WillNotDownvote

"Would the Grand Canyon be less grand if it was only a couple millennia old?"

Yes.

This page seems to suggest that poplar seedling density in clearcut areas is on the order of thousands per acre, which then thin out considerably as the trees mature. See the "seedling development" section.

http://www.na.fs.fed.us/pubs/silvics_manual/volume_2/liriode...

It's a testament to the brilliance of game show producers that they took something like this that both the contestant and the audience will misunderstand (but looks so simple!) and made a long running show out of it, making millions along the way.

Where did you find that 100 trees per acre figure? That sounded really low to me, so I did some googling and found numbers more along the lines of 300-400 per acre.

In fact, 100 trees per acre is the minimum to be classified as a forest in a particular program, and that's in Southern California, which is especially sparse land for trees. http://mountainsfoundation.org/uploads/media_items/landowner...

Poplars are considered to be among the best trees in terms of carbon sequestration according to studies done thus far. In addition, if they're converted to paper and other wood products, they continue to sequester the carbon for the life of those products.

Here's a layman's article on the "best trees" for carbon sequestration- http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_l...

Yellow Poplars in Georgia grow at pretty much that same rate naturally. When I was living there I let a portion of my backyard go from lawn to natural, and the poplars were amazingly fast.

Speed- The difference is after that 10 minutes, the transaction is settled. The money has moved. What you have with a credit card in 10 minutes is a promise that the money will move, possibly days or even weeks later.

The bitcoin can be moved again (spent by the receiver) after 10 minutes. Try that with money you received by a credit card payment.

This really is the fundamental difference of bitcoin- once the money has moved, it's really moved. It takes some time and thinking to appreciate how that opens things up quite a bit.

I was looking for something on r/askhistorians I saw a while back about a hot sauce bottle found in Virginia City ruins, indicating a brand that had gone national in the 1870s or so.

Haven't found it yet, but did find this- a discussion of the saloons of the city, which mentions the Irish bar in town a few times, as well as Tennent's Ale, which was a growing global brand at the time.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/285y5g/what_e...

In any case, I spend a fair amount of time browsing 19th century American magazines and newspapers (for fun, I suppose), and you can see the early national brands growing over the decades. The railroads were what made it all possible, they really did transform daily life in substantial ways. Certainly in places that were directly connected, but also even in more remote towns. Goods moved much more quickly, and growth hacking of all sorts was rewarded quite handsomely.

EDIT- here's the thread I was looking for, it was specifically the Tabasco brand we know today. There's also a subthread on cocktails of the era! http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29tus4/compar...

Trendy brands are fashion items with limited product histories? Who would have guessed?

In any case, it's instructive to look at old menus and wine lists to get a feel for what was actually on offer way back when. For the most part, cocktails as we know them don't show up until the 1940s or so. Though it's worth noting there aren't a lot of speakeasy menus around.

On the other hand, generic types of liquor like "old tom gin" or "rye" date back well into the 19th century.

Wine brands certainly date back even further, and interestingly it's the champagnes that have changed very little in the top brands for centuries. Some beer brands, particularly Guinness and Bass have been popular on American menus for a long, long time.

Browse the New York Public Library's historic menu collection here- http://menus.nypl.org/

This was also part of the Survival Swimming course that used to be mandatory at Georgia Tech back in the olden days. At some point in the class, we had to jump off the high dive, use our pants as described, and remain floating in the deep end of the pool for some length of time (30 minutes I think?)

Fun class, but I shouldn't have taken it in a poorly insulated gym at 8 am Winter Quarter. Brrr.

Combine this with pg's essay on the importance of importing the 'best and brightest' to America and some things start to make sense. More minds working where they can be aimed in the 'desirable' direction.

What if the AI was integral to the design and manufacturing processes of all the airplanes, which is a much more likely path?

Then you can see how it gains 'control', in the senses that control matters anyway, without us necessarily even realizing it, or objecting if we do.

Large corporations "restructure" all the time. Most often this consists of a periodic pruning of exactly these jobs, which really are worthless. The company continues on, wholly unharmed by the cuts.

When I worked as a bartender, if we didn't know what a particular drink was, and the customer didn't know what was in it, we just asked "What color is it?". We usually came up with something satisfactory!

Hinton's Coursera class a couple years ago pulled me in. I wish there were more Coursera classes at that level.

Ubuntu 14.04 on my laptop. I stayed on 10.04 as long as I could, but eventually the lack of support for Chrome and so on convinced me to update.

Plus I have 14.04 running on all the servers where I have a choice.

Certainly my impression of everything that pg has said is that solo founders have the odds stacked heavily against them when it comes to YC acceptance. I'm surprised that you're surprised that's what we all believe.

While having a co-founder might indicate you have trouble convincing people of things, or that you have no desire to do so, it's also the case that having a co-founder is no indication at all that you do have the ability to persuade.

I'd be willing to bet more co-founders than not are the people who happened to be close by and were the path of least resistance for each of them to move forward. Entirely possible there was no convincing, leadership, nor charisma involved.

I wonder why it's obscured so much by what looks like protective housing in some shots. I also wonder how much of its navigation it's actually doing, as opposed to being remote controlled.

You seem like someone tuned in.

So what art is happening in San Francisco right now?

Computers are magic. Dragons are magic. QED.

I'm actually kinda serious.

Also, humans are monkeys. Ergo, "monkey" is popular.

My brother is a restaurant owner. He bought the building one of his places was in, along with several other businesses. Initially it was a struggle to keep the mortgage payments going, but over time the other shops faded out and he replaced them with higher rental rate tenants. His restaurant there eventually died a slow lingering death, but even then he just got in a new tenant with higher margins that could afford more than the rent he was paying himself anyway. In any case, he's now got a lot of equity and a steady stream of income from the building.

His partner in his other restaurant owns the building they're in, and also owns 3 of other 5 businesses in the building. Nice setup if you can get it.

It happens with US accounts too. Banks have a strong incentive to avoid money laundering activities, and no real penalty for false positives.

He made the post mentioning Silk Road on Jan 29, 2011.

He made the post looking for a developer 9 months later, on October 11, 2011.

And as I mentioned below, the fake ID issue seems to have come up after the email warrant was issued, so it wasn't a factor there.

Lack of leads is no excuse to start digging in people's privacy.

The fake ID thing seems to have occurred after the warrant was issued, so I'm not sure I see its relevance.

Right, so the whole 'probable cause' is built on one post about Silk Road. As I say, that seems an awfully thin reason to go digging in someone's email.

I couldn't care less one way or the other about Ulbricht or Silk Road. Not my circus, not my monkeys, as they say.

But I do think it's disturbing one moderately suspicious post is enough to have your privacy violated.

There is literally nothing unusual about "conveniently avoiding specifics" in a tech recruiting post. It's not even a tiny bit suspicious.

He may or may not have been the first to post about Silk Road on Bitcointalk, or anywhere for that matter, but that seems awfully thin ground for getting a warrant.

I'm surprised HN seems to be in favor of such action.

So just discussing Silk Road was enough to get a warrant to look at his email?

There's nothing at all suspicious about the tech recruiting post. It's the same thing everyone here has seen 10,000 times. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=47811.msg568744#msg5...

Which would still be a crime, if he committed it. But he wasn't tried for it.

It's a problem with no ideal answers. On the one hand, without any regulation it will be wild west rules- you can do whatever you're able to do. On the other hand, it's territory outside the ownership of any nation on Earth, and it shouldn't be subject to any nation's control.

Some sort of independent authority would be great, but probably impossible in practice.