pimmen

Thanks for this tip! Working on my Spanish as we speak!

Throughout history, Congress has leaned heavily on the side of rights holders. I would love it if this would be a wake up call for Congress that overzealous copyright protection has stifled innovation and contributed to the current rent-seeking business models in entertainment.

But the richest 10% of people are the ones who make far more than half of all flights [1]. They could certainly fly less.

[1] https://www.inequalityintransport.org.uk/book-author/news-bl...

Some more context; she didn't ask for 15 different opinions, she lived in the country side and her nearest hospital used relay doctors. So, it was more a case of being sent home and told to return if it didn't get any better, and when she did return, her previous doctor was long gone and had been replaced. All the next doctor had was whatever the previous doctor left them to work with in her charts. I'm not a doctor, so I don't know how much that would be in a case of a piercing headache.

For tech, that list of cities could be changed drastically (Dublin, Berlin, Stockholm and Tel Aviv are major tech centers, for example) but the gist of it is very true.

Not jumping on the latest fad is very common, and something I expect of a doctor. However, I wish more doctors I've met fit in with the latter part of the grand parent comment, though.

A friend of my family met 15 different doctors for a period lasting years because of agonizing headaches, they all sent her home thinking it was nothing unusual. She died of a brain tumor the size of a tennis ball. We often think about what would've happened if one of those 15 doctors would've shown some humility.

To be clear, I work in tech, we have more than our fair share of big egos too. I don't think this is anything particular about doctors.

Passion is important, it's what makes you unique and fulfills your life, but you need other people to achieve it and thus you need to do things they expect of you. Sometimes, in order for them to even give you a chance, you need to impress them when you're introduced.

What enjoys widespread appeal is however the cream of the crop. Being raised in Sweden I often opt out of watching a Swedish movie or tv-show simply because everything that makes Nordic Noir good, morally complex stories with plain language, can make the main characters insufferable and obnoxious. You have to remember that the most exciting stories in a culture are about those who do something daring and in Scandinavia, where we are very conflict averse, you thus get heroes acting like assholes because we wouldn't dare do that ourselves.

It can work quite well as evidenced by the popularity of The Bridge, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and others ... but it can also not work out at all if you don't sympathize with the characters' cause. That's why they're almost all crime dramas, because asshole or not, we all sympathize in their attempt to catch the bad guy. Try watching a Scandinavian romantic drama to see what I mean.

How is the government response (or lack off) affecting the debate around climate change in Australia? If I understand correctly, the current Australian government does not believe in human caused climate change but still enjoys domestic support from voters. Is that changing?

We had a similar, less serious event in Sweden last year during an extraordinary summer with a lot of forest fires, during an election year. The forest fires did not seem to change voters' mind much on the issue, unfortunately. Then again, we allocated a lot more resources than usual to fight the fires, even asking other countries for help.

And in Nordic countries I’ve honestly heard people say that the fact that it’s pretty cold right now is evidence against global warming. That whole ”global” part really trips people up.

Does anyone know how to explain this nice and clear to people who aren’t that well versed in variances and means? I really struggle.

I agree. Nobody cared that tech was collecting tons of data in the 00s, or that they had military contracts with some very questionable regimes. Then, traditional media realized that tech was their number one adversary. Tech was revealed as the number one threat to the media's ad revenue and premium content distribution. They were not the allies the publishers thought they were. And, with all this user data and cheap hosting, tech enabled niche groups to completely bypass traditional media in getting massive influence (some of these groups were really good, some of them were terrorist and/or nazi organizations).

Tech poses one of the most existential challenges to publishers, maybe ever. That's one of the reasons the media championed regulations on big tech in the final years of this decade; "So, you want to make money that used to be guaranteed for us big publishers? Enjoy being the editor in chief, bearing the brunt of the responsibility for what your users read. Don't expect the 'just an ad platform' argument to hold water, we found that out ourselves the hard way".

(Disclaimer; I'm a developer working for one of the Nordic countries largest publishers, so I sympathize a bit with the publisher's reasoning, even though I think eg. the upload filter laws passed in the EU and other stupid laws lobbied by big publishers is enough reason to be furious for years straight)

The right language can heighten the atmosphere, but otherwise a skilled director working closely with the rest of the crew can make it work. Remove the control of the director by using voice actors who were not directed by the director and it will take away from that work.

Reduction of atmosphere is just one of the reasons I don't like dubbing, the fact that it robs the actor of his or her oral performance is the major one. But there are more reasons, many of them I've already mentioned such as mismatch in grammar leading to changes in the dramatic pacing.

Lots of movie productions make actors dub the dialogue after shooting, it still creates a mismatch between the atmosphere and the dialogue when you change the language, which was my argument.

> Regarding the « no difference whatsoever », you noted in a previous comment that you know a few seconds in advance what’s going to be said.

Yes, sometimes that will affect the drama of the scene since the pacing of information in the scene might be compromised. That's likely to happen with dubbing too, because the grammar doesn't match and a name has to be mentioned at the beginning of the sentence in one language instead of the end, as the director intended. Since Swedish and English are both Germanic languages it doesn't happen that often in the few movies that are dubbed to Swedish, but I've seen it get really weird in Swedish films dubbed to Spanish.

Either way, in my experience, if I see Clint Eastwood's line a moment before he says it, I can still feel the scorching sun and smell the gunpowder like I'm there in the old American west. That atmosphere disappears completely when I hear his line in German or French.

As a sibling comment points out, you forget it’s even there. In a Swedish theater American movies have subtitles but when I watch them at home I usually don’t use subtitles. No difference whatsoever in immersion, comprehension or overall pleasure.

The only annoying thing could be bad subtitles, as in the translation is poor and you notice it. And of course jokes that don’t work in Swedish get lost or changed in translation, which you notice in the subtitles. These situations happen maybe once, for five seconds. Far less annoying than not even hearing the actors’ performance.

I see lots of movies in languages I don’t understand thanks to subtitles. That way, I can read the dialogue and know what they’re saying. About one or two seconds later I see the actors do their performance and get the emotional and cultural context with the dialogue.

I didn’t understand English that well when I was a kid but since we don’t translate English language media, except for subtitles, I got to hear English over and over again and now my ability to comprehend spoken English is very good. As is most Swedes, we spend just as many hours a week in English class as they do in France, Spain or Germany yet we are better at it (in general). We’re not geniuses, we just get more practice and less hand holding.

Can’t do anything about books though, sadly. If I read a book in a language I don’t understand I probably have the intention to learn that language.

I'm Swedish and we almost never dub entertainment, unless it's for kids. It just drives me insane when I go abroad and listen to the dialogue being completely butchered on TV. Imagine being the director of the movie and seeing this, remembering all the hours you put into directing the actors to give your vision life, and now your work is being mangled.

And then politicians in these countries wonder why they're so bad at English...

The problem is that property laws are local or national, because it's assumed that I need physical access to your property to do anything. If I fire a rocket at your property from some other country, I would be violating all kinds of air space regulations or maybe even international treaties on weapons.

We now have a better understanding of the unintended, global consequences of small, national actions.

Imagine this happens, but you can't correct these Holocaust deniers because they bought an edit that will remain for at least 6 months. This is what Wikipedia could be selling.

> That sounds like a very poor business model - they can and do that for free already.

I might have been unclear, or I'm misunderstanding you, but charging people for something that used to be free is a great business model, since Wikipedia is so big and is so trusted that it's not realistic to go somewhere else or start a new wiki and hope it gets just as big and trusted.

Not necessarily. They could argue that they're a platform, just like Facebook or Twitter, and claim they want to be neutral. Facebook and Twitter have taken flak, but all in all, people still trust the core features of these platforms. Even if Wikipedia sold the right to edit Turkish Wikipedia to a pro-Erdogan organization I would still probably trust the article about set theory on English Wikipedia.

You don’t use it, you let other actors use it while you simply rent it out to them. Maybe some Turkish organizations who are pro-Erdogan use Turkish Wikipedia to manipulate Turkish speakers. All the while, people on the other Wikipedia instances don’t notice and lend credibility to the platform.

When we in the West heard about Dragonfly we didn’t stop trusting our own Google results.

Sure, calculus can unlock more pure mathematical concepts than statistics. But so can graph theory, number theory, set theory and abstract algebra.

The second point you raise, that calculus has so many applications in physics, is honestly the real reason calculus dominates high school mathematics post algebra classes. 50-60 years ago an engineer mostly worked with mechanical and electrical concepts, not anything in computer science. Today, we have highly trained engineers who work exclusively with other branches than analysis. Just because you are an advanced student does not mean that all the calculus served in high school will serve you better than any other mathematical branch.

You don’t have to know that much calculus to grasp what a probability distribution is, or where the tables come from. Do you know what a limit is? Great, then we can explain a continuous distribution as soon as you grasp a discrete distribution. Areas are also something you probably can understand. Would it be cool to derive the tables by doing integrals? Sure. Do you need to in order to understand variance, significance, estimation of distributions, correlation and more? No.

I would be willing to let those who are more interested choose calculus, but I would appropriate just as much resources to let people choose the other branches of mathematics too. If you can take integral calculus, but not combinatorics, that’s a problem in today’s society. Physics and chemistry are great, but we should not let them dictate the entire math curriculum, statistics and computer science are just as important and lucrative fields for advanced students to pursue.

So, if we do have to let one mathematical branch dictate upper high school math education, let’s dethrone calculus and instead teach statistics. If I have to choose just one to give the same absurd levels of attention as calculus has been given, I think statistics will be by far the most useful to everyone, whether you’re a medical doctor, lawyer, engineer or any other highly skilled professional, statistics will probably serve you best. If for no other reason than to ask informed questions rather than just smile and nod while I explain the variance of an important business metric.

Replace most of the calculus classes with statistics.

Most people who take calculus in high school will never, ever, do a derivative or integral in their life, nor will they use their understanding of calculus to unlock more mathematical topics.

Most people who never, ever, take a statistics class will get statistical concepts and problems hurled at them from every conceivable angle in both their professional and personal lives. Since I know statistics and math, I enjoy a great deal of trust from people when it comes to the data science work I do, more so than if I were to enter a discussion around building software with non-programmers. And I know this is not because I'm a genius, it's because people don't feel like they know enough about statistics to challenge my claims, even though they will make decisions based on what I tell them. And then we have the people who don't know statistics, but think they do, and start inferring all types of causations based on some insignificant patterns they've found.

If we want more informed voters, managers, employees, politicians, consumers and decision makers in general I cannot overstate how important it is to understand that there is such a thing as different distributions, that you can estimate them, how variance actually works and what "significant" actually means. At least relative to taking the derivative of a third degree polynomial.

This is also why you might send an envoy to negotiate a purchase instead of going yourself and only authorize a certain amount. They insist on a higher price, they get no money at all. The risk you take is that you lose out completely when you can’t offer anymore money, but you’ve changed their options.

A good interviewer could ask some questions to find out if the answer is just memorized or if they understand the concept. And it would test your willingness to educate yourself on a domain, which is something I would value in my team.

And I say this as someone who doesn't particularly like the modern tech interview style, I think actually trying to build something is better. However, it does have some merit in measuring a candidate's ability even if it's not necessarily that great.

I’ve never understood why the police needs to lie. In Sweden, the police is not allowed to lie but may however withold information or ”speculate” how the circumstances and evidence will be interpreted at trial. The prosecutors still win 90% of cases.

That’s the absolute worst. I’m paying for YouTube Premium and I hate that I get pop-ups for YouTube TV and YouTube Kids and whatnot. Peace and quiet was one of the things I paid good money for.

We’re fortunate to have some politicians and officials who believe in anti-trust measures in the European Union. Margrethe Vestager is the current champion and I’m glad I’m under her wing rather than her American counterpart, Ajit Pai.

I’m optimistic that regulations will come, sooner or later.

I've solved plenty of problems when I swim. There's so many different "rooms" and frames of mind I can be in during that activity I think that's the main reason why it doesn't happen as often during weight training. While swimming I can come up with the solution in the shower, in the sauna, while doing my sets in the pool and while resting between sets. I switch between being completely immersed in water, almost deprived of sensory inputs, and being above water constantly.