mannykannot

These examples point to a further complication: there is no single pronunciation for the "ough" (cough versus through versus thorough, and then there's cases where the "ough" is not terminal, such as thought.)

I doubt that reading English can be taught without a dose of rote learning.

My guess is that they would be more likely to “fix” and “improve” Ken’s algorithm than understand it (Jon Bentley mentioned, in passing, a similar case where this was the outcome.)

Partly on account of the "perhaps" in the original, and partly because I have seen (elsewhere) "just doing his job" defenses.

In corner cases, culpability for uncertain expertise can be a tricky issue - you may recall the case of the Italian geologists, a few years back, indicted for minimizing the risk of an earthquake shortly before one occurred - but the case here seems pretty clear-cut (again, I'm speaking morally, not legally.)

While there is no real doubt that most, if not all, of these suicides were a direct consequence of the appalling way this monumental failure and its investigation was handled, reporting the news responsibly has become a minefield in which any deviation from what is strictly known is liable to be exploited by those who do not want their role in events to become public.

As you want to call a spade a spade, can we agree that the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't, is undoubtedly among those who are morally (if not legally) culpable to a considerable extent?

I do too - it tells the reader what they have to do in order to bring about the desired result, more directly than do any of the alternatives.

I assume (on the basis that it has not come up so far in this discussion and my limited further reading) that position-momentum uncertainty offers no justification for throwing away the correlations?

Personally, I am thankful that I have better options than going through hundreds of options with scant and unreliable information about which is actually effective and will be supplied as as claimed. If, however, that is your preference, you can certainly get it in the US, at almost any price point.

The tricky cases are the very many where there are dependencies between iterations, but not demanding the strict serialization that a simple loop enforces. We have constructs for that, but there's an irreducible complexity to using them correctly.

Doing it through an app is what made it possible to turn each transaction into effectively a pair of opaque auctions with Uber holding all the information, but they got away with it because consumers really like low prices.

You have me wondering about that as well. If the uranium was going to be enriched for use in a light-water reactor (I would guess it was), maybe the difference translates into needing more stages of enrichment to reach the required level?

I take your point that the absence of any discussion of the effect of temperature choice or justification for choosing 1 seems to be an issue with the paper (unless it is quite obviously the only rational choice to those working in the field?)

Yes, the whole "Towers of Hanoi is a bad test case" objection is a non-sequitur here. It would be a significant objection if the machines performed well, but not given the actual outcome - it is as if an alleged chess grandmaster almost always lost against opponents of unexceptional ability.

It is actually worse than that analogy: Towers of Hanoi is a bimodal puzzle, in which players who grasp the general solution do inordinately better than those who do not, and the machines here are performing like the latter.

Lest anyone thinks otherwise, this is not a case of setting up the machines to fail, any more than the chess analogy would be. The choice of Towers of Hanoi leaves it conceivable that they do would well on tough problems, but that is not very plausible and needs to be demonstrated before it can be assumed.

The key issue appears to be how long it took to realize that existing infrastructure would present a showstopping cost. In practice, waterfall and agile are virtually indistinguishable in their ability to anticipate such issues early - they can, but doing so depends on factors independent of the differences in methodology.

I don't recall if this is covered in the video, but here are two pitfalls I have noticed from my own attempts:

1) If I am considering possible objections to my position, I have to be very clear which points I am raising only for the sake of argument, and which are the ones I am actually advocating for, or else it will appear confused or self-contradictory.

A related issue is to preempt possible objections to the point where the reader might lose track of the main issue.

2) After making several passes to hone my position, it can seem so obvious to me that what I write for the reader is too terse for anyone who is approaching the issue for the first time.

> …they are getting pressure from administration to pass the students.

I know someone who resigned her position over this issue, and paid a decade-long emotional cost for her integrity (fortunately she came back stronger than before, but still…)

The cheaters may think they are entitled or they may think they are beating the system, but the only winners are those who profit from the machine.

The drift you describe is a problem, but current AI is not up to the foremost task of telling good from bad.

If current AI were used, I suspect it would be strongly biased in favor of those good at prompt engineering, regardless of subject matter.

Indeed - and it is not just a matter of becoming more bold: when the system has become corrupted, you will be trampled underfoot if you do not go along with the flow.

This is mentioned in the introduction here [1]. The version I'm looking at is an image, so I cannot easily copy-paste the relevant passage, but it seems to say that the efficiency gain comes from detonation causing the combustion to occur at a higher pressure than in the case of deflagration. Generally speaking, higher peak pressures increase the efficiency of heat engines, as this allows for greater expansion of the working fluid, and thus more work being done for the same fuel consumption.

With regard to your comparison, I guess this means that the detonation engine can have a higher pressure in the combustion chamber, together with a larger bell, a faster-moving exhaust, or some combination.

[1] https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/6.2013-3971

Now I'm wondering if this could be helpful in doing the NY Times Connections puzzle.

Here's a step 0 for your debugging strategy: spend a few minutes thinking about what could account for the bug. Prior to its occurrence, you are thinking about what could go wrong, but now you are thinking about what did go wrong, which is a much less open-ended question.

In what appears to be a fairly recent discovery, it seems that flares on magnetars can produce gold and other heavy elements, and these are likely more frequent than neutron star collisions.

https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/neutron-stars/magnet...

So long as one can see the sun and stars reasonably frequently, I imagine a competent navigator could estimate his latitude and know which way is West accurately enough to stay in the trade winds and make landfall along Brazil's coast, which I suppose was McVicar's only hope, given the extreme shortage of water and rations.

The more precisely they are defined, the less frequently will you see them used correctly.

They probably have few assets - the actual work is subcontraced. What options do you have in that situation?

Starting in four days, you will need, to board a commercial flight in the US or enter a federal government facility, either a passport, an 'enhanced' or 'real ID' driver's license, or one of a small class of alternatives. This has increased the burden on state DMVs, and any resulting deepening of the accountability sink is at least partly due to not doing anything to mitigate a predictable situation.

I imagine AC makes things considerably more difficult. Reactance is a consequence of inductance and capacitance, which cause current and voltage changes to be out of phase with each other. While the current on a DC transmission line will vary, it will not be reversing every ~10 milliseconds, and I suppose the voltage will be very steady except during startup and shutdown.

On an AC transmission line, I suppose any corona discharge going on shuts off and restarts every time the voltage reverses. They make a characteristic buzz in humid conditions.

They are the victims.

Unless you suffer from disrupted sleep, there would not seem to be any reason to change your regime.

It would be a leap to assume another culture has something similar to (or, in some cases, anything resembling) one's ethics, sense of humor or taste in music. In comparison to these things, science has something they do not: apparently universal and impersonal 'laws', which, where we can check, appear to hold across the visible universe (putting aside some unresolved issues on the leading edge of our present knowledge.)

For some extra-solar civilization to examine the probe and its plaque intact, it will have to rendezvous with it in space. It seems to me to be the greater leap of faith to suppose this can be done without having knowledge that is isomorphic or equivalent to our formulation of orbital mechanics. Do you have any concrete ideas about how this might be so?

> We do not know if all this is political theater or if Trump really wants to end the war...

The utterly confused picture of what the president is thinking is itself a considerable problem. Political theater would be unconscionable, yet that is mostly what we get.