darthoctopus

For some context: the author, Benny Ferencz, was the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg war crimes trials (in the aftermath of WWII). He passed away just a couple days ago on April 7th.

[2017]

that is, to proponents of the LVT, a feature, not a bug: it discourages rent-seeking, thereby incentivising other uses (e.g. actually living in the property).

While we're on the topic of Bambi, here's an excerpt from its wikipedia article:

> The copyrights for Bambi, a Life in the Woods were inherited by Anna Wyler, Salten's daughter, who renewed them in 1954. After her death, Wyler's husband sold the rights to Twin Books, a publishing company which subsequently filed a lawsuit against Disney, claiming Disney owed it money for the continued licensing for the use of the book. Disney countered by claiming that Salten had published the story in 1923 without a copyright notice, thus it immediately entered into the public domain. Disney also argued that if the claimed 1923 publication date was accurate, then the copyright renewal filed in 1954 had been registered after the deadline and was thus invalid. The courts initially upheld Disney's view; however, in 1996, the Ninth Circuit Court reversed the decision on appeal in Twin Books Corp. v. Walt Disney Co., 83 F.3d 1162 (1996).[76][77]

I find the juxtaposition of Disney's highly zealous defense of this supposed intellectual property, and active destruction of the public domain, vs. its own questionable claims in the first place, and recourse to the public domain when suits its purposes, quite deeply ironic and hypocritical. If anything, specifying those deer to be Bambi-related only deepens my antipathy towards Disney, and sympathy for OP's parents.

> simultaneously expensive and highly profitable

Indeed. My personal pet theory is that this combination (expensive + unprofitable) might have been why so many early pioneers of computing were female in the first place.

1. these days 2. nursing may be female-dominated, but the gender ratio of doctors (for whom the industry is significantly more profitable) is still heavily skewed towards men, is it not?

That the field became male-dominated once computing became simultaneously expensive and highly profitable should be entirely unsurprising.

Avi Loeb again??

not any more! thanks UKIP!

The key difference here is that every player is forced to give money each tick, whereas in your implementation players are randomly selected to give money. The following implementation does yield an exponential distribution:

    for _ in range(10000):
        for i in range(N_players):
            if W[i] > 0:
                j = np.random.randint(N_players)
                W[i] -= 1
                W[j] += 1

Fwiw your implementation will also relax towards an exponential distribution (try 10000000 iterations); it just converges at a different rate.

This is the Boltzmann game! It's a classic classroom experiment that's useful in conceptualising thermodynamical evolution and the exponential distribution.

It's quite sad to see it presented here without attribution; the appropriate reference is Michalek and Hanson, 2006 [1]. For the physically inclined, this [2] is a more detailed description of the underlying mechanics.

[1]: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ed083p581 [2]: http://hyad.es/boltzmann

(2015)

Relevant reading as well: https://qntm.org/abolish

this strikes me as a considerably smugger formulation of Hanlon's Razor with none of the charity of the original…

> I have never seen someone try to use Pauli matrices to solve a trigonometry problem, but it can certainly be done.

The Pauli matrices in this context are isomorphic to quaternions, which certainly have been used to solve geometric problems in 3 dimensions (although not necessarily by physicists), as has been discussed many many times here on HN. The property of describing spin-1/2 particles (i.e. generating SU(2)) is precisely the same property that makes the quaternions amenable for use in reasoning about 3D rotations!

How does this compare with astropy's units module? The usage (after preamble) seems pretty similar: see e.g. https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/units/index.html. As far as I can see, this part of astropy is by now quite mature (it was already pretty stable when I started grad school 5 years ago)

That's not what Noether's theorem means! The "symmetries" referred to here are operations which leave invariant the action of the physical system (heuristically, the physical laws governing the system). To the extent that one can (at least in principle) write down the action of composite systems as the sum of their actions + interactions, these are taken to mean (again heuristically) the laws of physics writ large. Likewise, "conservation law" here means not specifically the particular result of an experiment (like the work integral you describe), but a more general notion of conservation, in the sense of there being universally invariant conserved quantities (i.e. things that cannot be created or destroyed).

To get a feel for it (and why it may not necessarily be intuitive) consider the following pairs of symmetries and conservation laws:

- The laws of physics are invariant under time translation (i.e. repeating an experiment at different times gives you the same result ceteris paribus). The corresponding conserved quantity is energy.

- The laws of physics are invariant under spatial translation (i.e. repeating an experiment at two different places gives you the same result ceteris paribus). The corresponding conserved quantity is momentum (this is a vector: one component of momentum for each possible direction of translation).

- The laws of physics are invariant under rotation (i.e. repeating an experiment under different orientations gives you the same result ceteris paribus). The corresponding conserved quantity is angular momentum (again a vector, since the rotation group SO(3) has three generators).

- Electromagnetism, constructed as a classical field, exhibits an internal symmetry in the field quantities. The corresponding conserved quantity is the electrostatic charge (actually a 4-vector current).

It is not a priori obvious from from the kind of arguments you've supplied why these should be the case. Demonstrating these would require access to the Lagrangian formalism (i.e. action principles) and how it behaves under these symmetry operations. I would say that, as you suspect, you are fundamentally misunderstanding the situation.

This is very much an Arch issue. The publicly available debian/fedora pandoc packages are statically linked, and, until two years ago, so was the Arch Linux pandoc package. The change to dynamic linking (and therefore 700+ MB of Haskell-related dependencies) was a deliberate decision made at the time to reduce maintainer burden. A statically linked pandoc is still available on the AUR under the name pandoc-bin.

community-contributed subtitles are an essential part of the appeal of YouTube for me, particularly with non-English videos from small operations who may not have the resources to provide quality transcriptions/translations. I don't think this functionality was as little-used as the support post represents. Clearly more options exist for managing spam than just shutting down the feature altogether.

the assertion being made here is not that Mandarin will become a dominant text-based language; it already is one. rather, the argument is that the ascendancy of China, abetted by its economic strategy in the developing world, will force Mandarin into a more central position on the Internet, like it or not.

As supplementary reading material (more to do with Galileo's character rather than competence), I highly recommend the series of articles [1] entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown", which provides a great deal of historical, political and scientific context for Galileo's actions and legacy.

[1]: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...

I have an xps13 (9360) running linux; it's been extremely sturdy and relatively painless to upgrade/repair (except for the memory, which is soldered on). it's also very compact. I've had almost no driver issues (one was resolved by a BIOS update). The battery still lasts ~7 hours after 2.5 years. keyboard is good. would strongly recommend, especially if you're moving around a lot.

If you're on Linux, you can set up your compose key map to do the job. here's an example: https://gist.github.com/carlobaldassi/8951743

not relevant