The fact that they did it in the beginning and are doing it now makes the whole “well, there was a period of time when they didn’t do this” seem like a minor footnote to the notion that “they’ve always done this”. Even though the statement isn’t strictly true, it sure seems like the cynicism is warranted now and, with the benefit of hindsight, was back then too.
Have they fixed MacOS startup performance yet? ISTR some post about why faster CPUs were making emacs even slower on startup. Seems to have gotten worse over the years.
And Gene wrote the assembly tools that did shotgun assembly of the human genome for Celera when most folks (except Jim Kent who wrote the _other_ assembler (used by the public sequencing effort (NIH,Broad,UCSC, etc…)) said it couldn’t be done. IMO, he and Jim Kent deserve a Nobel prize for these efforts.
No, once again you've misunderstood or mischaracterized what I'm getting it. Folks can hold their beliefs with whatever sincerity they choose, but when they mix those beliefs with teaching, it becomes a pernicious form of activism. So if people are gonna try to decouple activism from teaching, they better include religious activities, doctrines, and proselytizing in said activism. That's all. Or, to put it another way, if you're gonna allow religious activities to get mixed up with teaching, be prepared for other forms of activism to be mixed in as well. To put activism grounded in supernatural beliefs/prophets/sacred texts on privileged ground above other forms of activism makes little sense to me.
What are you talking about? The whole article implies that they're gonna decouple activism from teaching. Just apply the same playbook to religion? Oh what's that? It can't be done? Ah, I see. Maybe that was the meta-point behind my whole rant after all. You wanna have religious schools? Fine. You want (non-religous) activist schools? I guess that's fine too. But the notion that we're gonna get rid of "activism" and not touch religion in teaching/education/academia strikes me as absurd.
Fair enough. One's belief in creation myths, higher powers/beings, afterlives, etc... is not, per se, activism, but once you start gathering people on a regular basis to bring about societal/behavioral change (ya know, commandments, morals, laws based on religious ideas/notions/opinions, etc...), much less proselytizing, then, yeah, it's pretty much the definition (or at least the poster child) of activism.
Meanwhile, there's a pretty sizeable percentage of the educational world that has inextricably tied education to religion. How about getting religion out of higher (and lower) education?
And, either way, this maneuver seems like it generated CO2 emissions roughly equal to those that would be saved by 10 people line drying their clothes for a year. Which 10 people are we gonna pick?
Ah, the good old days when your then-future CS professors wrote the fonts you might use (Clancy and Harvey). Pretty sure most soon-to-be CS profs aren't designing fonts these days.
org mode with paredit for the lisp source blocks is a life changer! but it does highlight the deficiencies of other languages (and their editors) when one has to write/edit R, python, etc... Then again, being able to do so in the same file is a major win.
I'd argue that our future retrospective view of chemotherapy will be more of how we view hunting with a club rather than, say, a bow and arrow. Not optimal but, at least in many cases, proven to be better than nothing by multiple randomized clinical trials.