r-bryan

I can recommend _The Happiness Hypothesis - Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom_, by Jonathan Haidt, as relevant here.

The book was suggested to me by a CBT practitioner. It languished on my shelf for several years because it sat adjacent to a bit of new age fluff, and I thought the subtitle sounded like it was another bunch of lost-wisdom-of-the-ancients drivel. I thought wrong: one should not judge a book by its cover.

The book is serious -- Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU Stern School -- yet eminently readable. It pulls in relevant aspects of the "ancient wisdom," evaluates them in the context of contemporary research, and shows where they can help us today and where they are outright plain wrong.

I can't say it has changed my life yet, but it has helped settle the inchoate bits that I have taken from the Enchiridon, Meditations, etc., into a useful way of thinking about the world and my place in it.

Now on to William Braxton Irvine...

Hatred. Stupidity. Devotion. Greed: The four horsemen of the new Apocalypse. --Salman Rushdie (I forget which book)

You mean BTU/hour.

Sounds like a perfectly classic version of the growth trajectory characterized in "Innovator's Dilemma" (Clayton Christensen). Company grows into a big fat dinosaur, leaving a soft underbelly for a scrappy little mammal to claw at.

Except in this case the scrappy little mammals are big fat dinosaurs themselves.

Actually, just leave it all in the ground.

That "mind-melting" equation looks like it could benefit from common subexpression elimination.

Would it appear to be fixed in place if actually moving down the screen?

When learning some Italian I was both dismayed and fascinated to discover that it was necessary to avoid every diminutive ("cute") and augmentative I could think of, because they all carry sexual innuendo.

Although I join you in deploring the sloppy usage of "enormity" to merely mean big size, I thought the word perfectly captured the _scariness_ of the size of the research task ahead. Centuries of usage agree: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/enormity#usage-1

hobbyist

In Cory Doctorow's _Little Brother_, some characters would put pebbles in their shoes so gait-recognizers wouldn't recognize them.

I can't find it now but I recently read of one or two guys who systematically tabulated juggling tricks. Gaps in the table led to new tricks which astonished experienced jugglers -- the way gaps in the periodic table led Mendeleev to predict properties of undiscovered elements. One guy gives talks on juggling at math conferences and on math at juggling conferences.

Maybe we've been looking at the wrong cost. As you suggest, voting machines wouldn't make it cheaper to count the votes. They would make it cheaper to hack the election!

"No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up." --Lily Tomlin

Suppose your coal or nuclear steam plant suffers not just fuel cost, but an additional cost every time you ramp its output up or down. At times when instantaneous demand is less than you are producing, it could well be cheaper to pay someone else to take the excess energy off your hands than to adjust your plant. That's simply a negative price. Hard to get freaked out over that.

Boston (also in North America) paid 21.9 cents/kWh in June. As I type this, Ontario residents are paying on-peak 13.2 cents/kWh.

https://www.oeb.ca/rates-and-your-bill/electricity-rates

https://www.bls.gov/regions/new-england/news-release/average...

...or bury that length of communication fiber you remembered to bring along. "A backhoe will be along presently to dig it up."

Not Equifax but here's a story about how another David once met his Goliath in Small Claims Court. I wish I could find an online citation to confirm the details :-(

In the 1970's, financial conglomerate Transamerica owned a credit card brand, Diners Club I think. An ordinary citizen had a dispute with Diners Club and was getting nowhere. He convinced a small-claims judge to place a lien on the Transamerica building in S.F. That got their attention real quick because they needed clear title to the real estate for some finance shuffling.

I can recommend:

Bernard F. Schultz, _A first course in general relativity_

It's accessible to undergrads! (who have studied SR, vector calculus, electrostatics).

I was a child of the 1950's. Only 50 miles south of New York City, we little grade school kids were routinely drilled in cowering under our desks in case of a nuclear attack. Every time I heard an airplane, I was afraid it was going to drop bombs. Popular Science ran features about how to build your own fallout shelter, and how Dad could prepare his family for the coming nuclear apocalypse. The understated, tragic horror of _On the Beach_ was complemented but not countered by the mordant humor of Dr. Strangelove.

The clips here don't have the bizarre choreographic beauty of the Dr. Strangelove finale, but they bring back the all too keen anxiety and existential terror of being powerless, while deranged world leaders measure each other's manhood by "mine's bigger than yours." Fine, you proved that yours is big enough, it doesn't really matter whose is bigger any more than whose hair is dumber, now can we _please_ return to sanity?