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https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

It's great to see these technologies applied to an important hard problem (herding flocks away from flight paths near airports). Speaking of flocking bird behavior, on a lighter note, consider the complexities of migrating geese: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...

I just enjoy telling people that they're wrong. Everyone has a hobby.

Do you by any chance wear a hat?

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and understand.

Obligatory XKCD that you need to read and actually understand.

Earth's Land Mammals by Weight: https://xkcd.com/1338/

Explained: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...

It references a 2002 book: "The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change".

So, while this topic is very important, I'm not sure what in the study is actually "news"? Maybe the low percentage of ocean biomass (which I feel is hard to believe)?

This seems appropriate here: Bobby Tables https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...

That's a pretty standard argument when quantum mechanics is involved.

River Tam will become a Disney Princess, in this movie.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...

While the sudo manpages get short shrift, the Sudo release notes are one of the best examples of open-source release notes.

They are

• published in a convenient "permanent" location
• provided in multiple formats (direct email, mailing lists, usenet, webpages, version control strings, package logs)
• searchable format (text)
• ordered reverse chronologically (newest first when reading top to bottom)
• available in common languages
• clearly written in short, technical language
• mentioning new features including searchable strings or examples
• providing references, links and IDs of relevant tickets, bugs and background information

So, for example, if you needed to do something like figure out when the includedir option was added? Google it, get that page, find the version on that page and you are done.

Note that I use the present tense form in this. The legacy of the written word applies to Shakespeare as equally as it applied to your public Git commit messages. Or release notes. Once you publish your release notes they are always providing that information. They are providing information right now, just possibly to new people.

And please, don't just make your release notes a compilation of your commit messages. Unless they are really really good.

Which is precisely what this "study" does. Their graph simply compares cubic meters to cubic meters.

I put "study" in quotes because as far as I can tell there actually isn't a peer-reviewed study. Please correct me (with a link) if I'm mistaken.

Direct observation/measurement isn't the only method to estimate global temperatures over long periods of time. This chart isn't scientific, and the vast majority of the line is dashed to show the temperature is estimated (not observed directly), but a picture is worth 1000 words:

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...
(On the plus side, we seem to be preventing the next ice age from coming along.)

You could argue that direct observation is the only way to be certain, but that's like arguing that there's no way to be certain that trees existed before mankind showed up to observe and document them. You could take it one step farther and argue that even after humans developed written language, they were probably lying (en masse), in much the same way you believe that 98% of the scientists studying climate are lying. Any fossils found were faked or planted there by God to test the faithless (because he's definitely that petty/vindictive).

NASA is STRICTLY an Orbiter shop.

I thought Beret Guy's company already did this

However, he reveals that "since March of 1997" he doesn't really believe in anything. This could possibly refer to the March 26, 1997 incident in San Diego, California, where 39 Heaven's Gate cultists committed mass suicide at their compound. It is a plausible explanation, since one of them was the brother of Nichelle Nichols (a Star Trek actress), so the event got a big resonance in nerd circles (and Randall often refers to Star Trek in xkcd). However, given Black Hat's strange behavior, it could be anything, even Bill Clinton banning federal funding for human cloning research.

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wi...

Plus or minus 5 degrees

That would have us swinging in and out of an ice age.

What's the "ideal", "average"

The ideal temperature is approximately what it's been since the dawn of civilization. Only for the reason that we built this civilization, (the farms, the coastal properties, the dykes, the infrastructure, etc), with that climate in mind. Transport all that to a different climate and it no longer fits. It's expensive to have to redo it all.

and how you calculate and control it?

Best way to calculate it: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs... (IMHO, YMMV, but all methods produce roughly the same results.

Best way to control it: https://www.theguardian.com/en...

Read and learn something else, and you might be able to pull the stick out of your ass.

Have you tried turning on no-clip mode from the javascript console?

Spoilers

.... there is absolutely nothing that you can actually do, barring the use of what would probably amount to excessive physical violence, to prevent someone from taking your fingerprints who is intent upon doing so.

You can, at least, refuse to divulge your passwords.

Sure, but then you're pretty much leaving yourself to this:
http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...

Heh, I think this tweet is apropos:
https://twitter.com/NeckbeardH...

2003: "I replaced you with a set of very small shell scripts."
2013: "I replaced your scripts with a six-figure enterprise DevOps platform."

I worked through some large companies trying to do this transition. They were literally trying to transition from a BOSS (bunch 'o shell scripts) repository to OpsCode Chef. The idea was that there were previously lots of Developer groups, throwing shit at a separate Operations group, and having us System Engineers in the middle trying to coordinate it all while also keeping the Systems Architects and other disparate managers happy. At some point they had formed a DevOps group to try to merge all of that, which was good, but last I heard they had disbanded the DevOps team and were moving on to the next buzzword already. Anyway, most of us left and I have no idea what they're doing now, but I imagine a lot of the Chef cruft ended up being an inspiration for http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...

Anyway, it's been an interesting buzzwordy ride, and some of the technologies, particularly docker stuff, seems genuinely useful for delivering bits, enough so that I've started using it for personal projects at home. But I agree that most of it is just reinventing poorly what we had in the old days with pipelines for testing and packaging and version control and cluster management.

http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...

The obligatory obligatory

Yet some people actually choose to have 28 hour long days, i.e. 6 day long weeks: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...

Rule 34 of the internet says that there is already ewok porn.
Try to keep up.

Nice quote:
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."

From the movie "Primer" see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/P...

Yeah, that's one of my favorite movies. And it had a production value of what, $10k?
http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...

Sorry, pal--that argument's already been had, and won.

unless the hackers were dumb enough to believe that the NRC would store sensitive information on a public-facing server?

To be fair, very few organisations take security seriously, even when it's their entire job.

It's not dumb of a hacker to make the assumption that their target is incompetent. Cynical, maybe, but not unfounded.

Harpoons in space ...for those as confused as I about what the hell the "Apollo 12 Rum Incident" was all about. Hint: probably some kind of "noodle incident"

Unless the developers have taken a belt-and-suspenders approach to guarding against cross-site scripting and Bobby Tables attacks by not only using parameterized statements but also stripping any punctuation characters that may have special meaning in HTML or in SQL. Angle brackets, ampersands, and quotation marks become an underscore, which is a more common (that is, less entropy) character in passwords.

Duh, the centrifugal force is an effect, not a force in itself. That's what we were taught in physics at least.

Searching, I stand not corrected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And Wikipedia is always right. But xkcd is always righter.

OB www.explainxkcd.com, It's 'cause you're dumb ;)

That's why there is explain xkcd.

Haters be hat'n

Thank you.
Adelaide had it's hottest February day on record, 44.7 degrees celsius.
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/...

To respond to the parent of your post, yes when a jet-stream pushed air from the north pole over North America, and it got cold.
As you point out, that doesn't mean the entire world is colder.
And of course, obligatory XKCD http://www.explainxkcd.com/wik...

quickly! must google: job interview site:xkcd.com and post whatever is returned. Seriously what relevance does that have? He doesnt even ask an interview question.

Hey, I googled one which is relevant: 1088.

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Oh shit; where can you sign me up for one? Can it do that and get a first post? I'm willing to pay up to 10,000 euros for this; do you think you could get me one for under 4000? Actually it seems relatively cheap (ob XKCD)

I do not know if that would be faster/better to do 'join' statement over multiple huge data tables compared to nested queries

Using a joined query instead of nested means that you are hitting the database once per transaction instead of 5, 10, 50 times. The company where I work has an outsourced application that will hit our database first for the top 2000 records, then hit it again and again for each filter that the user applies, one query per filter. In every transaction there's a minimum of two hits on the DB. Multiply this by about 6,000 operations per minute coming in from all around the state, and it's a bandwidth headache. A better way would be if the program hit the database once on boot to ensure the table headings are updated, then have the user set up the filters s/he needs and execute a single joined query.

why would GET & POST requests be involved in security?

Although both can be susceptible to an injection attack, it's simply easier using GET over POST. It can be partially explained by xkcd and it's related explanation. Using POST will allow for more parsing in the back end to be able to sanitize the user's input, thereby reducing the chances of a successful injection attack. With GET it's considerably harder to sanitize the URL before it hits the processing script. When working with security, you want to make decisions that increase the difficulty of the attack vector. Just the difference between GET & POST alone isn't enough for security, but it is a good first step in seeing if a candidate understands the difference and can comprehend how the difference can matter from a security standpoint.

You want transcript? Have transcript. You're welcome.

Did anyone else take Pffth *cough* Just got some in my mouth as an oral sex joke

Explained xkcd has a gif that combines most of the individual 'time' comics: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=1190:_Time

Taking soft sciences into consideration (psychology, social sciences, medical), most papers hinge on a 95% confidence level. This means that 1 out of every 20 results arise from chance, and no one bothers to check.

Recent reports tell us depression meds are no better than chance and scientists can only replicate 11% of cancer studies, so perhaps the ratio is higher than 1 in 20.

1 in 20 would be expected if errors are random and if no biases are in place like publication bias. We know that's not typically the case, so we can indeed expect it's worse than 1 in 20. The more I read about anti-depressant trials, the more I think we will come to view them as particularly egregious examples of deliberately badly designed trials. I've just read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre and it's mind-boggling what happens in real world trials. One little example: to take advantage of the 1 in 20 chances, simple hold 20 little trials and publish the one that gets good results! Or ignore your stated trial goals and measure and just cherrypick any good result afterwards. If you have many variables you're bound to get some correlations post hoc, just by chance alone.

The bloggers are not testing the scientific method, they are testing methods that are scientific. Those are two vastly different concepts. Their work is important, but not epic.

I'm not so sure about that.

We believe in a scientific method founded on observation and reproducible results, but for a great number of papers the results are not reproduced.

Taking soft sciences into consideration (psychology, social sciences, medical), most papers hinge on a 95% confidence level. This means that 1 out of every 20 results arise from chance, and no one bothers to check.

Recent reports tell us depression meds are no better than chance and scientists can only replicate 11% of cancer studies, so perhaps the ratio is higher than 1 in 20. And no one bothers to check.

I've read many follow-on studies in behavioral psychology where the researchers didn't bother to check the original results, and it all seems 'kinda fishy to me. Perhaps wide swaths of behavioral psychology have no foundation; or not, we can't really tell because the studies haven't been reproduced.

And finally, each of us has an "ontology" (ie - a representation of knowledge) which is used to convey information. If I tell you a recipe, I'm actually calling out bits of your ontology by name: add 3 cups of flour, mix, bake at 400 degrees, &c.

This assumes that your ontology is the same as mine, or similar enough that the differences are not relevant. If I say "mix", I assume that your mental image of "mix" is the same as mine. ...but people screw up recipes, don't understand assembly instructions, and are confused by small nuanced differences in documentation.

Does this happen in chemistry?

(Ignoring the view that reactions can depend on aspects that the researchers were unaware of, or didn't think were relevant. One researcher told me that one of her assistants could always make the reaction work but no one else could. Turns out that the assistant didn't rinse the glassware very well after washing, leaving behind a tiny bit of soap.)

It's good that people are reproducing studies. Undergrads and post-grads should reproduce results as part of their training, and successful attempts should be published - if only as a footnote to the original paper ("this result was reproduced by the following 5 teams..."). It's good practice for them, it will hold the original research to a higher standard, and eliminate the 1 out of 20 irreproducible results.

Also, reproducing the results might add insight into descriptive weaknesses, and might inform better descriptions. Perhaps results should be kept "Wikipedia" style, where people can annotate and comment on the descriptions for better clarity.

But then again, that's a lot of work. What was the goal, again?

Chu is just as one dimensional ...

Nonsense. In addition to his many accomplishments in physics, he has contributed to several other fields, and even invented the Scroll Lock Key, which was a major advance for personal computers of the time.