt the same convention.

Related theory I've had rattling around my brain recently: a programmer's career velocity is strictly correlated with the percentage of code that they deal with every day that is code of their own making, vs. someone else's. I always get so motivated and productive when I'm building off my own stuff, and pretty grumpy and slow when not.

It used to be that geographic proximity caused a lot of similarity in needs/votes. But now our votes are more alike when our "tribe" is alike - e.g. professional, rural, urban poor. Plus few people ever see their local representative except on national TV. So maybe the time for geographic districts has passed.

To get real minority interests some representation, and to solve the geography problem, I'd like to see a state say they've got 10 representative positions, and you're all going to have a vote (or maybe 10). The top 10 vote-getters are then chosen.

What is lovely about this debate is that people who don't like getting up early think that DST gives them a magic extra hour of daylight, so they push hard for permanent DST. At the same time, they think that people advocating 8-4 working hours or earlier school hours are draconian ascetics. Yet what they get in both cases is exactly equivalent, other than which numeral you use when referring to the time.

Anybody here remember "Boids"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids

Now reaching a physical universe near you!