1,056 karma · joined February 27, 2009
I've been meaning to read that history for a long time, but never gotten around to it:
https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Dragons-Conquest-Fergus-Flemi...
That might be true.
When you get past the snark, there is a strong argument against syntax highlighting in Plan 9. If your desk is too messy to find anything, tidy it up; if your code is too messy to read, ditto. Syntax highlighting, from this perspective, is like bringing in a mechanical excavator when the answer is to stop digging. If you look at the Plan 9 code, they practiced what they preached.
But that perspective is an elite one, that of research programmers at Bell Labs, where the code is the product.
I understand non-relativistic quantum mechanics, i.e. the Schrodinger equation, so close to perfectly as makes no difference. So do thousands of other physicists.
We don't all understand it in the same way. The atomic scale is removed from the human scale by an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude, they do things differently there, so humans can't appeal to their experience to say that one self-consistent description of atomic phenomena is real and another isn't. But the way I understand quantum mechanics is self-consistent, so is the way any the next physicist understands it, and we'll all agree what result it predicts for any experiment you can imagine. If you want more than that, science can't help you.
Why isn't that a rational response? Many of Trump's actions were wrong. However, he got away with them, and acceptable and normal are about what you can get away with, not what's right.
Propaganda.
> For voters, improve their ability to make the right choice via education and representative (not direct) democracy
The common theme of Le Bon and Bernays was that such groups as "the voters" are inherently not capable of making deliberate choices, and those choices will be made for them by propagandists. I find that depressing, but their arguments for it are convincing.
> people may draw completely different conclusions from the same facts
Le Bon points out a more basic issue. He wrote about the kinds of crowds who used to storm the Bastille and so on—and appear to have returned to American history today after a long vacation. He concluded that the members of such crowds simply don't do things like considering facts or drawing conclusions. Instead, they associate chains of images and follow suggestions from prestigious leaders. TV advertisments do exactly what he suggested, and so does Donald Trump. It appears to work.
This puts me in a dilemma. As a physicist with egalitarian tendencies, I want everyone to take action that will provide the things they want and need, according to valid arguments founded on the laws of nature. But apparently, one of those laws of nature says that valid reasons have nothing in common with the reasons people do things.
Bernays resolved that dilemma by telling people like me to manipulate everyone else into doing what (we believe) is in their best interest. I'm really uncomfortable with that position, but it's hard to see an alternative.
In Britain and Australia, they're not. (Except for the Tasmanian Dams Case.) Parliament has to, in effect, cut and paste the treaty into legislation, and only then will courts enforce it. Sometimes parliament refuses to do that, and sometimes they try but slip up.
There was an amusing twist after this was published. The creators got in trouble with the Australian Government, who were concerned about their use of the Australian coat of arms: it might confuse viewers into thinking the video was an official government one.
Those mistakes are just details. But I'm a physicist, so I can't tell if there are more serious mistakes that break the whole argument. Any biologists want to comment?
It's also worth noting that the Fair Work Commission has been stacked by the current government, which is formed by the investors' party, but the Federal Court is genuinely apolitical. The workers' party has spent most of the last 30 years in opposition.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/dec/07/coali...
So, in the limit of effective response, COVID saves net lives, and in the limit of ineffective response, it costs net lives. The simplest explanation might be that Sweden has hit the intermediate point where it does neither.
What happened? On the one hand, few people died of COVID. On the other hand, there are other deadly respiratory diseases, especially influenza. They're all less contagious than COVID, so the measures taken to contain COVID had the side effect of pretty much eradicating them. (Looking at it the other way: if influenza is still circulating in your community, there is no way you're going to get COVID under control.)
This might not last: the psychiatrists are saying that a lot of Australian teenagers have developed eating disorders, that in ordinary times would lead to very high suicide rates, and the recession is bound to kill lots of people in various ways. No one will know the optimum response for some years, and Sweden could still turn out to be right.
The Australian response could certainly be improved. Mostly by public servants who promptly owned up and asked for help when they got out of their depth in implementing it, and made fewer and less catastrophic stuff ups for want of awkward conversations with their ministers.
I read that bit as a really good answer to a question famously posed by Knuth: 7 is a random number iff the reasons it isn't 8 are beyond anyone's control.
You maintain a file README.jl, with a mixture of Markdown text, example code in Julia, and hidden code in Julia. Inspired by Knuth's literate programming idea, there are several things you can do with that file:
* Weave it to get README.md, with the text, the example code, and the output from running the example code.
* #include it in your tests, to run the example code, then run the hidden code to verify the results.
* Super-weave it to generate a web notebook, where people can modify the example code and see what happens.
This isn't perfect. When the examples generate graphical output, you have to write some boilerplate code to capture it as a GIF and link it in README.md. That gets annoying in a numerical language like Julia. But it's pretty good.
To get from x∧x to |x|², you need a norm. And I guess linearity must break down somewhere unless that norm is compatible with an inner product. Thanks, I missed that point.
> But I guess the intent is clear enough.
Once you have u and b, you can define a = u - b.
When people talk about it, it always sounds like a simple generalization of exterior algebra. And so it is. You allow a formal sum of a 0-form, a 1-form, and so on up to an n-form; instead of x∧x being zero, it's |x|². I assume the textbooks show how to do all this in a basis-independent manner.
Can you do the same thing with chains, and come up with an even-more-generalised Stokes theorem?
There are two things I don't get.
Why start calling things 2-vectors, when you could call them 2-forms and people would know what you were talking about?
Also, when discussing 3D rotations, the article decomposes a vector u as the sum of two vectors a + b, where a·i = b∧i = 0, and i is a 2-vector. I'm fine with b∧a, and I know that there is an inner product for forms of the same degree, though I'd have to look up how it works. But how do you take the inner product a·i of a vector and a 2-form? I'd guess this is an abuse of notation whose meaning is obvious if you're used to it.
In fairness, those are due to quarantine failures, which were anticipated and planned for.
Why would a region with one person per square kilometer plan to quarantine people in a crowded hotel in the centre of a crowded city, and respond to the inevitable outbreaks which potentially expose millions of people to the virus, when you could divert all the jets to Woomera and stick everyone in tents for 14 days? That's a question which those responsible are trying hard to ignore.
My favorite is the idea of "let's expand functions over a set of Gaussians". That is variously known as a Gabor wavelet frame, a coherent state basis [sic], an Gaussian wave packet expansion, and no doubt some others I haven't found. Worse still, the people who use each term don't know about any of the work down by people who use the other terms.
Fun fact: these days, Australians own more of everyone else's farms and factories than they own of ours.
First, it can be argued that Australia started this trade war. Long before China put any restrictions on imports from Australia, we were putting "anti-dumping" tariffs on Chinese steel. The ban on Huawei is a bit dodgy. You wouldn't want every mobile router in Australia to come from the same Chinese vendor. But the choice we actually have is between N networks with western hardware, or N+1 networks where the extra one uses Chinese hardware (and is possibly a lot cheaper and a bit shonkier than the others). It's not clear how that extra network would cause the collapse of Australian democracy: no one is forcing us to use it. On the other hand, it's very clear how it might cause a collapse in the profit margin of a monopolistic telecom company with close ties to the Liberal Party.
Secondly, there's that thing which everyone knows but pretends not to: trade benefits consumers much more than producers. For farmers in Australia, this means plowing some crops into the ground and delaying buying their kids the latest smart phone. For farmers in China, it means feeding their kids a diet of mercury, cadmium and melamine, when they lose access to safe and unadulterated produce. That isn't a very smart way for the Chinese government to spend its political capital, and you have to suspect this is more about vanity than deliberate strategy.
Police road blocks. Geography no doubt helps: there are only so many bridges across the Murray River, passes through the Australian Alps, and roads across the desert to Adelaide. And it's a bit far to ride a bicycle cross country.
One effect of the virus has been a rise in geographic realism among Australians. Over the last 50 years or so, we have been very gradually coming to think of Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan and Japan as medium size, more-or-less democratic countries like Australia. This year, we've been forced to give up on America and Europe, and we're thinking more seriously about how to live in our part of the world, where many countries have the virus under control. Though not yet seriously enough to learn the languages they speak, or anything like that.
Seriously, I think that we'll have to live with one Southeast Asian country (including Australia) having an outbreak at any given time.
Yes. I went with the headline Australian newspapers are using, which in hindsight lacks sufficient context for HN.
What I find remarkable is how many things Australia stuffed up, but was able to recover from by brute force and social cohesion. Procrastinating over quarantine for international travellers, obsessing about ventilators while ignoring prevention, identifying that aged care was a massive vulnerability but doing nothing to mitigate it, gross recklessness in setting up hotel quarantine, failing to anticipate that although the virus went away it was bound to come back: it's a long list.