Steady or declining CO2 emissions is only good news if we're in a steady state situation.
We're not.
Simply keeping anthropogenic CO2 and CH4 emissions steady is woefully insufficient. The "well below 2 degrees warming" goal of the Paris agreements is itself based on an assumption that we will be able to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere, requiring a technology we have yet to make feasible at scale.
We cannot afford to burn our currently known reserves of fossil fuels. We have to decarbonise our energy production as quickly as is humanly possible. That countries such as Australia are still granting fossil fuel exploration permits is, frankly, insane.
Excitingly, elevated levels of CO2 — such as those found in poorly ventilated rooms, or as atmospheric CO2 levels continue to climb, in our environment at large — also diminish our cognitive ability. See, e.g. this paper among others.
If we don't stop burning coal and hydrocarbons soon, we'll be too stupid to ameliorate the consequences,
The first step is to demonstrate that what is legal and what is moral are not coextensive.
Once one understands that the law is at best a compromise, and its formation subject to the whims of the powerful, typically preserving, if not aggravating, the divisions in our societies, then copyright makes perfect sense.
Reading this was almost painful: Cook, like Trump, appears to be aiming at primary schoolers when it comes to complexity of expression.
Sentences have on average fewer than nine words each and the majority are extremely simple in structure — the text has a Flesch–Kincaid grade level of only 4.5. He uses the word 'thing' instead of a more specific word or phrase on five different occasions.
As with Trump, this lack of nuance and basic level of language seems at odds with what we would expect from the role. Is this really appropriate from a CEO of Apple?
My only disappointment with the paper was that it read more as a survey than something offering new conclusions or new methodologies.
The claim that 'ice is just ice' is both tautological and missing the point. Glaciers obviously play a role in societies that cannot be captured purely by a description of their iciness. It shouldn't be surprising that analyses of the impact of (for example) climate change on glacier retreat that take into account only a certain subset of their role in a social, human context will give a distorted picture. Such selective views can indeed lead to policies that exacerbate existing power differentials.
Words such as discourse, colonialism and marginalization, the use of which is mocked without further argument by Soave, do have specialised meanings in critical studies and sociology. One might mount arguments about the relevance or quality of scholarship, but to criticise without any appreciation of the academic context is lazy and contributes nothing but noise to the discussion.
If I want to understand how ice melts, I will use the language and methods of physics. If I want to understand what it means to a community when the ice melts, then I will want to use a different set of tools.
The central claim appears to be that humans individually are bad at formulating plans to respond to distant crises, and consequently we are failing to tackle climate change in a meaningful way as a population. But the article is all over the place.
The author states that we should frame the problem with "an ends-justify-the-means approach", based on a quote from a study that states "[...] whereas harm originating from impersonal moral violations, like those produced by climate impacts, prompts consequentialist moral reasoning." On the contrary, the quoted statement indicates that by virtue of it being impersonal, we employ consequentialist approaches.
Inasmuch as this holds among our population, the conclusion isn't that we are bad at dealing with these sorts of crisis, but rather some of us — in particular, I imagine, the members of our oligarchies — are incapable of or disinclined to engage in moral reasoning. In short, they are broadly psychopaths or evil.
Oh, and "[...] the slowly unfurling nuclear crises that may or may not eventually wipe out whole metropolises and military bases" — the what now?
Consider if the media did do this — detail the (on average) 90 people killed in the US on the roads in one day. And then did it again the next day. And the next. And the next.
Perhaps then the population would demand a proportionate response. Or at least would place the current risk from terrorism in context.
The erosion of middle-button paste functionality is a continual frustration.
There are cultural differences between the Windows and Macintosh personal computing worlds, and that of X11 on Unix workstations. While always allowing customisability, we should hold on to the good ideas of the past, rather than dismiss them as being unfamiliar to the personal computer user.
What irks me especially is that the same forces that are driving us towards a Windows-like experience on the Linux desktop are also removing the ability to easily customise our environment, if only to retain the functionality that is being deprecated or dismissed. (I'm looking at you, GNOME.)
The Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX is a wireless mouse, so may not suit. It does nonetheless have a middle button distinct from the scroll wheel, and is not a weird 'ergonomic' shape.
I use it with the laptop, but at work I'm on the sadly long-discontinued Logitech Marble Mouse, with middle-button emulation. (I see that there is now the Trackman Marble, so perhaps I will still have somewhere to go if my venerable trackball ever dies!)
Short of bugs in the compiler's optimizer — and we all know there have been many — the idea that "if the entire code absolutely must stay fully intact, it shouldn't be optimized" is already dangerous.
A compiler conforming to its documentation or standard isn't going to change semantics that have been guaranteed by that document. Those guarantees though are all you have: even without explicit optimization options, a compiler has a lot of freedom in how it implements those semantics. Relying on a naïve translation from a line of code to a particular, non-guaranteed assembly representation is a very brittle practice.
Knuth is of course a valuable addition to the book-shelf — as others have pointed out, it's a superb source for chasing up information, details and citations for algorithms and data structures one needs to justify or investigate, if nothing else.
I would recommend two other texts to add to a collection:
Computational Geometry by de Berg et al.: computational geometry techniques have a habit of turning up all over the place in CS and computing more generally, and this is probably the best overview text, providing motivating examples, a good high level theoretical discussion, and pseudo-code.
Category Theory for Computing Science by Barr and Wells is an excellent introduction to both type theory and category theory, each informing the other.
I would recommend a book on convex optimisation and probabilistic graphical models, but frankly I don't know of a single text on either topic that I could whole-heartedly recommend. Any suggestions?
Hundreds of billions spent on drug development, primarily driven by state investment and infrastructure, and billions of people in India and elsewhere gain significant health benefits.
Really, this is the way it is supposed to work.
That some private individuals are not making as large a personal profit is purely their own problem.
There are countries far more socialist than Sweden that have a prison and murder rate per capita far higher than the US.
Well, no. No, there isn't. Because the US is in fact the world leader in per capita incarceration rate. The US is, in this metric, really number one.
Murder is another story. If you compare the US though with its economic peers, you have to go a long way down the per-capita GDP axis before you find another country with a higher per-capita homicide rate.
I'm willing to believe things are going great in your environment — we have been plagued by problems. (Some of the gripes in my post may have been specific to TFS2008, though the mind-boggling line transposition was just two months ago.) We will almost certainly be upgrading TFS when we move to VS2013, though given some of the egregious compiler bugs present in the new release, we will probably wait until the first SP. In the meantime, we're migrating projects over to git, and ultimately we will probably not use TFS at all for source control.
It is good to know that some issues can be addressed with tfpt; it would have been very helpful to have that functionality accessible from within Visual Studio (hint, hint.)
I haven't any repeatable set-ups of brokenness, but things do seem to be way less reliable when we have files with mixed line-ending characters, or when TFS is operating in a non-constantly connected network environment (owing to the VPN link.)
I've seen: check-ins transpose lines on check out; complete failures to update to actual latest versions of code; and random check-outs of code with no local changes.
Other fun aspects: can't unshelve to anything but the changeset that the shelf came from; industry worst? merge and diff tool; no non-connected way of getting changeset info for automatic version information; despite being a centralized model, local workspaces can't be moved (say, in the advent of hardware failure on a development machine). The only way I can be assured that the check-in state actually correlates with what I have locally is to manually run a compare over the project directory and check.
It's also terribly, astonishly, slow over a VPN. Start typing to make a change, only to have all but the first character thrown away as TFS laboriously attempts to check out the file first.
It is so crushingly painful to use now, that I honestly can't imagine they've fixed all their shit in two years to make TFS2012.
We don't expect journalists to write articles only in Basic English. If someone were to profess that they had never heard of Shakespeare, or didn't know what a metaphor was, we would rightly judge them as being ignorant, or at the least, highly under-educated. Yet, apparently, balking at the simplest of equations is perfectly acceptable.
It's no wonder that we have such shallow thinking, such an abysmal and superficial political discourse, such a disengagement with the notions of science and society, when everyone is given a free pass when it comes to mathematics and logic. Put equations in your writing. Judge those who complain about 'math'. People who are unwilling to think can barely be counted as citizens, having abrogated a fundamental and necessary duty.
Regular ignorance can be cured. Wilful ignorance is a blight. We need to demand better of our peers.
It is by no means clear that anyone has a fundamental right to own land. Indeed, few individuals own land outright — in common law states, real property is typically held fee simple.
If all land were owned and its use restricted to private individuals, how could one live without being a property owner, or being beholden to one? Land exists independently of human art, and our literal existence demands that we at the very least reside in it, breathe the air on it, and so forth. Morally, the private, exclusive use of land must come with an obligation that that ownership benefits our society more than a lack of ownership would — there is an obligation of stewardship, if nothing else.
The system whereby our governments enforce property ownership is almost certainly better than one where individuals maintain the exclusive use and benefit of land by force. Yet it is by no means a natural system, and those who benefit by it to the exclusion of their fellows should not be divorced from the obligations associated with it.
63Ni might have an annoyingly long half-life, but it is a pure beta emitter at a relatively low energy (max 67 keV). I wouldn't lick it, but it is a much more manageable risk than 137Cs, which produces a lot of nasty gamma.
Beryllium-7 decays naturally (to Lithium) by electron capture, but obviously Hydrogen doesn't, without some sort of push.
According to one of the presentations at the LENR symposium at CERN last year, the required energy deficit is on the order of 1.28 MeV, which in principle can be supplied by surface plasmons. The author states that observed neutron generation in lightning discharges and piezoelectric rock fracturing can be explained by this process.
Social mobility when achieved through government policy rather than economic reality will cost more in the long run.
I think both theoretically and evidentally, this is not the case. If you are brought up with wealth, you have better nutrition, better education, more lucrative social networks, more useful free time, and a far less severe exposure to risk. If there is no government policy to redress this imbalance, then probability dictates that wealth concentrates and poverty, on the whole, becomes entrenched. And this is what we see in the modern US.
Individuals certainly have opportunities to make for themselves a better life. But if they are coming from a poor background, those opportunities are far fewer, they must work harder to take advantage of them, and the consequences of failure are much more severe. Essentially, the dice are loaded.
Moral considerations aside, a society where 80% of the population have the opportunity to take risks and be innovative and exploit usefully the extant infrastructure is going to be economically more successful than one in which only 20% do.
Slashdot Mirror
Steady or declining CO2 emissions is only good news if we're in a steady state situation.
We're not.
Simply keeping anthropogenic CO2 and CH4 emissions steady is woefully insufficient. The "well below 2 degrees warming" goal of the Paris agreements is itself based on an assumption that we will be able to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere, requiring a technology we have yet to make feasible at scale.
We cannot afford to burn our currently known reserves of fossil fuels. We have to decarbonise our energy production as quickly as is humanly possible. That countries such as Australia are still granting fossil fuel exploration permits is, frankly, insane.
Excitingly, elevated levels of CO2 — such as those found in poorly ventilated rooms, or as atmospheric CO2 levels continue to climb, in our environment at large — also diminish our cognitive ability. See, e.g. this paper among others.
If we don't stop burning coal and hydrocarbons soon, we'll be too stupid to ameliorate the consequences,
The first step is to demonstrate that what is legal and what is moral are not coextensive. Once one understands that the law is at best a compromise, and its formation subject to the whims of the powerful, typically preserving, if not aggravating, the divisions in our societies, then copyright makes perfect sense.
Reading this was almost painful: Cook, like Trump, appears to be aiming at primary schoolers when it comes to complexity of expression.
Sentences have on average fewer than nine words each and the majority are extremely simple in structure — the text has a Flesch–Kincaid grade level of only 4.5. He uses the word 'thing' instead of a more specific word or phrase on five different occasions.
As with Trump, this lack of nuance and basic level of language seems at odds with what we would expect from the role. Is this really appropriate from a CEO of Apple?
My only disappointment with the paper was that it read more as a survey than something offering new conclusions or new methodologies.
The claim that 'ice is just ice' is both tautological and missing the point. Glaciers obviously play a role in societies that cannot be captured purely by a description of their iciness. It shouldn't be surprising that analyses of the impact of (for example) climate change on glacier retreat that take into account only a certain subset of their role in a social, human context will give a distorted picture. Such selective views can indeed lead to policies that exacerbate existing power differentials.
Words such as discourse, colonialism and marginalization, the use of which is mocked without further argument by Soave, do have specialised meanings in critical studies and sociology. One might mount arguments about the relevance or quality of scholarship, but to criticise without any appreciation of the academic context is lazy and contributes nothing but noise to the discussion.
If I want to understand how ice melts, I will use the language and methods of physics. If I want to understand what it means to a community when the ice melts, then I will want to use a different set of tools.
The central claim appears to be that humans individually are bad at formulating plans to respond to distant crises, and consequently we are failing to tackle climate change in a meaningful way as a population. But the article is all over the place.
The author states that we should frame the problem with "an ends-justify-the-means approach", based on a quote from a study that states "[...] whereas harm originating from impersonal moral violations, like those produced by climate impacts, prompts consequentialist moral reasoning." On the contrary, the quoted statement indicates that by virtue of it being impersonal, we employ consequentialist approaches.
Inasmuch as this holds among our population, the conclusion isn't that we are bad at dealing with these sorts of crisis, but rather some of us — in particular, I imagine, the members of our oligarchies — are incapable of or disinclined to engage in moral reasoning. In short, they are broadly psychopaths or evil.
Oh, and "[...] the slowly unfurling nuclear crises that may or may not eventually wipe out whole metropolises and military bases" — the what now?
Consider if the media did do this — detail the (on average) 90 people killed in the US on the roads in one day. And then did it again the next day. And the next. And the next.
Perhaps then the population would demand a proportionate response. Or at least would place the current risk from terrorism in context.
Once that's done, we could move on to cancer.
The erosion of middle-button paste functionality is a continual frustration.
There are cultural differences between the Windows and Macintosh personal computing worlds, and that of X11 on Unix workstations. While always allowing customisability, we should hold on to the good ideas of the past, rather than dismiss them as being unfamiliar to the personal computer user.
What irks me especially is that the same forces that are driving us towards a Windows-like experience on the Linux desktop are also removing the ability to easily customise our environment, if only to retain the functionality that is being deprecated or dismissed. (I'm looking at you, GNOME.)
The Logitech Anywhere Mouse MX is a wireless mouse, so may not suit. It does nonetheless have a middle button distinct from the scroll wheel, and is not a weird 'ergonomic' shape.
I use it with the laptop, but at work I'm on the sadly long-discontinued Logitech Marble Mouse, with middle-button emulation. (I see that there is now the Trackman Marble, so perhaps I will still have somewhere to go if my venerable trackball ever dies!)
It's a shame it has such a reputation for being boring, and it is a shame that it seems to be rarely taught in an engaging way.
Statistics is the first artificial intelligence. It formalises what we know when we 'know'. It is fundamental.
It's also fairly hard to do right. But many worthwhile things are hard.
Short of bugs in the compiler's optimizer — and we all know there have been many — the idea that "if the entire code absolutely must stay fully intact, it shouldn't be optimized" is already dangerous.
A compiler conforming to its documentation or standard isn't going to change semantics that have been guaranteed by that document. Those guarantees though are all you have: even without explicit optimization options, a compiler has a lot of freedom in how it implements those semantics. Relying on a naïve translation from a line of code to a particular, non-guaranteed assembly representation is a very brittle practice.
Graduate-level CS encompasses a lot of ground!
Knuth is of course a valuable addition to the book-shelf — as others have pointed out, it's a superb source for chasing up information, details and citations for algorithms and data structures one needs to justify or investigate, if nothing else.
Okasaki's Purely Functional Data Structures has also already been mentioned, and I'd add my endorsement!
I would recommend two other texts to add to a collection:
I would recommend a book on convex optimisation and probabilistic graphical models, but frankly I don't know of a single text on either topic that I could whole-heartedly recommend. Any suggestions?
Hundreds of billions spent on drug development, primarily driven by state investment and infrastructure, and billions of people in India and elsewhere gain significant health benefits. Really, this is the way it is supposed to work. That some private individuals are not making as large a personal profit is purely their own problem.
They're just trying to see what they can get away with with a Newtonian approximation of gravity.
Well, no. No, there isn't. Because the US is in fact the world leader in per capita incarceration rate. The US is, in this metric, really number one.
Murder is another story. If you compare the US though with its economic peers, you have to go a long way down the per-capita GDP axis before you find another country with a higher per-capita homicide rate.
I'm willing to believe things are going great in your environment — we have been plagued by problems. (Some of the gripes in my post may have been specific to TFS2008, though the mind-boggling line transposition was just two months ago.) We will almost certainly be upgrading TFS when we move to VS2013, though given some of the egregious compiler bugs present in the new release, we will probably wait until the first SP. In the meantime, we're migrating projects over to git, and ultimately we will probably not use TFS at all for source control.
It is good to know that some issues can be addressed with tfpt; it would have been very helpful to have that functionality accessible from within Visual Studio (hint, hint.)
I haven't any repeatable set-ups of brokenness, but things do seem to be way less reliable when we have files with mixed line-ending characters, or when TFS is operating in a non-constantly connected network environment (owing to the VPN link.)
TFS2010 very good? Oh, my.
I've seen: check-ins transpose lines on check out; complete failures to update to actual latest versions of code; and random check-outs of code with no local changes.
Other fun aspects: can't unshelve to anything but the changeset that the shelf came from; industry worst? merge and diff tool; no non-connected way of getting changeset info for automatic version information; despite being a centralized model, local workspaces can't be moved (say, in the advent of hardware failure on a development machine). The only way I can be assured that the check-in state actually correlates with what I have locally is to manually run a compare over the project directory and check.
It's also terribly, astonishly, slow over a VPN. Start typing to make a change, only to have all but the first character thrown away as TFS laboriously attempts to check out the file first.
It is so crushingly painful to use now, that I honestly can't imagine they've fixed all their shit in two years to make TFS2012.
As someone who is obliged to use TFS, I would say that your reading is correct.
We don't expect journalists to write articles only in Basic English. If someone were to profess that they had never heard of Shakespeare, or didn't know what a metaphor was, we would rightly judge them as being ignorant, or at the least, highly under-educated. Yet, apparently, balking at the simplest of equations is perfectly acceptable.
It's no wonder that we have such shallow thinking, such an abysmal and superficial political discourse, such a disengagement with the notions of science and society, when everyone is given a free pass when it comes to mathematics and logic. Put equations in your writing. Judge those who complain about 'math'. People who are unwilling to think can barely be counted as citizens, having abrogated a fundamental and necessary duty.
Regular ignorance can be cured. Wilful ignorance is a blight. We need to demand better of our peers.
It is by no means clear that anyone has a fundamental right to own land. Indeed, few individuals own land outright — in common law states, real property is typically held fee simple.
If all land were owned and its use restricted to private individuals, how could one live without being a property owner, or being beholden to one? Land exists independently of human art, and our literal existence demands that we at the very least reside in it, breathe the air on it, and so forth. Morally, the private, exclusive use of land must come with an obligation that that ownership benefits our society more than a lack of ownership would — there is an obligation of stewardship, if nothing else.
The system whereby our governments enforce property ownership is almost certainly better than one where individuals maintain the exclusive use and benefit of land by force. Yet it is by no means a natural system, and those who benefit by it to the exclusion of their fellows should not be divorced from the obligations associated with it.
Bargain!
Things may well have changed in the last 7 years or so, but I don't recall many izakaya offering nomihodai courses back then.
63Ni might have an annoyingly long half-life, but it is a pure beta emitter at a relatively low energy (max 67 keV). I wouldn't lick it, but it is a much more manageable risk than 137Cs, which produces a lot of nasty gamma.
Beryllium-7 decays naturally (to Lithium) by electron capture, but obviously Hydrogen doesn't, without some sort of push.
According to one of the presentations at the LENR symposium at CERN last year, the required energy deficit is on the order of 1.28 MeV, which in principle can be supplied by surface plasmons. The author states that observed neutron generation in lightning discharges and piezoelectric rock fracturing can be explained by this process.
I think both theoretically and evidentally, this is not the case. If you are brought up with wealth, you have better nutrition, better education, more lucrative social networks, more useful free time, and a far less severe exposure to risk. If there is no government policy to redress this imbalance, then probability dictates that wealth concentrates and poverty, on the whole, becomes entrenched. And this is what we see in the modern US.
Individuals certainly have opportunities to make for themselves a better life. But if they are coming from a poor background, those opportunities are far fewer, they must work harder to take advantage of them, and the consequences of failure are much more severe. Essentially, the dice are loaded.
Moral considerations aside, a society where 80% of the population have the opportunity to take risks and be innovative and exploit usefully the extant infrastructure is going to be economically more successful than one in which only 20% do.