craftsman

It would be more accurate to say that science corrects itself. At any given time there are ideas which appear to have been verified as much as possible, others which are near speculation, and others which are quite uncertain with evidence for and against.

What I think the parent means by contradicting science is rather different: the Bible says things which go against ideas which we believe have been verified by evidence, but the Bible won’t be changed to reflect that understanding. On the other hand, science will change its idea of what it thinks to be true as more evidence becomes available. Nobody changes things in the Bible.

I can’t reply to the question I was asked, so I reply here:

How many have I verified? I’m not sure of the #, but I’ve verified much of classical physics, chemistry, astronomical observations, and lots of things in electronics (some of which rely on quantum mechanics) and electromagnetism.

But as I said, they question is not whether you or I have personally verified everything, but whether they are verifiable in principle, by anyone. The claims of chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc, are verifiable. The claims of a holy man are not.

If you can’t use the concept of causality outside of the universe, then the idea that there’s a creator outside of the universe who caused the universe is already out of bounds.

You seem to have a view that the world consists only of (a) people who claim things, and (b) people who believe them, and that there’s no difference between types of claims.

The claim of someone who says they have the word of god is hearsay and there’s no way to figure out whether they do or not. The claims of someone who says they’ve followed the scientific method are verifiable by others. If they claim that their experiments show tiny blue tetrahedrons make up all matter, other people can check. Nobody can check if god talks to the first person.

The difference between the two claims is whether they are verifiable.

> Maybe the consequences of that in terms of individual wealth ownership are unpalatable to you, but the alternative would result in an option that is net significantly worse for society.

The alternative? Surely there are more than two ways of organizing society: (i) one with successful entrepreneurship but large wealth inequality, and (ii) presumably one without successful entrepreneurship along with various other characteristics that make that society clearly "net" worse than it would be in (i).

For example, I could imagine a tax regime which resulted in a cap on individual wealth at, say, 1% of GDP. Or 5%. Or 0.1%. Or ...

It's not clear to me that there's an unambiguous demarcation between only two types of societies, and one which is observed across all possible policy or economic schemes.

The law can provide the authority to act, the boundaries of action, and define the intent. The agencies, by taking on the role of determining & implementing the details of Congress’ directive, reduce the overt political influence that tends to dilute or pollute (no pun intended) the aims of the legislation. If Congress finds that the agency has stepped outside its mandate, they can correct the legislation to be more specific.

That's true in exactly the way that disproves your point. Prior to the Federal Reserve era, there were so-called non-fiat currencies, that is, those convertible to silver or gold. Except when they weren't. There were many notable periods of inflation and deflation, and many periods during which convertibility was suspended.

So only in the most narrow sense is it even possibly true that "the US did not have inflation when it did not have fiat money": if you ignore the times when convertibility was suspended, it becomes a slightly more accurate statement, but still not true as it ignores inflation soon after the founding, large deflationary periods in the early and late 1800s, and subsequent inflationary periods prior to WW I. So you have to ignore convertibility suspension and the inflation and deflation in order to argue that there was no inflation or deflation.

The one iron-clad law of "non-fiat" currencies: eventually they will become fiat currencies.

The Mathematical Experience by Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh talks about the different ways of viewing mathematics, including this Platonic idea of it existing "out there". Another poster noted a quote--which I also think is from that book--about many mathematicians being Platonists on the weekend. It's a beautifully written book. I've read it twice, and just thinking about it makes me want to read it again.

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

> I don't know why / who said that pipenv is the official recommended way, if it is it should not be and I hope it is not.

The Python Packaging Authority says that pipenv is the first "recommended way" for managing application dependencies: https://packaging.python.org/guides/tool-recommendations/#ap...

Except if pipenv doesn't meet your needs. Then use pip.

Or, if you need cross-platform support, use buildout.

Or, if you are doing scientific computation, don't use any of those, use conda, Hashdist, or Spack.

Or if you need to create a package, use setuptools and twine.

So, no, pip and virtualenv don't solve the problem, because there are a lot of different problems and use-cases. I can say from my experience that conda is _the_ best solution to the problem for scientific work.

For those interested in hearing more about TI calculators and hacking on them, this episode of the Embedded.fm podcast was really fun, and there are a couple interesting links in the show notes: https://www.embedded.fm/episodes/259.

I'll admit to it being poorly worded. :)

So yes, I know that small, embedded systems exist, so let me be more concrete in my questions, some of which you started to answer:

* What languages are used on these systems?

* What RTOSs would be interesting to learn?

* What processors are typically used?

* What hardware should I get to start learning?

* What organizations and companies do a lot of small embedded systems?

I think I know the answer to _some_ of these, but I'm interested to hear what you think. And thanks for the answer!

Have you tried NASA's Earthdata Search? https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/

Two friends and I built and submitted _At Journey's End_:

https://github.com/w0hrk/js13k

We used TypeScript along with rollup and uglifyjs and got the zipped artifact just under 13k. The contest was a lot of fun and we learned a bunch along the way. It's a great contest and I'd encourage you to participate next time. Get a friend or two and have fun building a game you enjoy.

This is spot on.

Regarding the last paragraph, I was once in a meeting at a very large company in which an AVP asked me and several other experienced engineers: "Ignore the technical details; is there any reason we shouldn't purchase this large suite of Oracle products?" That was the litmus test, so yes, it's purely a safety play for many.

It's probably worth (re)watching Cory Doctorow's talk at 28c3: The Coming War on General Computation. He mentions this issue around the 23:45 mark, but the whole talk is great.

https://youtu.be/HUEvRyemKSg

Regarding "it imposes rather strict conditions": Yes, it imposes the condition that the user of the software retain their freedoms with respect to the software.

Software freedom is a double-edged sword: to have it, you have to restrict other people's freedom to take it away from you.

I do understand your point here. But, as the article points out, the very thing in question here is: are we going to determine science funding solely by politics, or are there measurable, objective ways of determining where to allocate funding? If the underlying science is not testable, falsifiable, then we really are in the realm of politics and taste. One might almost say, religion.

I greatly admire Donald Knuth. He's humble, dedicated to his work in a healthy way, and has fascinating outside interests in organ music, for example.

Most of all, I see in him the playful attitude about computer science that Alan Perlis referred to: "I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing."

These data are available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC): http://nsidc.org/data/nimbus/index.html

I know you're being cynical, but these weren't the originals--they were photographic images of the originals displayed on a TV monitor (!). So though what they received were unopened boxes, they were unopened boxes of poor copies. In addition, the original data wasn't used for climate research, but rather weather monitoring and forecasting. One of the innovative things about rescuing this data was to put this data to a different use than its original purpose.

I say this just to clarify that it is not the case that we launched these satellites and then never bothered to use the data (i.e., in case readers had an image of the Ark of the Covenant being wheeled into a warehouse).

It was a crisp fall Saturday when I first learned about the basement full of computers.

The previous night my dad's boss hosted a party at his house that my parents had attended. My dad was in the IS department of a medium-sized insurance company, and his department was full of chess players, assembly language programmers, ham radio operators, and computer tinkerers. My dad's boss was all of those rolled into one. "You would love it!" my mom told me, "his basement is full of computers!" My imagination ran wild.

Within a week or two my dad's boss invited us over. We pulled up to his house and I gazed up at a 50-foot tower with a beam antenna next to his garage. As I walked into the basement, I could hear strange sounds of beeping, static, and garbled voice. My first sight was of three walls covered with a custom-built set of cabinets that contained a dizzying array of electronic equipment. I would later learn that it was full of Heathkit radios and computers. I was awe-struck.

Later that fall my dad announced, "we're getting a computer." We proceeded to spend several evenings and weekends at my dad's boss' house where they built our family's Heathkit H-89 computer. As they soldered, I played on the Heathkit pinball machine. Our H-89, as I recall, had 16K of RAM and a 4 MHz Z-80 CPU. My first program was about twenty print statements that displayed a crude outline of a football helmet using asterisks.

That winter I studied for and received my amateur radio novice, and later, my general class license, and my dad's boss administered the novice test. I remember him sending morse code at 6 or 7 WPM and excitedly decoding it and reading it back to him. My first radio was a Heathkit purchased for $80 at a ham 'flea market'. I went on to build a Heathkit VTVM (vacuum tube voltmeter), a code practice oscillator, and a few other kits. There were several Christmas nights spent soldering into the wee hours of the morning.

Without my dad, his boss, and Heathkit, it's unlikely I'd be doing what I do today. Thanks for the memories, Heathkit.

We've got a whole house fan and it's awesome. We live in a climate that cools off nicely at night and it works like a charm.

We do run the AC for a few hours on really hot days to 'cut the top off' of the heat, but at night the whole house fan comes on. We can then go a large part of a really hot day by managing shades and windows and the house stays nicely cool.

I agree, but why not use, say, a library? The Library of Congress comes to mind. Perhaps the National Archives would be appropriate as well.

Please do post an update. I have a side project I'm starting that will be a paid service, but I'd like to AGPL it in keeping with the free software philosophy.

Awesome! You guys were great. I thoroughly enjoyed that, so thanks to you too.

I met Jim at Rocky Mountain Ruby a couple years ago. He was friendly, easily approachable, and had that hacker humor that is so fun. You could just tell he loved everything about Ruby, hacking, and teaching and learning from others.

He sang Ruby Coding High at that conference:

http://www.confreaks.com/videos/740-rockymtnruby2011-ruby-co...

Thanks for helping us all get on a Ruby Coding High Jim, we'll miss you.

It's interesting that nearly everything that was wrong with the Space Shuttle was accurately predicted in this article. Both catastrophic breakups were essentially predicted (a booster failing and tile damage from falling fuel tank ice), as well as the huge cost overruns and performance shortfalls. I wonder what author Gregg Easterbrook thinks as he looks back on the Shuttle era? Having a quick glance at his article on Wikipedia, it seems he's written or said a bit more about space policy since the shuttle; I'll have to read up.

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

I'll let the accountants and economists weigh in on that. But I'd rather rely on data than the argument "they all play accounting tricks therefore it must all cancel out". In other words, I'd like to see a similar analysis of the US's trade numbers and see if the resultant 'trickery' adjustment results in a significant shift in the trade numbers.

Or just: when China's per capita GDP surpasses that of the US (since the 4.2 probably won't remain constant).