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I don't agree that a definition of multiplication that includes transcendentals such as pi must be numerical. In fact, to the extent that numerical approximations are approximations _of_ something, the thing they would be approximating is the actual value of the operation of multiplication being applied to pi and pi. The only reason we're talking about algorithms at all was to distinguish between them and definitions.

The comment to which you replied says that thinking about multiplication as "just" repeated addition is problematic, so let's look at that.

Consider 3 x 2. If we take that approach, it seems ok - we understand it to mean "add together 3 2's" - 2 + 2 + 2, which gives the correct answer of 6.

What about -3 * -2? What does it mean to add a negative number of times?

What about pi * pi? What does it mean to add something pi times?

What about the matrix M * the matrix N?

etc. The parent's point is that this repeated addition thing is just an algorithm one can use to calculate a multiplication for some operands, specifically whole numbers, not a general definition of the operation of multiplication.

Tbh it sounds like you're guilt-free either way. You're saying that it doesn't matter at all to you when your actions harm others. You would like to be able to say they didn't, but don't feel guilty if they do. Also fwiw as many people who have tried it will tell you, there is a gain in acting selflessly, and it's better than the gain from acting selfishly. The idea that altruism is for suckers is actually harmful to your self-interest.

The paper's authors are surely writing for an audience of physicists and not a general audience. As mentioned here[1], their audience will expect this usage. ScienceDaily may not have, though if they did, it would have been nice for them to highlight the distinction.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20666140

you say:

> regarding physical models, you are assuming there is a universal truth or reality that is the same for everyone

which is basically an axiom one must adopt to engage in science. E.g., here's the formulation found in the Wikipedia article "Philosophy of Science"[1]:

> that there is an objective reality shared by all rational observers

So if one wishes to engage in an inquiry that doesn't hold this axiom, it's of course a perfectly fine thing to do, but it's best for all concerned not to call it science or scientific. Many issues and lines of inquiry that are important to people aren't amenable to scientific inquiry, but it does nothing but harm to dissimulate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_science#Naturali...

I don't think it's a given that a useful way of expressing programs must also be a useful way of expressing an academic paper.

That being said, a lot of mathematical notation is pretty close to lisp syntax, basically anything that works like sigma.

The fact that lisp syntax introduces no extra characters and no extra noise is my point; I'm glad we agree.

> Without these things, the increased syntax burden of parens don’t buy you anything except visual noise and being forced to type extra characters

So instead of f(x), I have to accept the visual noise and extra characters of (f x)?

He's replying to a comment suggesting that dead people be fed to vultures with the observation that elderly people are a population with a propensity for being treated with diclofenac and a link indicating that the presence of this drug in carcasses is threatening vulture populations.

> the egg cells of women are produced before birth

just fyi this is actually an active research topic, c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oogonial_stem_cells#Research

The idea of anaphoric macros[1] is first found in Paul Graham's "On Lisp"[2] and is based on the linguistic concept of anaphora, an expression whose meaning depends on the meaning of another expression in its context. An anaphor (like "it") is such a referring term.

I think if you like this idea, you will really like the book. Better still, you can download the pdf for free.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_macro [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html

I wonder if you would want to add a link to that page about setting up Cloudflare dynamic DNS on a Synology NAS? That's my use case, and I found a script[1] and a page[2] where people were having some success using it.

[1] https://github.com/joshuaavalon/SynologyCloudflareDDNS [2] https://luvis.se/tipstricks/set-up-dynamic-dns-with-cloudfla...

It's useful because the read-string in core is passing a string to the reader, essentially like an eval[1].

The edn namespace is for Extensible Data Notation[2], and exports functions for reading an object from a stream and from a string without passing it to the lisp reader.[3]

[1] https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.core/read-string [2] https://clojuredocs.org/clojure.edn [3] https://clojure.github.io/clojure/clojure.edn-api.html

If you correct for this effect caused by changing distance between the parties, you will still observe a difference in passage of time in the two different inertial frames of reference (each observing the other). In both cases the party taking the measurement will observe that time is passing more slowly in the frame of reference that the measurer sees as moving with respect to the measurer's frame, regardless of whether that motion is toward or away from the measurer.

> Sir Bruce Greatbatch, KCVO, CMG, MBE, governor of the Seychelles, ordered all the dogs on Diego Garcia to be killed. More than 1000 pets were gassed with exhaust fumes. "They put the dogs in a furnace where the people worked", Lisette Talatte, in her 60s, told me, "and when their dogs were taken away in front of them our children screamed and cried". Sir Bruce had been given responsibility for what the US called "cleansing" and "sanitising" the islands; and the killing of the pets was taken by the islanders as a warning.

The second half of his post is not a critique of how the point to which he responds was communicated, but of the point itself. He's saying that the message "people shouldn't write like that" is problematic and flawed, not that it itself shouldn't have been written like it was.

As to your second point, that any speech at all might offend someone so there's no point in drawing attention to that fact, on the contrary, the commenter is actually making a very concrete point. He is talking about a very specific thing, that this prescriptivism about writing style alienates and turns away a lot of people that could otherwise make valuable contributions. It's not a general statement that any statement might offend somebody, but a highly targeted examination of the consequences of such speech policing.

A quote attributed to Honoré de Balzac, but when I went to use it a few years ago I wanted a citation and found that his actual words were neither so pithy nor so broadly implicative:

"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu’il a été proprement fait."

The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, because it was properly/cleanly done," is my fairly literal translation, but I am not really fluent enough to capture subtleties.

A bit off topic, but fyi Stephen, the mailhide widget at the bottom of your "About" page seems to be broken. I browsed your site beyond the article you submitted and wanted to mention that you may be able to use Ctrl-[ as a substitute for the missing Escape key on your iPad pro. I do that a lot on normal keyboards just to avoid the pivot movement and stay on the home row, as it's just a simple pinky stretch (assuming Caps Lock as an additional Control), and also map Ctrl-] to be the tmux escape for the same reason.

Windows 10 Pro is only $200.00 if your time is worthless, is the flip side.

This isn't about the various senses the English word "derived" can have, it's about the specific meaning of the legal term "derivative work." That would start with including major elements of another work and those elements being subject to copyright (e.g. in the US, book titles are not). There's no point in talking about how one could argue that something wouldn't be what it is without something else, that's not the legal basis at all. In no legal sense are the Indiana Jones movies derivative works of the old 1930's serials just because they were sources of inspiration.

In a recent blogpost [1], Hossenfelder responds to a review of her book. All but the first two paragraphs are basically a response to this idea. A brief excerpt:

> In most cases, however, physicists are not aware they use arguments from beauty to begin with (hence the book’s title). I have such discussions on a daily basis.

> Physicists wrap appeals to beauty into statements like “this just can’t be the last word,” “intuition tells me,” or “this screams for an explanation”. They have forgotten that naturalness is an argument from beauty and can’t recall, or never looked at, the motivation for axions or gauge coupling unification. They will express their obsessions with numerical coincidences by saying “it’s curious” or “it is suggestive,” often followed by “Don’t you agree?”.

[…]

> What physicists are naive about is not appeals to beauty; what they are naive about is their own rationality. They cannot fathom the possibility that their scientific judgement is influenced by cognitive biases and social trends in scientific communities. They believe it does not matter for their interests how their research is presented in the media.

Have you read the book or any of her posts about the ideas in the book? There are in fact a lot of people who do claim that research programs and research dollars should be prioritized because of ideas like naturalness or beauty, even when decades of increasingly expensive and time-consuming work has led to no support for the natural or beautiful hypothesis.

[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/02/a-philosopher-of-sc...

May I ask what point you are trying to address? Did I say that there was a worldwide trend for veganism in the 7th century BCE? Or that eating meat was a recent practice?

You said you had no qualms with killing animals for food, and that "the issues people have with it are purely a side effect of chic urban programming." Even without resorting to a possibly contentious archaeological record, we know from recorded history that the Jains abstained from meat for ethical reasons from all these centuries ago, as they do today, which I think falsifies your claim. If you want to dispute the specific example of the Jains, there are other groups of ethical vegetarians going back thousands of years to cite.

And yet we know vegetarianism goes back to at least the 7th century BCE. So perhaps your glib ascription to an urban trendiness is unfounded.

Democracy and authoritarianism are both forms of government, and that is the sense of the words being used in the sentence ("Current government models, democratic and authoritarian alike, …"). You've chosen to reinterpret one of them as an adjective unconnected to the thing it describes (government models) and then criticized the parent for a category error.

c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia , https://old.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/

makes sense, so it's really exact reduplication, but represented with the orthographic constraints you describe. thanks :)

reduplication[1], in case you find that sort of thing interesting. Almost exact reduplication, bar the ending - is ending in -in or -din allowed in Brazilian Portuguese?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication

.

Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps have normal BMIs. BMI is very sensitive and not very specific, meaning that it has few false positives and lots of false negatives, the opposite of what you suggest.

In this article[1] "Measuring Adiposity in Patients: The Utility of Body Mass Index (BMI), Percent Body Fat, and Leptin" you can see this dramatically illustrated in Figure 1 [2]. The upper left quadrant (different colors for men and women) is the most populous. It contains the people who are obese by body fat percentage but not BMI. The lower right is the least populated. It contains the people who are not obese by body fat percentage but who are flagged as obese by BMI.

The small fraction of the population that have devoted such attention to the cultivation of muscle over other goals, such as athletic performance, are surely well aware of their body fat levels and are unlikely to be impacted by this edge case in BMI measurement. (Their excess muscle may also not be healthy for their cardiovascular system.) Dismissing the utility of a easily applied and highly sensitive screen like BMI is a mistake, both for individuals and for public health.

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=...

You may wish to know that the current executive budget proposal would shutter the NIST time radio broadcasts (WWV, WWVH, and WWVB)[1][2][3].

[1] https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/information-from-the-nist-re...

[2] https://www.kb6nu.com/nist-to-shutter-wwv-wwvh-wwvb/

[3] https://www.nist.gov/director/fy-2019-presidential-budget-re...

"Illustrative program reductions in FY 2019

-$6.3 million supporting fundamental measurement dissemination, including the shutdown of NIST radio stations in Colorado and Hawaii"