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davidweir

22 karma · joined September 12, 2012

Numerical cosmologist at the University of Helsinki.

https://saoghal.net

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davidweir··on EFF sues Proctorio on behalf of student falsely DMCA'd
Exactly - assessment methods that are difficult for the sake of being difficult benefit nobody. They’re only marginally more meaningful than FAANG interview questions.

Employers, students and society as a whole have all moved on; they want assessment to demonstrate that students can do what the course has taught them (known in the jargon as “alignment”), not memorise a bunch of facts that they can regurgitate on demand.

davidweir··on Nasty macOS flaw is bricking MacBooks: Don't install this update
> when adjusting volume in the status bar the UI dragbar position is very jumpy

I've noticed this as well. Qualitatively, it seems to be worse when external audio output devices are selected, than for the Internal Speakers.

davidweir··on How to pack a Norwegian sandwich, the world’s most boring lunch
> Most important is good bread

Having lived in Norway for two years, and resorted to deep frozen baguettes from Meny (an upscale supermarket chain) because the fresh bread was so bad, I'm... not sure about this.

Glad to be back in Finland where the bread is good (seriously!) and the lunches are substantial, healthy, warm and filling.

davidweir··on Kvikkalkul: the secret programming language of the Swedish Navy?
In addition to "the quick and the dead", it also appears in the idiom "(cut) to the quick", meaning to cut someone deeply - usually emotionally.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cut_to_the_quick https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/to_the_quick

Take it back further, and it's cognate with bíos in ancient Greek, whence the prefix bio-.

davidweir··on A Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire
Transporting goods inland was hard because no way had yet been found to use horses to provide motive power without strangling them, hence

"It remained cheaper to transport heavy goods in bulk from one end of the Mediterranean to the other than to haul them without a river-way for seventy miles inland."

Source: The Classical World, by Robin Lane Fox http://books.google.com/books?id=nqKpSKq0v6oC&lpg=PP1&dq=%22...

davidweir··on 15 GB now shared between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos
With javascript disabled or on a text-based browser, there is no content on that page. What price accessibility?
davidweir··on [dead]
Useful to note that parent's Ref. 0 has been peer-reviewed and is published in JHEP, a respectable high energy physics journal.

Sadly, articles like those linked often do not check the authors' credentials or whether the research being summarised has been successfully published somewhere rather than just put on the arXiv.

The BBC (and possibly others) go further, asking rival or independent researchers to comment on new work; this approach (check for peer review and also seeking critical comment from third parties) should be the expected standard in scientific news reporting for a lay audience.

DOI link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/JHEP04(2011)029

davidweir··on Ubuntu on tablets
In a sense, not putting their eggs in one basket was their downfall: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/10/nokia_ui_saga/