2,243 karma · joined April 22, 2008
I know Webkit/Blink have humongous test suites, but these probably aren't easy to adapt to a toy layout engine.
Assuming yes, do their users have significant problems understanding the written text when pronounced in an audiobook? Are there well-known conventions or shortcuts or explanations that audiobook readers insert into their speech to signal the correct meaning of the word?
Do Japanese audiobooks provide evidence for or against the idea that doing away with kanji in writing would not harm understanding significantly?
If it's true that the appeals court would be likely to severely reduce the damage amount, if not overrule the verdict itself, is it reasonable to claim that the decision not to stay enforcement is by itself unjust, in that it effectively robs the defendant of a chance to exhaust the judicial process?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Health/comments/4hhdsj/the_science_...
On the face of it it isn't obvious to me why using a least-square model trained on just the baseline of these 16 individuals (the way they predict RMR in the paper) is better than the standard equation, and if the standard equation is a much closer fit to measurement, this seems suspect. But I know next to nothing about metabolic measurements.
Going to read more Lafferty next year, I'm pretty sure.
Michael Frayn, Democracy. A compulsively readable play about an episode in the politics of West Germany in the 1970s, a subject I didn't know could be made so interesting to me. Superb.
Michael Flynn, Eifelheim. Excellent and profound SF/historical novel about aliens crashing in the Germany of the Middle Ages, and how that would work out. Avoids cheap tricks, very strong on historical research and verisimilitude.
Ross Thomas, The Cold War Swap, Cast a Yellow Shadow, Chinaman's Chance. Very well-written thrillers, typically stories about spying or political corruption. I'm usually bored by this genre, couldn't put these down. Will read more by this (hitherto unknown to me) author.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wizard of Earthsea. (reread) Still as good as I remembered it to be.
P.K.Dick, The Man in the High Castle. (reread) Very inventive and weird in a good way, but I wish the characters would be a little different (everyone is the same highly neurotic mouthpiece for the author), and the obsession with I Ching does nothing for me. Still worth reading.
Robert Ryan, Dead Man's Land. A Sherlock Holmes novel in which 90% of the action is with John Watson rejoining the Army to help in World War I at his late middle age, and Holmes appears only briefly. Works quite well. Very detailed on day-to-day trench warfare and medicine at the front.
Michael Frayn, Noises Off. A funny short play, very meta, not as good as his "Democracy".
Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Better than his two long novels of the 2000s. A self-contained fairy tale, fun to read and well-written, but not beyond that. Gaiman's unsurpassed masterpiece, to me, is still The Sandman.
Michael Swansick, Chasing the Phoenix. SF, set on a future Earth where computers and electronic communication are outlawed following problems with runaway AIs, but there's lots of high technology (e.g. genetics) otherwise. Funny and amusing, a light read.
[edit: deleted about 20 books I didn't like or hated]
Henry Marsh, Do No Harm. A brilliant memoir by a neurosurgeon about his work, the nature of his profession, successes and mistakes (especially the latter). Frequently touches or verges into the personal. Not morbid, but often sad.
Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers. Viola Spolin, Improvisation for the Theater
Two very good books about improvisation, although Spolin's is too dry and theory-laden for me (it's meant for teachers more than practitioners). Both, however, pale compared to Keith Johnstone's earlier Impro: Improvisation and the Theater, which is a life-changing book about what improvisation can teach us about spontaneous creativity and relationships between people. I recommend that one first and foremost if you know nothing about improvisation and are curious.
Martinus J G Veltman, Facts and Mysteries in Elementary Particle Physics. A readable account - necessarily simplified, of course - of the current state of affairs in elementary particles and much of the last 50 years of history, by one of the participants (a Nobel prize winner). Not as organized and methodical as I thought it would be, and half a year later I forgot most of the physical explanations, but it was an interesting read.
Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies. A thorough examination of the hundreds of horrible examples when "natural" societies studied by anthropologists have customs that are not only bad from our modern Western point of view, but arguably fail in achieving their own objectives. The whole book exists to counter lazy cultural relativism of the "maybe we don't like X, but if they do it, it must be for a good reason and it must be a useful adaptation for them" kind.
Michael Harris, Mathematics Without Apologies. A very eclectic and idiosyncratic book by a mathematician on the sociology and epistemology of mathematics as a discipline. To be appreciated for its wealth of ideas and references to other interesting books and theories, rather than for any particular argument or thread.
Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. A story on what happened when a psychologist tried to bring three psychiatric patients, each believing themselves to be Christ, together and to talk it out amongst themselves. Happened in the 1960s. The idea is more interesting than the outcome.
Fiction, best to worst:
Patrick O'Brian, The Hundred Days. The penultimate book in the series of the best historical novels (the Aubrey-Maturin series) ever written, by a huge margin. The series transcend the genre and I count the Aubrey-Maturin books among the very best books I read in the last decade.
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle. A brilliantly written coming-of-age story about a girl growing up in an impoverished family occupying a decaying castle in the English countryside, set in the 1930s. Reminded me in many ways of Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows, a novel in the similar genre (but with a younger protagonist) that's known much less than it deserves.
Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo. If you read and liked Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude, this one is shorter, darker, involves many more dead people, and you may want to give it a try.
Alfred Hayes, In Love. A story of a man obsessed by love in a mid-century NYC. Unexpectedly touching, very convincing psychologically.
Iain M. Banks, Against a Dark Background. SF, a grand heist novel set in a advanced civilization living in a star system located unimaginably far away from any other stars and galaxies, and so doomed to a lone struggle with its own long history. A wealth of technological and social ideas you'd expect from Banks. The ending felt a bit forced.
Gene Wolfe, There Are Doors. Gene Wolfe, Nightsite of the Long Sun/Lake of the Long Sun.
Gene Wolfe is the best writer American science fiction produced in the last half-century. "There are Doors" is a pretty weird fantasy novel about an alternate world where men die after their first intercourse (as some spiders do in ours), and the hero travels back and forth between that world and ours. It's good, but not as strong as Wolfe's best, which to my taste is the Book of the New Sun tetralogy, the novellas in the Fifth Head of Cerberus collection, and many of his short stories (well-collected in The Best of Gene Wolfe). The other two are the first half of the "Book of the Long Sun" series that I'm still reading through.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed. Superb political SF about an imagined anarchist [anti-]utopia. A serious attempt to describe a human society with no central power structures and no ownership. The hero is a physicist born and raised in that society who escapes to a sibling planet with the more typical modern states. This novel took all the awards in the 1970s when it was published, and deservedly so.
[cont'd]
If you try to think about it in a clean-slate way, sort of; forget "oppression", "microagressions against minorities" and all the other politicized jargon that the current version is peppered with, and ask yourself (answers are my opinions, obviously)...
Q. Is there a problem with some open source communities being too hostile, unwelcoming, potentially harassing to many people? A. Yes. Some communities are clearly much more "nice" than others. Some are clearly much more welcoming of newbies, etc.
Q. How does this "bad behavior" manifest itself, in actual open source communities? A. Mostly by how much rudeness and brusqueness some regulars of the community feel they can treat others with. If you hang around on forums, issues, IRC channels etc. enough you can get a clear feel of the "niceness meter". Sometimes there's also explicit misogyny, but that's relatively rare. Other explicit forms of hostility (e.g. racism, transmisogynism) are even rarer to nonexistent. It's simply that if the overall level of niceness is low, then people behave like assholes. Asshole-like behavior is easy to interpret as racism etc.
Q. Is this a huge problem? Should we invest effort in trying to make communities more nice? A. I don't know, seems like a personal call. I personally like the nice and welcoming communities much more, and don't really see the point of being rude and hostile (I think it's counterproductive and not only wrong).
Q. Is a code of conduct a way to achieve that? A. Doubt it. Seems like the norm set by the leaders of the community, together with a few clear examples of "we will not tolerate this kind of behavior", is how it's successfully done. Is there a project which went "not nice -> adopted CoC -> became clearly nicer"? I haven't seen any.
Suppose there just isn't enough interest in the younger generation of mathematicians to study the proof, even if the old guard are able to organize it better before they retire. Then we may reach a situation in which CFSG will still be used as a proved theorem and not a conjecture - because it's so powerful and important in many fields of math - but its proof will be lost to collective memory. I'm not sure, but I think that state of affairs might be without precedent.
(Here's a quote from Gian-Carlo Rota's _Indiscrete Thoughts_ on forgotten and rediscovered math:
"The history of mathematics is replete with injustice. There is a tendency to exhibit toward the past a forgetful, oversimplifying, hero-worshiping attitude that we have come to identify with mass behavior. Great advances in science are pinned on a few extraordinary white-maned individuals. [...]
One consequence of this sociological law is that whenever a forgotten branch of mathematics comes back into fashion after a period of neglect only the main outlines of the theory are remembered, those you would find in the works of the Great Men. The bulk of the theory is likely to be rediscovered from scratch by smart young mathematicians who have realized that their future careers depend on publishing research papers rather than on rummaging through dusty old journals.
In all mathematics, it would be hard to find a more blatant instance of this regrettable state of affairs than the theory of symmetric functions. Each generation rediscovers them and presents them in the latest jargon. Today it is if-theory, yesterday it was categories and functors, and the day before, group representations. Behind these and several other attractive theories stands one immutable source: the ordinary, crude definition of the symmetric functions and the identities they satisfy.")
Consider a paradox such as "This sentence is false". There's a problem with deciding if it's true or false. Countless articles and books have been written about it, and there exist different ways of dealing with this "difficulty". However, nothing prevents you from actually writing these letters on a piece of paper, and nothing prevented me from typing them a few seconds ago. The puzzle we're talking about makes the same point in a more amusing fashion.
If you're reading a math textbook, or a CS textbook, or any but the most fluffy programming book, then you're giving it so much of your time and attention that any cost up to $100 is meaningless next to how much one book is better or worse than another.
I see people living in the First World and saying things like "I wanted to learn calculus from this very well-recommended book, but it costs $50, so I got this reprint of an older textbook for $15". You're basing your choice of the guide to challenging material that you predict will be tough to understand on the cost of a dinner and a movie. Textbooks are not commodities! Some of them are really good and others are really bad and it depends on the student, too. It isn't always that the more expensive one is better, to be sure. Often it's just the opposite. I'm saying you should just forget about price altogether and choose based on sampling/reviews/recommendations.
Things may be difficult for someone truly in dire poverty, or someone living in a poor country where $50 is more like the month's earnings. Those people should just go to gen.lib.rus.ec and download everything.
I guess what I love in Rudin is that he gives the Level 2 details in such a lucid logical manner, with nothing missing and yet relatively tersely, all the details interlocking together. I got a sense of real beauty from reading him as an undergraduate that I did not get from other textbooks. I think that enjoyment ranks much higher from me than the disappointment from not getting the motivation early, which I do try to give myself when I teach something.
I wonder if these two can be separated: if a textbook could be Rudin-style in logical unity, terseness, and beauty and yet not "hide the scaffolding". To some degree, I thought Stephen Abbott's "Understanding Analysis" was a step in that direction, though it was still too wordy and meandering compared to Rudin, for me.
http://shkrobius.livejournal.com/375927.html
I think about that now every time I see a pleasing, healthy-looking, tasty-looking deeply yellow yolk on my plate.
You do make a good point. "no harassment happened" shouldn't be the strong default belief (I'm not sure it actually is for many people here). But based on the statement and what is known about the relevant politics in academia, "serious harassment definitely occurred" shouldn't be one either.
Lewin = undergraduate-level physics Susskind = graduate-level physics, converted to minimize math and maximize accessible explanations, but still graduate-level physics.
MLK being dead plays to the strength of this analogy, because Lewin is retired. Removing his lectures on OCW, recorded 15 years ago, is like refusing to read or watch MLK because of his moral failings. The issue with the MOOC on MITx, where he participated as late as last year, is different, and I would agree with barring his participation on the platform in case the transgressions are serious enough. But if you look over the discussion, it is the removal of the static, non-dynamic, incredibly popular and famous lectures on OCW that strikes many people as unjustified.
P.S. Feynman was a creep, and anyone who thinks that fact should cause people to stop reading his justly famous textbook and prefer that others "step up" is, not to put too fine a point on it, an idiot.
This comparison is completely inappropriate. You're pitching the contributions of one individual against the mores of the entire society over generations, as if Walter Lewin is single-handedly responsible for this "loss of uncountable women". How are you not ashamed to do this?
> I'm sure there are many fun and engaging physics teachers at universities big and small across the world who can lecture equally well and don't harass women online. One of them can step up.
Well, MLK was a plagiarist. Do you think it'd be a good idea to stop celebrating his life and works, stop citing him, revoke the holiday, etc.? After all, there are many fun and engaging civil rights activists around the world. One of them can step up.
Err, what? Kafka died in 1924, 15 years before Weidmann's execution. He also never worked for Paris-Soir or any other newspaper.
I believe [ʊ] used to be [u], but I don't remember when this quality change happened.
I think there are still current dialects in the center and north of England where this split didn't happen, so they would have [lʊv]. Here's an interesting self-aware example: http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6911/understa...
Words like move, remove, prove used to be pronounced with the long [o:] sound before the Great Vowel Shift (which is how they got their spelling), and by Shakespeare's time they moved to [u:], which they retained until modern times. I tried to find any evidence other than the love- rhymes that these words could be pronounced with a short [ʌ] sound, and couldn't.
On the other hand, "love" was probably pronounced usually with a short [u] sound, the same sound we use today in "put". All the words with u in a closed syllable used that sound as well, like "cut", "but", "cup" "sun" etc. The change from this [u] to [ʌ] happened after Shakespeare's time, mostly later in the 17th century, resulting in the familiar pronunciation of "but" "cup" "sun", but leaving after it a fair number of exceptions that refused to follow the change, such as "put" "push" etc.
"prove" and "love" did rhyme when Shakespeare used them; but perhaps the rhyme was a bit inexact, rhyming long [u:] of "prove/move/remove" and short [u] of "love" (but still much more exact than modern [u:] and [ʌ] of course). Or, as Charles Barber claims in his "Early Modern English" (unwieldly Google Books links: http://bit.ly/1uI7SWQ), "love" was exceptional in having a variant [u:] pronunciation especially beloved by poets, precisely because they could use it to rhyme it with handy words like "prove" and "move". Either way, the love/move rhyme did not sound at all the way Ben Crystal pronounces it.
This shows an infinite loop in lambda calculus evaluation. It can be arrived at independently (and I'd be surprised if it hadn't been) just by trying to build the simplest expression that doesn't reduce. Why do you need the Y combinator for this?
Sorry, I don't understand what that means.
Also, (lambda x: x(x))(lambda x: x(x)) already gives you an infinite loop, so why do you need a Y combinator to show non-termination? Once you have functions as first-class citizens that you can copy around, you've lost control of termination. Seems pretty intuitive. What's the specific contribution of the Y combinator?