9,061 karma · joined May 28, 2009
Hyakujõ had the director of the monks strike with the gavel and inform everyone that after the midday meal there would be a funeral service for a dead monk. The monks wondered at this, saying, "Everyone is in good health; nobody is in the sick ward. What does this mean?" After the meal Hyakujõ led the monks to the foot of a rock on the far side of the mountain and with his staff poked out the dead body of a fox and performed the ceremony of cremation. That evening he ascended the rostrum and told the monks the whole story. Õbaku thereupon asked him, "The old man gave the wrong answer and was doomed to be a fox for five hundred rebirths. Now, suppose he had given the right answer, what would have happened then?" Hyakujõ said, "You come here to me, and I will tell you." Õbaku went up to Hyakujõ and boxed his ears. Hyakujõ clapped his hands with a laugh and exclaimed, "I was thinking that the barbarian had a red beard, but now I see before me the red-bearded barbarian himself."
Hindsight is really something. Of course we usually write the denominator as |x'|^3 but once you see it, it makes sense.
>August 8, 2026
I would guess not.
First, limits are harder than derivatives. Historically, humans figured out the derivative in the late 1600s, but the modern rigorous definition of the limit didn't exist until the 1800s. Slow-walking the definition of the derivative doesn't fix the problem of understanding limits.
The limit of a function f at a point x is defined as the value y, if it exists, such that for all d > 0 there exists an e > 0 such that for all x' in [x - e, x + e] we have |y - f(x')| < d. That's an earful. But for essentially all limits in introductory calculus we evaluate using two rules: the limit of a continuous function f at a point x is f(x), and the squeeze theorem. So my suggestion is to elevate these to the status of axioms. Introducing another number system does not help when students will not do anything nontrivial with it anyway.
The second problem is that "introductory" calculus includes too much material and is consequently pushed too late in the curriculum and seen as a weed-out course. Students spend too much time on "preparation" that doesn't prepare them for calculus. Studying logarithms and trigonometry is orthogonal, so basically all of "precalculus" is not actually pre-calculus. To me a four-year high school curriculum could be written up just fine with two years of algebra and geometry (not separated), one year of calculus and then statistics, which provides an ideal application for the theory of derivatives when you learn regression. But the author has included multivariable calculus and fiddly techniques for taking derivatives of ugly functions into "introductory" calculus. I think this is a step in the wrong direction. Laborious algebra calculations can be moved into an optional methods course for engineering students; we should be ensuring the core ideas are as accessible as possible so that doctors don't write papers about the trapezoid rule anymore:
https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/17/2/152/17985/A-M...
Caffeine causes increased locomotor activity. It's possible that the apparent benefits of coffee may occur because it causes drinkers to move around more (exercise). Other drugs also do this, but usually with more side-effects. Reductions in all-cause mortality associated with coffee consumption are broadly distributed across cardiovascular disease, cancer, which qualitatively resemble the benefits of exercise. Increased testosterone is also an effect of regular exercise:
https://journals.bioscientifica.com/ec/article/6/5/306/35211...
Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.
Most coups are organic. The US involvement in the Iran coup of 1953 was not very much, but the signal of support was meaningful. Ditto Chile in 1973. Ukraine's overthrow was not like those coups. It relied on popular support from the region near the capital. However, this support was not uniform across the country, and support for the protests hovered around 50% and never reached 60%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan#Public_opinion_abou...
>According to a January poll, 45% of Ukrainians supported the protests, and 48% of Ukrainians disapproved of Euromaidan.
>In a March poll, 57% of Ukrainians said they supported the Euromaidan protests.
The polling variation was large. The government was overthrown in February. But the western regions were massively in favor, and surrounded the capital, while the southeast was mostly opposed. Well-functioning states rely on political processes instead of simply overturning the government whenever a majority of citizens opposes it.
Given the polling data and the division of public opinion, I don't support what happened in February 2014. But that doesn't make it a coup -- a coup is a transfer of power that originates specifically within the government, and Ukraine's protests weren't like that. Nor does it justify Russia's invasion. What happened was more like a feudal power struggle. It doesn't help that before new elections could be held, the interim government banned several political parties. Maybe they were "pro-Russian", but democracy means voters deserve a say in a country's geopolitical alignment, so that doesn't seem like a valid reason to ban a political party to me.
>but maybe you can point exactly to the US involvement
Now this sounds like a joke. US politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden and several senators, attended the protests. This makes American support pretty obvious. US media at the time also tended to minimize domestic opposition to the protests, even though this was a significant position within Ukraine.
That they lost about 80% of their lawsuits throws doubt on that.
>It’s a valid concern, but the data show that Chile’s obesity rates weren’t rising in the years before the reform.
This last sentence is a real 'wat' moment. Practically every country has rising obesity rates. So I went looking for some data and found that over the whole population, obesity rates in Chile were rising rapidly prior to 2016. And also after 2016. If there has been any effect it's pretty small.
https://statbase.org/data/chl-prevalence-of-obesity-among-ad...
If you add in Argentina you see a bigger effect from the Argentine economic crisis at the turn of the century than you do from anything else.
It turns out vim vs emacs is a universal phenomenon.
Well, kinda. But Haber-Bosch uses an iron catalyst. This is cheap, but it requires very high temperatures and pressures. There has been some recent work on ruthenium catalysts (particularly a Japanese company Tsubame BHB) which are more expensive, but allow the reaction to proceed under milder conditions. A particular goal is to have smaller facilities which can then be colocated with power generation. So you are exchanging a higher fixed cost for hopefully lower variable costs. I don't know if that's actually what they're doing here, though.
This isn't insurmountable for a probe. Biology can get stuck in local optima. Humans have the Periodic Table and quantum mechanics. But it means we are on untrodden ground. Refining titanium, today, uses a massive molybdenum-lined reactor operating at 1600 C (2900 F). The alternative processes (FFC and Chinuka) use liquid calcium chloride, mp 773 C. The square-cube law points to enormous energy losses trying to scale these processes down. And that's just one element.
And I guess I do think that FreeBSD had a saner organization pattern than the sort of haphazard ecosystem of projects that grew up around GNU and Linux. Maybe the chaos was necessary for growth, but it still seems to be a hurdle for new Linux users in the current day.
>You’ll also find lots of cough medication with guaifenesin, which has similarly thin scientific backing.
He links ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24003241/ ) which shows that guaifenisin had no measurable effect on sputum volume or consistency (p = 0.12 for volume). But there are other studies with broader outcome measures which show positive effects:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1465-9921-13-118
>The pilot study was a randomized, double-blind study where patients were dosed with either 1200 mg extended-release guaifenesin (n = 188) or placebo (n = 190), every 12 hours for 7 days [...]
>Subjective measures of efficacy at Day 4 showed the most prominent difference between treatment groups, in favor of guaifenesin.
>The DCPD assessment of symptoms also indicated advantages for ER guaifenesin over placebo for the between-day changes from baseline in response to the questions “Over the last 24 hours how often did your phlegm prevent you from going to public places?” (Day 2; p = 0.0016) and “Over the last 24 hours, how difficult was it for you to bring up phlegm?” (Day 5; p = 0.0070).
G tends to do well in subjective (symptomatic) assessments, even when subjects are blinded, but poorly in objective assessments. However, this isn't enough to condemn it.
But Geely can throw down the gauntlet by building Polestars and relabeling them Volvos.
Tech companies like to rob the cradle, and academic departments hire far more grad students and postdocs than professors. Of course, this is also part of the problem with academic careers.
Letting the industry guide policymaking seems like it could lead to regulatory capture preventing EVs from reaching the (low!) price points that they should reach. Already the two-track emissions standards and chicken tax make cars too big and the "arms race" of having a bigger car than everyone else to stay safe (at the expense of others) prevents meaningful reform.
The implications here for quality of life are pessimistic. Also, the "extension" in the study is about 10%, but driving responsibly can make your car last many times longer.