yaakov34

The factoid about resistance to EMP gets repeated endlessly online and in print, but it doesn't really make sense, and I doubt it's true. EMP damages electrical connections which are:

a) long. b) thin. c) far from a ground plane.

In more detail: the induced current depends directly on the length of the conductor; a thin is more easily overheated and damaged than a thick one; and conductors running near ground planes make poor antennas for picking up pulses.

Now, all three of these factors describe vacuum tubes more than solid-state electronics. Vacuum tubes have to have very thin heated cathode wires, and the dimensions of vacuum tubes result in a substantial distance to the ground plane and in long conductors. Compared with solid-state electronics, which, especially in modern design, can practically live on or between ground planes, this makes for a lot of sensitivity to EMP and external interference.

One sanity check is to consider electromagnetic noise emitted by the device. Any device which is emitting substantial RF noise from its internal components is also going to be vulnerable to external EMP or interference, since antennas work both ways - anything which is good at emitting will also be good at receiving. Now, vacuum tube devices emit more RF noise than modern solid state devices, and generally need more shielding.

The components in the MiG-25 radar had more to do with what was available to the Soviet designers in the 1950s. The radar of the MiG-25 came from the Tu-128 interceptor which first flew in 1961, which means that the radar was designed in the mid-1950s at the latest. Wouldn't surprise me if the US radar of the same vintage also used vacuum tubes.

You can get vehicle miles driven by state directly, and also such data as fatalities per road user and per miles driven: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...

However, you won't get much insight from plotting this data geographically: a table (as in that link) is enough. Basically you get exactly what is expected: Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "Law of the Canadian Border" - southern states have more social problems.

If you want high-resolution geographical data for purposes such as finding problem roads, that would be a lot more difficult - you need to have a graph of the road network (from e.g. Open Street Map), with traffic data attached to the arcs of the network (I don't know of any public access databases like that, although such data is commercially available for road planning) plus accident locations accurately mapped to the roads. I suspect it wouldn't be a quick project to do.

I agree with one of the posters below: this is a population heatmap, exactly as identified by XKCD (https://xkcd.com/1138/). Florida, which you mention, is highlighted in red only because this is a small-scale map with poor density representation. Here is Florida with the exact same data, as plotted by me in R with a little more resolution:

https://imgur.com/a/WU3JI

A population map, in other words. As a very basic demonstration of the capabilities of R, this is OK, but as a visualization, this is 100% useless. You would need something like "percentage of expected fatalities for a given stretch of road, given the type of road" to actually have something interesting. And that takes a lot more work.

The same study says that low BMI is also associated with lower lifespan, and the statistically optimum BMI for white people is 23 to 25 (there are racial differences in all the numbers, which I think also challenges the idea of assigning moral qualities to them).

However, I don't know if I would give too much thought to the effect for low BMI - it could just be that people with extremely low BMI tend to have some disease process which causes that; only a small minority of them are rail-thin athletes. For high and extremely high BMI, there are known causal mechanisms for disease, so it's a different story.

It is a fact that the effect exists, but I think that you are also victim to the popular idea that this effect is extremely powerful or even overwhelming, making "taking care of yourself" a powerful morality tale. Here is a quote from a large study:

"having a BMI between 30 and 35 shortened life by an average of 0–1 years, having a BMI between 35 and 40 shortened life by 1–3 years, and having a BMI above 40 shortened life by 1–7 years"

(This is easily googlable, I don't want to turn this message into a journal article)

Note that the error bars on the effect are quite large (1 to 7 years even for extreme obesity). Now it's true that a lot of things hide in an "average", and there is a lot to discuss here, and I am definitely not discouraging anybody from acquiring healthy habits and lifestyle, but... it's just not a simple story of reward for virtue and punishment for sins. Genetic factors which we have no control over probably have a greater effect. Which is not a story that people want to hear.

How about you think about what you just said for a minute. How is this a situation of "nothing to lose"? You are talking about an extremely sick person who, based on the fact that he has extremely advanced heart disease, probably has a lot of difficulty just being there for his family, and trying to put his affairs in order. Do you think he has the time and capacity to go on an "extreme diet" on the strength of "why not"? And if I publish some book which says that hitting oneself on the head with a pillow 100 times will cure heart disease, should he then try that? After all, what has he got to lose, right?

There is also this commonly held notion that if you "live right", with healthy habits, food, and exercise, you will live to 98 in perfect health, and probably die of an instant heart attack while in bed with a young lover. It's of course true that obesity and lack of exercise increase health risks at all ages, but that risk was never going to be 0. The notion that I mentioned basically makes health problems into a morality play. I've even seen people get angry at the fact that statins can reduce heart disease risk in an "unearned" way - they can't accept that. The fact is that blood vessels and everything else lose function with increasing age, at a different rate for different people.

That's not really true for pancreatic cancer. It is absolutely notorious for escaping even when it's detected early, and even after a (seemingly) complete resection. This was in fact Randy Pausch's case: he had a resection with negative margin (meaning no cancer detectable on the surfaces from which the tumor was cut) and negative lymph nodes. For most cancers, his chances of survival would have been excellent, but not for pancreatic cancer. I remember at the time he wrote that it was a 50:50 proposition, but it's actually a lot worse. We don't know why this happens - it probably has to do with early metastasis by very small clumps of cells, or even individual cells.

This is one reason nobody recommends widespread screening for pancreatic cancer - apart from the inevitable false positives and so on. We currently don't have anything very wonderful to offer even to people in whom it was detected early, although it does improve the chances somewhat.

So does mine. I just spent a few minutes researching this on Payscale, which confirmed the impression I already had: someone with a degree from a good school and a lot of experience can easily get an offer around $150k from one of the better companies in the bay area (assuming one interviews well). Their median was $148k, in fact. Numbers like $300k or $500k are not typical for software engineers, even in the best companies.

And remember that not everyone works for one of the top companies. There are hundreds of thousands of programmers in California (not sure about the bay area, although that has to account for a lot of them), most of them are well out of their twenties, and most of them don't work for Google or Facebook or anything as prestigious or well-funded.

That's just not true, not by any stretch. Certainly not for the median salary, and not even for the average, even though that's distorted by the long tail of very high salaries. There are easily-googled studies out there which put mid-career median salaries at $150k at best. If that seems absurdly low to you, that's probably because your friends are a self-selected group (as they are for everyone). Sort of like "how could Nixon win, I don't know anyone who voted for him".

Musk is the biggest shareholder in SolarCity, and his cousins are the top managers (and also shareholders) there. The decision to merge SolarCity with the much more powerful Tesla ensures the future of SolarCity, at least in the medium term. SolarCity was losing money and thought to be in trouble.

That said, it's not like the conflict of interest is a secret. Musk is going to get the deal approved by Tesla shareholders. Personally, I would be more skeptical in their place, but apparently they are fairly enthusiastic about it. So whatever, more power to him and to them.

> The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), thought to weigh at least 100 tons,

I don't know why presstv would write it that way, the specs of the missile have been publicly known for decades, and it weighs 209 tons. I guess that's "at least 100".

Honestly, this just sounds like a good reason to not be logged into LinkedIn ever, if I needed an additional one. Name and job title sent to random websites? No thanks.

Yeah, we'll definitely want a "dementia moonshot", or a few, before we attempt to create a generation of centenarians. However, cancer incidence climbs terrifyingly rapidly when people reach their 60s - long before we are ready to give up on them. A successful cancer moonshot (and the Nixon one, by the way, was quite successful) will let millions of people enjoy many good years with their loved ones; not to mention that it would also save many young people from dying of cancer, although that's a much smaller share of cancer patients.

I am going to go against the grain of the usual sympathetic responses to this type of articles, and I am going to say that this is a case of pernicious and pointless casuistry. Apparently, this now passes for some kind of deep thought on the human condition.

Well of course any medical treatment for anything just leads to more medical treatment in the future; that's not a profound statement, not as long as people are mortal. And it's not limited to cancer. It used to be, in the bad old days, that some people became almost completely bedridden as their joints gave out, and then either died early or wished they did; now we have arthritis medications and joint replacement surgeries that let many of them (not all, but very many) enjoy decades of their retirements. Does this lessen the need for future orthopedic treatment? Obviously not, since it extends their lives and keeps them on their feet long enough to develop other joint problems. Does that make orthopedics and rheumatology pointless? As someone who needed the intervention of rheumatologists, I assure you that it doesn't.

In the case of cancer, nobody believes that one can make people live forever by curing their cancers; of course, they will live long enough to die of something, maybe even another cancer. Still, I personally know people in their 70s and 80s who would have been dead and buried 20 years ago if it wasn't for cancer treatment; and the idea of the "cancer moonshot" is to give the same chance to a lot more people. I came home today after visiting a very dear friend whose cancer is, with the current level of medicine, close to untreatable. Will she live forever if some treatment is developed for it? Well of course not. Would it be worthwhile to change the several months that she has left to live into several years? Of course, and yes, it would mean that she would require more cancer treatment, not less.

We can debate if the "moonshot" model is right for cancer (personally, I think it has merits), but these pseudo-profound dismissals of medicine are simply vulgar and annoying.

> had a positive void coefficient of reactivity

Had and still does. There are 11 RBMK blocks still operating.

Actually, liquid oxygen is almost 40% denser than kerosene (1.14 vs 0.82 g/cm^2). And this is the reason most rockets [1] put oxygen on top/forward: they want the center of gravity to be as far forward as possible, ahead of the aerodynamic pressure center, so that the rocket will be as stable as possible when ascending through the atmosphere. Just as we would put a weight on the front of the arrow, and feathers in the back, to make it more stable.

For the vertical landing, this would seem to work against them, but I guess the mostly empty tanks don't dominate the considerations. Falcon has oxidizer on top in the conventional manner, as far as I know (they mention LOX feed lines going through the fuel tank).

[1] The N1 rocket had oxidizer below the fuel in every stage, apparently because they wished to use spherical tanks, and this allowed packing them in a conical shape - the oxidizer tanks are much larger.

There is correspondence between Mozart and his father about a cabal of Italians (especially the court composer Salieri) hindering him. I would say this reflects worse on the Mozarts than it does on Salieri, who spent almost his whole life in Vienna and didn't belong to any Italian cabals. In any case, Mozart established himself rapidly in Vienna and his complaints about Salieri, with whom he had friendly relations, trailed off.

This kind of thing is now a reason to accuse someone of the lowest kind of murder out of jealousy?

History didn't start with that movie, you know. Salieri's work was not performed e.g. in Russia, where the influence of Pushkin's "Mozart and Salieri" was particularly strong, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. For part of the 20th century, I was a witness to that myself - I heard several times from friends who were musicians that Salieri's works are never performed because he is thought to have poisoned Mozart. This is why his music was obscure. If he is being rediscovered after yet more slander, well, that's good, but two centuries of the worst kind of lies and calumnies are still a bad way to treat a person, I would say.

Salieri's confession itself was never anything more than a rumor. Following his delirium and suicide attempt, it was said that he confessed to a priest that he poisoned Mozart, but there is no such written note or testimony (I suppose there couldn't be, since priests don't reveal confessions). Again, we can't prove with mathematical certainty that he didn't confess, but given that he had many mutual friends with Mozart and that they defended him from these accusations throughout this period, we have no reason to believe such a thing.

A great illustration of how the slander works: "we can never know". Of course we do know, to the normal standard of historical proof, that Salieri didn't kill Mozart: any sane historian would note the fact that Mozart died after a fairly prolonged illness, that his death wasn't considered suspicious at the time by his doctor or his family, and that rumors of Salieri's involvement started decades later, and that the supposed "Salieri's confession" doesn't exist, and would pronounce the case closed. It's not a mathematical proof, but that can't be the standard by which we dismiss baseless rumors, unless we want to keep around every ridiculous accusation ever made by people who were not even contemporaries to the events.

As for the rivalry between Salieri and Mozart, it seems that there was a short period of rivalry while Mozart was trying to establish himself in Vienna, and a longer period of amiable relations and collaboration (such as the music piece now discovered). None of this rose above the expected level (given that they had different musical styles), and it certainly doesn't make a composer who was otherwise not known to be involved in murders into a poisoner.

Is there a more slandered person in all of history than Salieri? This is the man who murdered the world's greatest musical genius in his prime out of jealousy ... except that he fucking didn't, and the notion is ridiculous. The man whose music wasn't performed in many countries as a result of this belief. The man whose name became synonymous with talentless mediocrity - just because we don't listen to opera from his period as much as we listen to some other stuff.

I can't picture a white person being an ally if white people are explicitly excluded from leadership.

BTW, do you want to get started on explaining away "we can't teach white male managers empathy or compassion"?

I'm happy to indulge, although HN is not the most convenient forum for long discussions.

The reason that I didn't, and don't, want to make this about Nicole Sanchez is that, unfortunately, I don't think that she is unique in holding these views, or acting on them within a mainstream company. In fact, the original comment in this thread quotes an even more explicit statement by someone else in Github (about how you can't "teach empathy to white male middle managers). There is also the matter of the "open code of conduct", subscribed to by Github among others (apparently not so open, since they refused to change it) which up and says that "we will not act on complaints of reverse racism", which rather clearly means racism against white people.

So yes, avoiding mentioning Nicole Sanchez was intentional in the sense that I am not interested in arguing ad hominem. Her name and person don't hold any particular significance for the discussion or for me personally, and I hope that you are mature enough not to retort "well, that's because she is not a white male". I am absolutely certain down to the inner core of my soul that I wouldn't care to weave her name into my comments if it was "Dwight Higginbotham".

She certainly doesn't say "only white" and she explicitly excludes white women ("some of the biggest barriers to progress"). You can make convoluted excuses for her, but it's obvious that she sees white people (of whatever gender or socioeconomic status) as essentially enemies, and doesn't want them as allies (let alone is willing to accept some of them as people with different, but valid opinions). It's not acceptable to write "we're not looking for Indian folks to lead this", and it shouldn't be if it's "white".

Also, it's definitely not just her, expressions like this have popped up in a number of mainstream places. I am definitely not imagining the various celebrations of white people "dying off", their share in the population dropping, and what have you.

Ideological intolerance is part of it, but it's clearly not the only part, given that the very first point in her slide is "this is not work for white folks to lead", i.e. she doesn't want white allies. I don't see how much more explicit this lady can make the fact that she hates white people as such.

As for German or Russian philosophers - that seems far fetched. This is an American phenomenon, and in its explicit and mainstream form, it is a fairly recent one.

Another quote is "it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'". This is absurd and disgusting.

I haven't lived in the US for a while, but lately, I keep hearing all these expressions of straight up racial hatred of white people, all the way up to taking pleasure in white people "dying off" and so on. This kind of thing can't end well and needs to be stopped.

Agree absolutely with your sentiment. However, CERN's kind reaction is not atypical and is usually extremely self-serving.

This kind of minor stuff is often seized upon to demonstrate self-righteousness and establish a defense for future claims. For example, in a large company in which I worked (tens of thousands of people), someone at my site installed some unlicensed utility, which I think was worth like $200, on his laptop, just to check it out - it was something he didn't even need. The utility phoned home, the author company wrote a letter - not even a rude or threatening letter, just an FYI - to the large company. The next day, the large company made a huge show of having security meet this guy at the entrance with a box of his belongings, and sending a mail to everyone about how they just fired someone for unlicensed use of software, filled with some of the same sanctimony used by CERN. Everyone thought this was ridiculous, and that there were better applications for the high-mindedness.

I think you posted the same video twice, but I'm not disagreeing that domestic animals generally act less purposefully and intelligently than wild animals - they've lost the survival skills that they needed as wild animals. For example, many dogs like to dig big holes, but they are not remotely capable of building a proper den in which to raise a litter. And of course many of them bark at small animals, but most of them don't have any understanding of how to kill them (except some breeds which are selected for it).

I think these foxes are a lot like that - they love to hide in "dens" provided to them (plastic tubes), but I doubt they have the ability to build shelters or find food in the wild. Hence the less purposeful behavior - what are they going to do in their spare time, solve calculus problems? They play and wait for belly rubs and food. But I don't see the difference with pet dogs which are not bred and raised for specific work.

There are already lots of videos of these foxes on Youtube. I don't know about the minxes, but the foxes basically behave like domestic dogs, possibly with more energy. They don't sit and drool. On the other hand, it's almost certainly true that they lost a lot of behaviors that they'd need to survive in the wild, but that applies to most domestic animals.