mikhailfranco

Landslip / glacierslip 'tsunamis' in confined waters are not really the same as those from subsea earthquakes. The landslips just slop the water along the fjord or bay. The volume of water is tiny compared to big 9.0 oceanic quakes, like those for the Indian Ocean (2004) or Japanese (2011) tsunamis. We really need a different word for the local landslip type.

Here is a famous landslip-tsunami event with one eyewitness account:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Lituya_Bay_earthquake_and...

See the book Wildest Alaska: Journeys of Great Peril in Lituya Bay by Philip Fradkin.

P.S. Yes, an earthquake triggered the landslip, but the earthquake did not displace the water.

I thought it was a vibrator...

... and the word 'people' in the title was just being politically correct.

So the Shiva 'crater' Structure may not be an impact, and the date for Shiva is taken directly from the Deccan Trap basalts, so not a remarkable coincidence, a fix.

Tell Average Joe that CERN invented URLs.

The first big application of URLs was precisely this use case: distributed access to particle event data in databases and tape silos across different international institutions. The mainframes (mostly IBM 3090) would then crunch the data to analyze and filter the interesting collisions.

There were several asteroid impacts at around the same time. For example, the Shiva impact off the west coast of India:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_crater

The Deccan Traps basaltic flows also happened at 'the same' time, in the same place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps

It's not clear if the Shiva impact caused the volcanic activity, or it's just a remarkable coincidence.

The local moors flood every winter. However, this was the most catastrophic flood in recent times:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1607_Bristol_Channel_floods

Some nice maps in the referenced report [pdf]:

1607 Bristol Channel Floods: 400-Year Retrospective

https://forms2.rms.com/rs/729-DJX-565/images/fl_1607_bristol...

See The Creative Act: A Way of Being - Rick Rubin

He has a couple chapters on finishing.

It is also the part of the creative process that he has modified most over his career. You can feel the tension in his very articulate exposition.

At least that beer is now completed :)

The Davids (plural) who wrote the article, are also the authors of The Dawn of Everything.

This idea has been explored by Julian Barbour in his book The Janus Point.

http://www.platonia.com/books.html

The related math and modelling goes under the name Shape Dynamics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_dynamics

Shape Dynamics - An Introduction

https://arxiv.org/abs/1105.0183

Which is also why all those company market caps you see quoted everywhere are totally ridiculous. A company is not worth the latest price of a small share transaction multiplied by all the outstanding shares.

Reference:

   "What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense.

   This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money.

   Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'

   ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."

Bryan Cantrill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

Modern traffic radars have enough spatial and velocity resolution to apply a tailgating measurement. There are existing speed camera systems that can detect and ticket vehicles for tailgating, after a manual review of video and telemetry data (often just a quick glance and mouse click from a police officer).

There are relatively few jurisdictions that have a concrete quantitative definition of tailgating. So it's not yet widespread, but law enforcement certainly has the option available now.

The article appears very strong, and true, and it is. Perhaps everyone with some flickering self-recognition will see themselves as the protagonist in the story.

I definitely went through this transition, no earlier than 30, but certainly before 40. I think most self-aware people do.

But the recognition usually comes at a stage of life when you literally have every responsibility: mortgage, spouse, kids, beholden to some Dilbert-boss, and carrying the world on your shoulders (not sarc - Atlas, please don't shrug).

You have no honorable options to escape. Every dimension of escape is betrayal. Don't believe me? Try it and see. Face it, own it, own everything. Wait, push harder, postpone deliverance.

The decline of the hope and expectation that work could provide fulfilment happens gradually, then suddenly (as Hemingway once said about bankruptcy). But as I retire, I still code, I always will. It gives me joy.

The temptation is then to tell all your younger successors about the valuable insight you've acquired. What you have learned is very very important. But it cannot be told, or taught, it has to be experienced - or not.

My advice to parents is to treat your children as ~20% older than they are. By the time they hit aggravated puberty, you are already talking to them as adults. They don't deserve it, but they will thank you later. And even if they don't, you have no regrets, you showed them the shining path, the parental star of piercing brightness.

Show, don't tell.

Just be the best you can be at every interaction point with the world. Whatever person or problem is in front of you right now - just be the best you can possibly be. Don't think about the future. If you inevitably fail, from time to time, as you will, learn from failure, train what you wish you could do, and be better next time.

Be the absolute best in the grave. What better accolade?

Show, don't tell. Forever.

Of course, I contradict my own advice. We are all unfathomably contradictory.

"I contain multitudes"

Walt Whitman presaging Hesse, Gödel, or perhaps Wittgenstein - how can I tell what cannot be told?

I tried my best.

The best single volume overview is this page-turner, which embraces Vienna and Paris, for math, science, philosophy, literature and art at the turn of the 20th century:

The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought

William R. Everdell

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/244346.The_First_Moderns

The other much-argued encounter is that Wittgenstein was a year or two above Herr Schicklgruber in high-school. Obviously Ludwig was Jewish, and far more intelligent than Adolf, so it established a fervent resentment... or not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#Jewish_bac...

Same people.

Many refugees (mostly Jewish) from Vienna went to Manhattan, or the Manhattan Project. A few, like Freud or Popper, stopped in Britain, but many passed through to New York. Bernays (Freud's nephew) used his uncle's psychological insights to invent propaganda, marketing, advertising and PR. Others invented atomic and hydrogen bombs (probably less devastating than therapy and ads :) Some were Soviet atomic spies that reported back to the USSR.

Much of American pre-war/post-war intellectual life is due to European refugees. It's interesting to posit what might have happened without the influx.

Fun facts:

  Earth's orbital diameter is:      ~30 x 10^7 km
  number of seconds in a year is:   ~ π x 10^7 s
  so, Earth's orbital velocity is:  ~30        km/s

  speed of light, c, is:            ~30 x 10^4 km/s
  so, Earth's orbital diameter is:  ~ 1,000    light seconds
  and, Earth's orbital velocity is: ~ 0.0001   c

I've heard Sean Carroll answer the question:

  "Why don't more physicists worry about 
   the foundations of Quantum Mechanics?"

He said something like:

  "They first say they have no time, 
   and it doesn't affect their work anyway."

(kind of 'shut up and calculate' - Mermin, summarizing post-war physicists)

  "Then they imply that if they stopped their work 
   and thought hard for 20 minutes
   they could solve all the problems."

Maybe not original idea from Sean, but it rings true in my experience.

The 2D histogram is very interesting, but difficult to interpret, because of the various samplings and normalizations that could be relevant: number of books published; number (fraction) of books digitized.

If I had to summarize the big picture, taking the contour at the top of the dark blue band: coverage was sporadic until ~1700; then more books were published, and the references gradually moved back to 1500 over the next 100 years, but did not consider the future very much. 1800 seems to be a singularity (but perhaps due to sampling effects), where interest in the deep past and the future exploded in a short period.

There are also interesting lines in the plot. First the vertical lines. There seems to be one (or more) books in 1530 that discussed the far future up to 1900. Then another futurist work around 1610. There's a history book published ~1580, that covers then recent past, and another cluster around 1650, perhaps including Hobbes's 'Leviathan'. Of course we miss Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' because it covers antiquity, off the chart.

Secondly, the horizontal lines. There is a bright line at ~1100, perhaps the First Crusade, and more at ~1300, ~1600 ~1800. The line at ~1350 could be the Black Death.

Finally, there are the shadows of the 20th century wars, when history was not so popular, because there were more pressing current events to be written about, and all the historians were fighting at the front.

Probably the worst dam failure disaster you've never heard of, deaths probably exceeded 200,000:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure#Cover...

I don't quite understand how Phoenix, AZ, became the focus for chip fabs in the US, and even the recent CHIPS-backed TSMC investment.

AZ does not have a lot of water, and the Colorado Basin treaties expire next year. There are interests from existing holders of water rights, the 7 US states, several Federal agencies (BLM, Army COE) and the international aspect with Mexico.

I assume the negotiations are challenging and at some point, the Feds will step in, to direct water supply to chip fabs, rather than golf courses and almond groves.

I agree about markdown, but the only awkward implementation issue is nested syntax: what markup is parsed inside various other outer markup forms?

Italic headings? Bold links? Nested lists - how many levels? Code in list? How do paragraphs interact with lists? There are many opinions and many leaky implementations of those opinions. Newlines? Embedding HTML in Markdown !?!?

It all seems so sad, because (X)HTML nailed most of these issues a very long time ago. But HTML implementations were sloppy from the outset. And XML was born with inherited bloat, then got ever more complex over time (modular specs, XLink, XPath, XSLT, DTD -> XML Schema, ...)

With Markdown, it is relatively easy to introduce some recursion into the parser, but for what spec? In what contextual cases? At what cost?

Austria: GDP $516.0b, pop 9.0m

Tonga : GDP $000.5b, pop 0.1m

So Tonga 1/1000 GDP and ~1/100 pop contributed 5x more soldiers than Austria.

There's a Coldplay song:

Tonga: "Para-para-para-dise"

Austria: "Para-para-para-site"

One classic example is JSON.

It is possible to just treat commas as whitespace. It makes implementation so much easier. It accepts missing, trailing and repeated commas. It makes elements uniform. It ignores many common errors that arise from typos or cut'n'paste. It makes JSON writers simpler, by removing the first/last special case.

A JSON parser that treats commas as whitespace can be two dozen lines in most programming languages - if you do not want line/column, chapter and verse, for the remaining error messages.

It would be more useful if every RFC had a test suite of input/output and input/error.

Yes, those are potentially infinite, but a core set would be useful. As ambiguities come up, publish an addendum for clarification, and eventually, as the exceptions accumulate, a version step.

I don't understand how anyone can write a spec without concrete examples of pass/fail in their head. Perhaps there could be an informal example/counterexample syntax for those writing RFCs, which could be extracted into the 1.0 test suite.

The test suite must be a single open source repo, that accumulates acceptable edge cases until the relevant informed adults can make a call about revising the spec.

There has to be one approved, sanctioned, well-known and monitored test suite repo. It cannot be shrugged off into a free-for-all that makes it impossible to find a single canonical test suite. The interwebs are big and conflicted.

See Imre Lakatos 'Proofs and Refutations' for how this evolves.

Yes, I certainly benefitted very much from the series.

Here is the first episode - devastating, convincing, easy to understand and very well written:

https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

OK, good. So ... 3 soldiers

(about 20% of Tonga's contribution)

Link?

Not in the list here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participants_in_Operation_Endu...