comicjk

I agree. The author's description of what is "reasonable" sounds like a blueprint for many of my late nights struggling with Windows:

"apps that assume that printing works will still behave in a reasonable manner: You’re just on a system that doesn’t have any printers and all attempts to install a printer are ineffective."

Maybe the underlying assumption is that the users will give up before spending an "unreasonable" amount of time on these tar pit features.

If I understand trial law correctly, the rules of evidence already prohibit introducing a video at trial without proving where it came from (for example, testimony from a security guard that a given video came from a given security camera).

But social media has no rules of evidence. Already I see AI-generated images as illustrations on many conspiracy theory posts. People's resistance to believing images and videos from sketchy sources is going to have to increase very fast (especially for images and videos that they agree with).

They don't sell the paper version directly, but you can get it in reams from any office supply store.

There's also underfunded research on far-UV light, which at the right wavelengths kills pathogens without apparently affecting humans. It might really be that simple.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/could-uv-light-red...

https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/new-type-ultraviolet-lig...

Was anyone else hoping it would detect the ball by simply completing a circuit (since the rails are metal and so is the ball)? Then it could give a magnetic tug after an appropriate time. Maybe this would be flaky because of the poor contact between rails and a rolling ball, but an inductive proximity sensor feels like overkill.

Of course, slogans cannot be perfect. Slogans are tools for communication and should be judged as such. If "most people take it as" meaning something unhelpful, then it's defunct as a slogan. ("Black lives matter" is understood a lot more often, which is why it still works.)

An example of a textbook which starts from the discrete, linear-algebra form of QM (using the Stern-Gerlach spin experiment) is "Quantum Mechanics: A Paradigms Approach" by David McIntyre of Oregon State University. It's not quite like what's described here, but much closer to it than the more traditional way of teaching QM (using differential equations).

Google Ngram Viewer seems to agree, putting peak usage of "do the needful" in the mid-1800s. A phrase I would tend to use instead, "do what is needed", appears to be much more recent.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=do+the+needful...

I have long harbored an ambition of creating a Journal Of Implausible Chemistry, for the publication of research on hydrogen chains and other molecules cruelly disallowed by our impoverished reality.

US inflation YoY was 3% as of the most recent data. https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_consumer_price_index_yoy

The insurance company pays, but what they pay is not this price. US medical care is littered with dummy sticker prices that exist to give insurance company negotiators something to do besides negotiate good rates. https://www.propublica.org/article/why-your-health-insurer-d...

Your original comment didn't say that the notes contained insults and planned lies (beyond the dishonest appearance of spontaneity). Is this sample an exaggeration? It certainly looks a lot worse this way.

This is a classic math pitfall, described by mathematician Jordan Ellenberg as "Don’t talk about percentages of numbers when the numbers might be negative" because they're more often confusing than illuminating.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/06/how-not-to-be-wrong...

I think you're right, though I don't think it's so obvious when it's being specifically compared with US COVID deaths.

Where are you getting that death number? I'm seeing numbers around 43k, 30 times lower. Is your figure including health damage from air pollution or something? Or is it an aggregate over many years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

They're not wrong answers, they're floating-point answers. What's wrong is the assumption that infinite precision will fit in a handful of bytes.

There is a correlation. Germany has the reputation of being very concerned with inflation, which happens when the amount of money in circulation grows relative to the supply of goods to buy. When there is a supply shock (such as this energy conflict), inflation is the natural result, but a concerned government can respond by increasing interest rates to reduce the amount of money in circulation. That way they get less inflation than they would have otherwise, at the cost of slowing down the economy.

They didn't ask what books both men had read - I suspect Gore has read at least a large chunk of the Bible (he still describes himself as a Baptist to this day). It's just not his favorite book.

An example of what makes this so difficult is the "activity cliffs" often found in drug development: many pairs of apparently similar molecules will have totally different activity against a target protein. These differences can be understood if examined with costly physics-based simulations, but they have so far shown few of the simpler, compressible patterns that make machine learning effective.

I was baffled when I first entered my schedule for a conference into Google Maps, only to find when I flew across the country that all the times were wrong. I understand that it's a reasonable choice to use the local time zone at event creation, but it sure wasn't what I expected (I vaguely thought it would be like your alarm clock example, where it would move with the local time).

I see this model of science as potentially misleading. One obvious reaction to the "too many bricks" idea is to try to put together some grand theory yourself (an "edifice"), but this nearly always means becoming a crank. Likewise, I don't think see how a scientist has ever been stopped by the mere existence of too much trivial research, though they might be diverted from better work by the need to produce mediocre work quickly. I prefer Hamming's questions: "What are the most important problems in your field?" followed by "Why aren't you working on them?"

Nonprofit status makes it much harder to extract large profits. A charity founder can pay himself a million-dollar salary, but he can't sell his shares in the nonprofit and become a billionaire.

The question in this trial was: Will people in this at-risk population have less calcium buildup in the heart if we give them vitamin K2? The answer was, on average, no. That's the key piece of information for public health.

Blood tests would tell us if the randomization ended with the two groups being very different, but the prior probability of that is small. Blood tests would also tell us if there is some subgroup that benefits more from the treatment, but with an increased risk of getting the answer wrong due to smaller sample sizes, which would lead to worse public health decisions.

This is a randomized trial with hundreds of subjects. The two groups should be statistically similar to each other in their magnesium levels (and other attributes). That's the purpose of randomization: so you don't have to find and control for confounders afterwards like you do in a non-randomized trial. It's easy to obscure or reverse a result by controlling for the wrong variables, for some examples see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/24/you-need-more-confound...

If the proposed intervention is giving a pill, it seems fair to test that instead of a proxy. The study had hundreds of people; if the effect were big enough to be clinically significant they hopefully would have detected it, even with some patients failing to take the pills.

There is a deeper story. The realistic technical details are the bones; the flesh is the relationships between two human civilizations and a less-advanced alien race that doesn't know humans exist.

I think A Deepness In The Sky is actually better, especially for people on here. The story takes place on spaceships thousands of years in the future, but the characters are still using code based on Unix timestamps, and still complaining about legacy software.

You call passing a bill through Congress "immediate", and you think it can be "undone quickly"? I think the long-term budget deficit is too high, but the budget process is not responsive enough to be used to control inflation. (It's also too slow and clumsy when used the other way, as fiscal stimulus.)

One way of using the deficit deliberately as an economic control dial would be for Congress to grant the Federal Reserve the authority to adjust payroll tax rates within a given range. I doubt this could ever happen politically, though.

There were some small Alaskan islands that Japan actually seized. The non-military population of Alaska in 1941 was tiny, about 73k, and land links to the lower 48 were weak, so isolating and occupying the territory by sea might have worked. The same goes for at least the smaller Hawaiian islands. The Philippines were successfully occupied despite a much larger population.

Regarding Asia, I think "to acquire territory" is not the real question. Most Americans today would say that we should assist staunch allies such as South Korea if they were invaded, without any desire to acquire their territory. That goes more for the Philippines in 1941, since the US had given them a 10-year security guarantee under the 1934 Philippine Independence Act.

The point of the police in a society is that they have a near-monopoly on armed force, and therefore criminals can't hope to win by escalation. In a world where the US has by far the biggest military, it can to some extent arrogate to itself the role of a police force, which raises the issues you suggest.

WW2 is not this situation, and it's an anachronism to analyze it as such. Pearl Harbor was followed by a string of other US defeats. For a while, it looked like Japan would set up an empire from Alaska to Australia. You don't have the luxury of deciding to hold back in a situation where all your efforts might not be enough.