mannykannot

Imagination will give you something to think about, but it alone will not tell you which thoughts are correct.

I guess you probably don’t live in Texas, then!

I would guess that the interior of leaves are quite conductive and that this accounts for most of the attenuation and scattering.

Update: this comment on the original posting of this article suggests so: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896699

You might find these points helpful:

1) when an airliner lands, the undercarriage legs, which are telescopic sprung and damped struts, spread the vertical deceleration over a finite period (I cannot say how long it lasts, but I would say of the order of a second or so.)

2) At the point of touchdown, the wings are generating lift about equal to the aircraft’s weight. This decreases quite rapidly, largely on account of the decease in angle of attack as the nosewheel comes down and from the deployment of spoilers, but it would be mistaken to think that the runway is immediately supporting the full weight of the airliner after touchdown.

3) On takeoff, until the nosewheel is lifted to initiate rotation, a significant fraction of an airliner’s weight is being supported by the runway. During rotation, as the angle of attack increases, the lift increases [1] until it exceeds the weight, at which point the airliner lifts off.

4) If we ignore the fact that the undercarriage is sprung, then the airliner has no vertical velocity until it lifts off. Right at that point, however, when the lift exceeds the weight, it gains a vertical acceleration.

I hope this helps!

[1] Plus a vertical component of the engine thrust, but no airliner rotates to anything like 45 degrees - in fact, if it has not left the ground at a rotation angle equal to the angle of maximum lift coefficient (~10 - 15 degrees), it is not going to do so without going faster.

Maybe, but it is the present which concerns me.

That last criterion most assuredly will not be matched here.

Harsh as the Yukon is, it is a walk in the park compared to anything in space, where there is no realistic possibility of a rush of individual prospectors.

Several areas of the ocean floor are covered with valuable polymetallic nodules [1] which are way more accessible than anything in space, yet this has not led to the equivalent of a gold rush.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule

This is my reading, as an outsider: the head activator almost certainly does not exist, but the question of fraud is somewhat ambiguous.

To establish either the status of the head activator or whether fraud was committed, however, are not purposes of this article (IMHO). This is a real-life story about clashes of personalities, where ambiguity is the norm. Something is going on beneath the surface, but it is not clear exactly what and why. I would say there is evidence for an indictment, but not for a conviction.

It is more than that, as there is cold comfort in having an explanation that is arbitrary and capricious, irrational, contrary to the stated rules, or based on falsehoods, if there is no effective means of appeal - especially if there are few or no viable alternatives to the entity imposing the ban.

Improved turnout and participation is a good thing in itself, but not necessarily if it puts a weapon in the hands of those who do not like the outcome and are seeking to invalidate it without regard to whether it represents the electorate’s legitimate choice.

I am not aphantasic, but I would not say that I "feel" pain when I see people undergoing painful events (depending on how much weight the quotes around 'feel' are carrying.) I can remember that hitting my thumb with a hammer was very unpleasant, how much of my body it affected, and how it faded over time. I know that the last time I did it, I recognized it as being pretty much identical to the previous times. What I cannot do is imagine it with anything like the vividness with which I can imagine what tonight's sunset could be like.

I beat the target by deleting the parts that were causing the cycle count to be too high. /s

You are describing hiking in the mountains, which doesn’t generalize to mountaineering and rock-climbing when it gets difficult, and the difficulties this view is abstracting away are real.

Your second and third paragraphs are entirely consistent with the original point I was trying to make, which was not that it took Einstein specifically to come up with relativity, but that it took someone with uncommon skills, as evidenced by the fact that it blindsided even a good many of the people who were qualified to be contenders for being the one to figure it out first. It does not amount to proof, but one does not expect people who are closing in on the solution to be blindsided by it.

I am well aware of the problems with “great man” hagiography, but dismissing individual contributions, which is what the person I was replying to seemed to be doing, is a distortion in its own way.

Sure - and climbing a mountain is just putting one foot down higher than it was before and repeating, once you abstract away all the hard parts.

The fact that it reached this point is further evidence that if the AI apocalypse is a possibility, common sense will not save us.

If (as you seem to be suggesting) relativity was effectively lying there on the table waiting for Einstein to just pick it up, how come it blindsided most, if not quite all, of the greatest minds of his generation?

That is a very interesting idea, though I would not dismiss LLMs as a dead end if they failed.

Don't tell the current administration that there's something so un-American about the currency: they will insist on fixing it, and probably retire Jefferson as well.

As the ratio used is a rational approximation of an irrational, I would guess that the ratio-preserving feature breaks down well before you get to atomic sizes, though I have neither proved that to be so nor figured out how to calculate the divergence.

That's interesting. Do you know if they are used to keep track of the trains' positions with axle-spacing precision everywhere, or only at stations and track-section boundaries? (my somewhat cursory search suggested probably the latter.)

Quite often, when my search returned a 'closed as duplicate' reply, I found the allegedly duplicate question did not accurately describe my problem, and the answers to it were often inferior, for my purposes, than those which had been given to my original question before the gate was closed.

Hardcore proponents of this style often incant 'DRY' and talk about reuse, but in most cases, this reuse seems to be much more made available in principle than found useful in practice.

That’s a fair point, but a combination of “fake it ‘til you make it” together with extracting massive “compensation” before you actually make it amounts to pretty much the same thing.

How about "the documents were clarified" or "their contents were revealed"? Maybe "formatted for reading on your device"?

Talk of how it might be interpreted is rather beside the point when the administration appears to be implementing a particular interpretation and SCOTUS appears to be fine with that, whether or not it is a selective one. Those are the concrete concerns of which you speak.

It is helpful to have the document publicly available, but only if enough people heed its implicit warning.

Personally, I do not see the distinction here between the two sentences, but your last paragraph got me thinking: should we be using parenthetical, self-interruptive clauses? When we are speaking extemporaneously, we may need them, but when writing, could we rearrange things so they are not needed?

One reason I came up with for doing so is to acknowledge a caveat or answer a question that the author anticipates will enter a typical reader's mind at that point in the narrative.

If that is the case, then it seems to me that when an author does this, they are making use of their theory of mind, anticipating what the reader may be thinking as they read, and acknowledging that it will likely differ from what they, as the author, is thinking of (and knows about the topic) at that point.

If this makes any sense, then we might ask if at least a rudimentary theory of mind is needed to effectively use parenthetical clauses, or can it be faked through the rote application of empirically-learned style rules? LLMs have shown they can do the latter, but excessive use might be signalling a lack of understanding.

I will just float this idea for consideration, as I cannot judge how plausible it is: Is it possible that LLMs or their successors will soon be able to make use of formal methods more effectively than humans? I don't think I am the only person surprised by how well they do at informal programming (On the other hand, there is a dearth of training material. Maybe a GAN approach would help here?)

> You even admitted it was a poor argument.

"Creative" re/misinterpretation is becoming quite a thing here - what I actually did was agree that rgmerk had a more defensible position after he pivoted away from his original ~2% claim to a more reasonable one.

I'll state it plainly: rgmerk's subsequent pivot in his stated claims does not retroactively make my response to his original claim wrong! (Not even if the subsequent claim more accurately reflects what he really meant to say.) I am having trouble figuring out why anyone would think otherwise.

I like the way you made me think! It had not thought about it until now, but I take your point.

While thinking about it, this phrase occurred to me: “silver bullets are a defense against zombies.” It is not the same phrase structure as the original, but it also has the double-negative vibe, yet it feels more reasonable to me than “…are a defense for zombies”, which to me suggests that zombies would employ them against their enemies.

I think the resolution here is that defense is inherently against something, so these phrases are not unequivocally double negatives - though I also agree with nine_k’s point about a better way to say it.

EDIT: Duh! The fact that defense is inherently against something is precisely what makes these phrases look like double negatives! The resolution must be something else - maybe agreement in mood or sentiment…

No you didn't; you pointed out why it is not, in itself, a significant issue in the first place (which rgmerk tacitly seems to recognize in his first response, through pivoting away from the 2% claim.) My position on this has been that if the issue really is over ~2%, there is a simple solution.