driggs

Meanwhile our coal baron Governor is trumpeting that the State of West Virginia has a historic record $1.8-billion tax surplus this year:

https://governor.wv.gov/News/press-releases/2023/Pages/Gov.-...

And we're forcing the primary state university to gut its programs and/or risk complete shutdown over $45-million budget deficit, partially due to inadequate state funding.

Why? Because - tragically - West Virginians pride themselves on ignorance, consistently vote against their own longterm best interests, and loathe the idea of liberal higher education in all its forms.

(To be fair, the current WVU administration is to blame for letting this get out of hand rather than proactive budget cuts, but eduction should also be one of our literally-poor state's biggest investments.)

This cynical perspective has been brought to you by a lifetime WV resident and WVU Computer Science grad, consistently disappointed by my state's active rejection of progress.

This is in the FAQ, which you don't even need to click to read from the front page:

https://aerolite.dev/applite/index.html#details

    > Q: What information does Applite track?
    > A: None.

That's because the loophole doesn't exist. It's an obviously flawed interpretation of the 2018 Farm Bill which isn't likely to hold up in court when it's finally tested there.

Here's a commentary by drug policy litigator Matt Zorn: https://ondrugs.substack.com/p/delta-9-thc-gummies

    The prefatory text to Schedule I(c) of the Controlled Substances Act removes all doubt: “[u]nless specifically excepted or unless listed in another schedule, any material, compound, mixture, or preparation, which contains any quantity of the following hallucinogenic substances” is a Schedule I substance. 

    A 12 mg THC extract infused into a 4-gram gummy consisting of non-cannabis isn’t a “hemp” gummy. It is a “material,” “mixture,” or “preparation” containing “marihuana,” which is a Schedule I controlled substance.

I was more interested in that fascinating map captioned "The most remote places in the US".

Here's the source, which is based upon "travel time to cities" on a global scale:

https://sci-hub.ee/10.1038/nature25181

https://archive.ph/20230516154150/https://www.washingtonpost...

    Of all towns [in the US] with more than 1,000 residents, Glasgow [Montana], home to 3,363 people in the rolling prairie of northeastern Montana, is farthest — about 4.5 hours in any direction — from any metropolitan area of more than 75,000 people.

I think that almost nobody in the year 2023 would assume "a piece of wood" given the phrase "GPS Log", blue collar or white collar.

That's what makes it a good pun.

I'd like to think that this whole project came about from the pun "GPS Log".

As in, it's not just a GPS tracklog, it's a literal wooden log.

Brilliant!

WV is among the bottom 5 poorest states in the US, with West Virginia University critical for providing affordable in-state college education. WVU is urgently dealing with a $45-million budget shortfall.

I know two graduates of the Puppetry program, and neither of them work professionally in any puppetry-related career. They may as well have graduated with any liberal arts degree. The Puppetry major gave them a way to prove their "quirkiness" in college.

Here's the course requirements for the BFA in Puppetry: http://catalog.wvu.edu/undergraduate/collegeofcreativearts/d...

It looks like there are two puppetry-specific courses, with the vast majority of courses coming from the more general Theatre program with Liberal Arts core.

I don't know what the Puppetry BFA costs the university, but it's always been a joke to WVU students, and doesn't seem to serve West Virginia residents in a meaningful way.

(Source: WVU grad and local, who received an affordable in-state CS/Engineering degree, and now works in and supports WV's tiny but growing tech industry)

With "hiker" in the name, I had hoped to see onboard GPS. Nope!

I parsed this title as "lightning bug gun" and wondered why I didn't recall a bioluminescent insect powered weapon in that game.

> I want syntax that will keep people from using collections.namedtuple() just for its attribute API and ignoring/regretting its index API.

The author is proposing a worse dataclass, because they don't want to ignore positional indexing on namedtuple?

Don't let all the physiology distract you from the HN-relevant information theory(?) in the `Consciousness and Integrated Information` section near the end:

  A recent theory suggests a principled reason: information and integration may be the very essence of consciousness. Classically, information is the reduction of uncertainty among alternatives: when a coin falls on one of its two sides, it provides 1 bit of information, whereas a die falling on one of six faces provides ~2.6 bits. But then having any conscious experience, even one of pure darkness, must be extraordinarily informative, since we could have had countless other experiences instead (think of all the frames of every possible movie). Having any experience is like throwing a die with a trillion faces and identifying which number came up. On the other hand, every experience is an integrated whole that cannot be subdivided into independent components.

  Less metaphorically, the theory claims that the level of consciousness of a physical system is related to the repertoire of different states (information) that can be discriminated by the system as a whole (integration). A measure of integrated information, called phi (Φ), can be used to quantify the information generated when a system enters one particular state of its repertoire, above and beyond the information generated independently by its parts. In practice, Φ can only be measured rigorously for small, simulated systems. However, empirical measures could be devised to evaluate integrated information on the basis of EEG data, resting functional connectivity, or TMS-evoked responses.

Noting that the parent comment states that they can't remember autobiographical memories from the same day, which sounds closer to SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) than Aphantasia, though research shows that there's often an overlap of the two conditions.

I've been happily using the `Bing Chat For All Browsers` Chrome extension for many weeks, and have been very impressed with the new AI powered Bing and its chat agent.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-chat-for-all-...

...but not happy enough to install Edge!

Because its depth was discovered by researchers in 2021.

The Mayans knew that it was a blue hole. They didn't know that it was among the deepest known in the world, simply that it was one of many blue holes.

What makes blue holes so fascinating, in my opinion, is the historical perspective they provide.

These were once deep air-filled vertical shafts, formed by the longterm erosional/dissolutional power of falling water under the influence of gravity. Speleothems like stalactites prove that they formed in an air-filled environment.

In other words, the present-day sea level at the Yucatan Peninsula was formerly at least 275m lower; and/or the present-day surface was at least 275m higher. The paper attributes this to "glacio-eustatic changes", which is the equal-and-opposite-reaction involving lowered sea level (increased global glaciation) and the buoyant rising of the regional continental crust since the mass of additional sea water has been removed.

Highly recommend the documentary "The Creeping Garden" for an insightful look at slime moulds and intelligence:

http://www.creepinggarden.com

> Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong. [Toby Spribille] has shown that the largest and most species-rich group of lichens are not alliances between two organisms, as every scientist since Schwendener has claimed. Instead, they’re alliances among three. All this time, a second type of fungus has been hiding in plain view.

This idea is unlikely to work unless the entirety of the pressurized volume is encased in a giant "balloon" or some sort of sealant coating the entirety of the cave's surface.

Lava tubes are formed from flowing molten basalt, and basalt shrinks when it cools, forming contraction cracks. If we're producing breathable atmosphere and pumping it into lava tubes, it's destined to leak from innumerable cracks in the cave walls. And it'd presumably leak out faster than we can produce new breathable atmosphere.

This differs from proposed deep "carbon capture" strategies, where we'd pump large amounts of CO2 underground for storage; in that case, the depth provides an airtight seal due to significant overburden, impermeable clays/shales, and perched aquifers above it. But lava tubes, by their very nature, are always very near the surface. That's because lava tubes - unlike other types of caves - form on the surface as molten basalt flows over it. They generally don't survive for long (geologically speaking) nor survive significant sedimentation which would bury them deeply.

Lava tube caves can certainly provide shelter, and can significantly buffer temperature changes. But it would be extremely difficult to use them as an airtight biosphere.

Source: I'm former cave resource manager for the National Park Service at an NPS unit with 700+ lava tube caves which was used by NASA for training and ongoing research.

I came here to post the exact same sentiment and the ordered phrase "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle".

Yes, it's bad that this was advertised as a specific recycling program and involved parties knowingly or unknowingly diverged from that stated plan.

But from a global resource consumption perspective, it's far preferable to re-use good shoes (which also reduces the production of new shoes) than to recycle them for recovered material (which is lossy in terms of energy and materials).

The same argument about shoes may not apply to the specifics of say e-waste - where harmful materials, rare materials, or electrical efficiency come into play - but in the case of this article, we should be happy that usable shoes are being put on feet rather than shredded and chemically decomposed.

There are migrant gangs of Matsutake poachers roaming Northern California and Oregon. Working for the National Park Service / USDA Forest Service, we'd have unrelated scientific monitoring equipment destroyed and stolen by these groups assuming that they were camera traps. There are, of course, migrant mushroom foragers in general; but the high sale value of Matsutake invites criminal involvement.

> Objects demonstrating extreme capabilities routinely fly over our military facilities and training ranges. We don’t know what they are, and we are unable to mitigate their presence.

Occams Razor suggests that if these objects appear almost exclusively over US military facilities and US military training ranges, they're most likely operated by the US military.

(Sorry to the Navy pilot whose security clearance is too low to be in on the secret.)

The best way to (mis)understand The KLF is to invest 45 minutes immersing yourself in their incredible unreleased film "The White Room":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wngp8zou_M

The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu have left the building.

If vaccination prevents you from catching covid, then it has prevented you from spreading covid to those you would have otherwise.

If vaccination causes you to experience an early immune response, versus several asymptomatic days while unknowingly contagious, then it has prevented you from spreading covid to some of those you would have otherwise.

If vaccination results in a less severe infection with lower viral load, then it has prevented you from spreading covid to some of those you would have otherwise.

My reply was intentionally simple in order to drive home a point about selfish versus societal viewpoints.

It's so sad that Java 8 had the chance to really fix the null problem, but gave us only the half-assed `java.util.Optional<T>`. Rather than implementing optional values at the language level, it's just another class tossed into the JRE.

This is perfectly legal code, where the optional wrapper itself is null:

    Optional<String> getMiddleName() {
        return null;
    }

Thank you for pointing out that insightful detail!

The control group was 50% of the population who didn't get an invitation.

The experimental group was 50% of the population who got an invitation for colonoscopy, but turned out to be subdivided into ~40% "health conscious" who actually followed up on the procedure, and ~60% who ignored it.

Presumably there's a corresponding ~40% "health conscious" component of the control group, but this experiment had no method for identifying them.

If the study only looked at that ~40% subset of the experimental group, as opposed to the entire group who received invitations, then they could no longer compare them to the control group.

> ... who committed the offense of simple possession of marijuana ... regardless of whether they have been charged with or prosecuted for this offense

You're missing the joke!

You are confusing social communication with echolocation. Humans have the former but lack the latter. Bro.

Yes, it's 3D point cloud precision.

(Source: I study echolocation in bats, and many of the classic texts cover echolocation in cetaceans as well.)

You are confusing the two different uses of `in`. There's no reason to use a set for a temporary iteration container; but using a set is ideal and - in theory, for large n or expensive equality check - more performant as a temporary containment container:

  if x in {1, 2, 3}:
      print(x)

That's an insane amount of a very potent greenhouse gas. Seems like it'd be better to strike a match and flare it off as CO2 instead of methane, which has 80 times the greenhouse warming effect of CO2.

Thanks!

Does anyone know the rate at which these leaks are spewing methane into the atmosphere, and how quickly this pipeline can be shut off (if it isn't already)?