>As a convenience, the temperature at which people can stand to touch relatively comfortably is around about half way up the scale, somewhere around 50C, give or take a few degrees.
Right. So you've essentially wasted half of the 0 to 100 scale. From a usability standpoint, it is a bad choice.
Think about what it would be like if Celsius used the boiling point of lead, instead. (1750*C) You'd have to say that it was okay 1.011 outside, but maybe you'd have to put on a jacket if it dropped below 1.004.
Bad design. Bad usability.
The fact that you're used to Celsius doesn't make it magically better than Fahrenheit.
It has to do with human experience, as I said. Fahrenheit maps well to human experience. Celcius does not. The entire upper half of the 0 to 100 range is never used in everyday life, so you're losing all those significant digits.
We use Kelvin for science, since it works directly in thermodynamic calculations.
But for normal human experience, having a good range of values is an important choice. While we could assign 0*C and 100*C to 0 and 2, and talk about it being.294 outside right now, humans don't work well with scales like that. Hence the advantage of Fahrenheit. Significant digits and all that.
>Picking water is arbitrary, sure, but at least it is the same thing used at both points of the scale....and it's utterly impractical for everyday life, unless you work in a Bunsen Burner factory or something.
The choice of water is completely arbitrary, and sensible only in the sense that there's a lot of water around. But it is a much worse scale, practically speaking, than Fahrenheit, that maps reasonably well to human experience across its significant digits.
>Some are arbitrary and logical, easy to work in your head... Some are a bunch of disparate measurement systems that makes almost no logical sense what so ever. If I have to choose, I take the logical one, thank you.
Celsius over Fahrenheit is not a logical choice. We don't boil water on a daily basis, but we're expected to use the boiling and freezing points of water for our daily experience?
Fuck that noise. Fahrenheit (which roughly corresponds to human body temperature) is a more sensible unit.
If you're really going scientific, you use Kelvin anyway. Celsius is just as arbitrary as the Fahrenheit scale, with the downside of being less practical.
>What I would suggest is the following. Currently, the USPTO gets paid for every patent which they validate. This is so obviously perverse that it actually hurts.
Classic conflict of interest. While we're at it, let's: 1) Not all police departments to be funded by assets they themselves seize. 2) Not let judges in ticket trap villages draw their income from finding people guilty of doing 26 in a 25 zone. 3) Not let the highway patrol draw funds from tickets they issue.
It's not only a conflict of justice, but it's a perversion of the justice system entirely. I don't know why anyone would think government departments are immune to the lure of money - every bureaucracy I know engages in empire-building, and constantly demanding more, more, more funds. Giving the fox the ability to legally seize the chickens is the worst idea in this country's history.
>So how does the subsidy enter into that equation?
A lot more people will pay $200 for a new phone than $600, even though they end up paying much more in higher monthly bills to Verizon or whatever.
I stick with Verizon because I travel so much on business and they have the best coverage, not because of their extortionate monthly fees and data caps.
Food policy generally takes the form of: make food cheaper in country A, which makes food more expensive in country B.
Most countries have policies to make food both more expensive (to support its farmers) and cheaper (to support its customers). If this sounds contradictory, it is.
As Ronald Reagan said when he took office: I found that there were four policies in place to increase production of eggs, and another program in place to buy all the excess eggs!
>The GP doesn't mean continuous as in "365 days a year", but rather "year after year after year."
And he's wrong. Corn and soybeans are typically rotated against each other. Corn can be grown back to back to meet high price demands, but then they go back to soya.
>>Corn for ethanol is grown continuously, which means not only do they not let fields lie fallow, but they actually don't even practice crop rotation!
That's not true. During the ethanol price spike around 2008, farmers grew two back to back crops of corn to meet demand and take advantage of the high prices, but that was not normal practice, and they resumed their rotations afterwards.
>>Nobody is starving because we make corn into fuel.
Tell that to the people in Mexico that rioted over the sharp spike in tortilla prices due to corn ethanol a few years back.
>Yep - this is right up there with the MTBE debacle in CA about 10 years ago.
Wasn't just California. It was a nationwide cockup.
Ethanol has replaced MTBE since it is the only readily available fuel additive that can replace MTBE. There's federal laws that put a minimum consumption of ethanol on the books, but depending on what the price of corn and gas is, it is sometimes economically feasible to use more ethanol than the legislated minimum.
That said, Ethanol is a major driver to food prices - most all the growth in corn consumption since 2007 has been due to increasing ethanol use in the US. This puts upwards pressure on the price of corn, and leads to food price shocks.
>>I donâ(TM)t understand some of the arguments made against C++ by certain âoeelder statesmenâ of the OSS world. It seems they donâ(TM)t like some of the extra functionality available in C++, seeing it as overcomplicated or too readily able to hide behaviour. In itself, thatâ(TM)s a reasonable concern. But then they use C, and reinvent the same wheels using crude text substitution macros that could be doing or interacting with anything.
This is a reasonable criticism. I started very heavy into object-oriented programming, but after I shot myself in the foot with it enough times, I started appreciating C a lot more.
I still write in C++, since some of the added features just make life easier (like// comments), but my code looks very C-ish. I'll use objects when necessary, but I do my best to avoid anything that hides complicated behavior.
Asset forfeiture is a massive cash cow for law enforcement, and yet we all pretend there isn't a massive conflict of interest in having our justice system funded by finding people (wait, not people - assets) guilty (wait, no guilt is necessary).
They're also going after the people that lease the space to dispensaries, under asset forfeiture laws. Fortunately, those owners have enough money to defend themselves against unconstitutional search and seizure.
Yep, his DAs are prosecuting everyone they can find here in California.
A friend of mine is a landlord who rents out his land to farmers. One of them was growing weed on his farm without his knowledge.
So the feds are trying to seize (asset forfeiture) his farm, and all his other assets, too. (Why his other assets? Just because they can try.)
The worst thing about it (other than the fact the feds are trying to bankrupt someone not involved in the drug trade at all) is that our idiotic Sheriff Mims (who led the "fight", and is trying to bill my friend $100,000 for the police raid that started this) got called before a senate committee, and praised by Senator Feinstein for her efforts.
>Note also that if you want to make your house off-the-grid (as option) with solar, that requires much more expense. Batteries, inverter switches, etc.
This. I put solar on my house, but it'll go down if there's a major storm, since it is grid-tied.
Switching to a fully autonomous system would have doubled (or more) the cost for all the batteries.
Also - solar systems don't produce much power during major storms, so you're going to drain your batteries pretty fast.
In other words, a backup generator is a small price for a big reward, but an autonomous solar installation is a big cost for a small reward.
>I've seen 10baseT run on cat3. In my sophomore year of college, I lived in one of two dorms that was experimentally set up with a college-owned computer in every room, all networked using DECNet
Luxury! In my college apartment, we computer science people bought a couple thousand feet of coax and wired our rooms together ourselves.
It didn't connect to the internet, but it was really good for Warcraft 2 / Red Alert / Quake marathons.
>>Corn to ethanol only makes sense if you are trying to build up the ethanol infrastructure in the hopes of more efficient production methods coming down the pike.
>>Already it has displaced chemicals like MTBE, and all cars built since the early 2000s can handle E85, and most service stations seem capable of delivering the now-common 10% ethanol gasoline.
It only displaced MTBE in the sense that MTBE got banned, and so ethanol was the only readily available alternative.
Earlier cars can be damaged by higher levels of ethanol in gas, which is one of the reasons IIRC, why they backed away from a 15% fuel blend mandate. But we do have a legal mandate requiring the 10% blend, so it's no coincidence that gas stations can handle it.
The amount of biofuel mandates to be produced in the US is going to double in the next five years or so, but to avoid price shocks, corn ethanol is going to be capped (at a rather large number). "Advanced biofuels" from other sources is supposed to make up the difference.
>>The current one seems to think that corporations are people.
I hear this a lot from Colbert-heads.
Do corporations have freedom of speech? Should they be immune to the government taking their shit whenever it wants?
If you say yes, than you think "corporations are people" the same way the SCOTUS does. Corporate personhood isn't an especially novel or pernicious concept.
What *is* the actual issue is if corporations should be able to bribe politicians with campaign donations. I don't think they should. Corporations can't vote, so they shouldn't be allowed to donate. I have no problem with them running whatever sort of free speech themselves they want to do, but actual cash donations by corporations should be completely prohibited.
>>Lose your sense of entitlement. $80K/year, -20K taxes, -18K rent = $42K/year. You are doing way better than most people.
$26,000 taxes (we're in California, don't forget - I just ran the tax calculator)
$22,000 rent
$3,000 power/water/gas
$2,000 insurance
This leaves you with about $2,000 a month for student loans, car, retirement savings, gas, and food.
>You still have $1K/month for food, drink, and fun. You are doing pretty damn well for a young person.
I wouldn't categorize it as "pretty damn well". Shit in the Bay Area is ridiculously expensive. That's $33/day for all of your living expenses, including food and gas.
You're not homeless or anything, but on only $80k/year in the Bay Area, you'll probably want a roommate.
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>As a convenience, the temperature at which people can stand to touch relatively comfortably is around about half way up the scale, somewhere around 50C, give or take a few degrees.
Right. So you've essentially wasted half of the 0 to 100 scale. From a usability standpoint, it is a bad choice.
Think about what it would be like if Celsius used the boiling point of lead, instead. (1750*C) You'd have to say that it was okay 1.011 outside, but maybe you'd have to put on a jacket if it dropped below 1.004.
Bad design. Bad usability.
The fact that you're used to Celsius doesn't make it magically better than Fahrenheit.
It has to do with human experience, as I said. Fahrenheit maps well to human experience. Celcius does not. The entire upper half of the 0 to 100 range is never used in everyday life, so you're losing all those significant digits.
We use Kelvin for science, since it works directly in thermodynamic calculations.
But for normal human experience, having a good range of values is an important choice. While we could assign 0*C and 100*C to 0 and 2, and talk about it being .294 outside right now, humans don't work well with scales like that. Hence the advantage of Fahrenheit. Significant digits and all that.
>Picking water is arbitrary, sure, but at least it is the same thing used at both points of the scale. ...and it's utterly impractical for everyday life, unless you work in a Bunsen Burner factory or something.
The choice of water is completely arbitrary, and sensible only in the sense that there's a lot of water around. But it is a much worse scale, practically speaking, than Fahrenheit, that maps reasonably well to human experience across its significant digits.
>Some are arbitrary and logical, easy to work in your head... Some are a bunch of disparate measurement systems that makes almost no logical sense what so ever. If I have to choose, I take the logical one, thank you.
Celsius over Fahrenheit is not a logical choice. We don't boil water on a daily basis, but we're expected to use the boiling and freezing points of water for our daily experience?
Fuck that noise. Fahrenheit (which roughly corresponds to human body temperature) is a more sensible unit.
If you're really going scientific, you use Kelvin anyway. Celsius is just as arbitrary as the Fahrenheit scale, with the downside of being less practical.
>What I would suggest is the following. Currently, the USPTO gets paid for every patent which they validate. This is so obviously perverse that it actually hurts.
Classic conflict of interest. While we're at it, let's:
1) Not all police departments to be funded by assets they themselves seize.
2) Not let judges in ticket trap villages draw their income from finding people guilty of doing 26 in a 25 zone.
3) Not let the highway patrol draw funds from tickets they issue.
It's not only a conflict of justice, but it's a perversion of the justice system entirely. I don't know why anyone would think government departments are immune to the lure of money - every bureaucracy I know engages in empire-building, and constantly demanding more, more, more funds. Giving the fox the ability to legally seize the chickens is the worst idea in this country's history.
>Increase the gas tax to compensate. Gasoline should already be taxed more highly that it is because of it's numerous externalities.
Yep.
By taxing high-efficiency vehichles, they will be pushing people into lower-efficiency cars. Not a good move for ole hippie Oregon.
>So how does the subsidy enter into that equation?
A lot more people will pay $200 for a new phone than $600, even though they end up paying much more in higher monthly bills to Verizon or whatever.
I stick with Verizon because I travel so much on business and they have the best coverage, not because of their extortionate monthly fees and data caps.
Food policy generally takes the form of: make food cheaper in country A, which makes food more expensive in country B.
Most countries have policies to make food both more expensive (to support its farmers) and cheaper (to support its customers). If this sounds contradictory, it is.
As Ronald Reagan said when he took office: I found that there were four policies in place to increase production of eggs, and another program in place to buy all the excess eggs!
>The GP doesn't mean continuous as in "365 days a year", but rather "year after year after year."
And he's wrong. Corn and soybeans are typically rotated against each other. Corn can be grown back to back to meet high price demands, but then they go back to soya.
>>Corn for ethanol is grown continuously, which means not only do they not let fields lie fallow, but they actually don't even practice crop rotation!
That's not true. During the ethanol price spike around 2008, farmers grew two back to back crops of corn to meet demand and take advantage of the high prices, but that was not normal practice, and they resumed their rotations afterwards.
>>Nobody is starving because we make corn into fuel.
Tell that to the people in Mexico that rioted over the sharp spike in tortilla prices due to corn ethanol a few years back.
If you're interested in an unbiased study on the subject, I highly recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Economics-Food-Feeding-Fueling/dp/0137006101/
>Yep - this is right up there with the MTBE debacle in CA about 10 years ago.
Wasn't just California. It was a nationwide cockup.
Ethanol has replaced MTBE since it is the only readily available fuel additive that can replace MTBE. There's federal laws that put a minimum consumption of ethanol on the books, but depending on what the price of corn and gas is, it is sometimes economically feasible to use more ethanol than the legislated minimum.
That said, Ethanol is a major driver to food prices - most all the growth in corn consumption since 2007 has been due to increasing ethanol use in the US. This puts upwards pressure on the price of corn, and leads to food price shocks.
This book digs into the issue in great detail:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Economics-Food-Feeding-Fueling/dp/0137006101/
>>I donâ(TM)t understand some of the arguments made against C++ by certain âoeelder statesmenâ of the OSS world. It seems they donâ(TM)t like some of the extra functionality available in C++, seeing it as overcomplicated or too readily able to hide behaviour. In itself, thatâ(TM)s a reasonable concern. But then they use C, and reinvent the same wheels using crude text substitution macros that could be doing or interacting with anything.
This is a reasonable criticism. I started very heavy into object-oriented programming, but after I shot myself in the foot with it enough times, I started appreciating C a lot more.
I still write in C++, since some of the added features just make life easier (like // comments), but my code looks very C-ish. I'll use objects when necessary, but I do my best to avoid anything that hides complicated behavior.
Asset forfeiture is a massive cash cow for law enforcement, and yet we all pretend there isn't a massive conflict of interest in having our justice system funded by finding people (wait, not people - assets) guilty (wait, no guilt is necessary).
Justice has nothing to do with it.
And state-licensed dispensaries. For example:
http://www.justice.gov/usao/cae/news/docs/2012/12-2012/12-17-12Chavez.html
They're also going after the people that lease the space to dispensaries, under asset forfeiture laws. Fortunately, those owners have enough money to defend themselves against unconstitutional search and seizure.
The United States Attorney representing the Eastern District of California.
Yep, his DAs are prosecuting everyone they can find here in California.
A friend of mine is a landlord who rents out his land to farmers. One of them was growing weed on his farm without his knowledge.
So the feds are trying to seize (asset forfeiture) his farm, and all his other assets, too. (Why his other assets? Just because they can try.)
The worst thing about it (other than the fact the feds are trying to bankrupt someone not involved in the drug trade at all) is that our idiotic Sheriff Mims (who led the "fight", and is trying to bill my friend $100,000 for the police raid that started this) got called before a senate committee, and praised by Senator Feinstein for her efforts.
>He founded some companies and made a name for himself. But what breakthroughs did he actually make? What are his technical contributions?
Funny.
But yeah, in addition to the OCR work that made him famous, more recently his technology has been used to power SIRI and other NLP processes.
I've been reading through his latest book, How To Create a Mind. It's pretty interesting. My wife and I just made one about four months ago ourselves.
>Note also that if you want to make your house off-the-grid (as option) with solar, that requires much more expense. Batteries, inverter switches, etc.
This. I put solar on my house, but it'll go down if there's a major storm, since it is grid-tied.
Switching to a fully autonomous system would have doubled (or more) the cost for all the batteries.
Also - solar systems don't produce much power during major storms, so you're going to drain your batteries pretty fast.
In other words, a backup generator is a small price for a big reward, but an autonomous solar installation is a big cost for a small reward.
>The daughter of the world's leading romanticist becomes the world's first nerd.
Which is why I named my daughter Ada!
Except backwards, I guess.
>I've seen 10baseT run on cat3. In my sophomore year of college, I lived in one of two dorms that was experimentally set up with a college-owned computer in every room, all networked using DECNet
Luxury! In my college apartment, we computer science people bought a couple thousand feet of coax and wired our rooms together ourselves.
It didn't connect to the internet, but it was really good for Warcraft 2 / Red Alert / Quake marathons.
>>Corn to ethanol only makes sense if you are trying to build up the ethanol infrastructure in the hopes of more efficient production methods coming down the pike.
True. But corn ethanol overall is a terrible idea. You get severe price shocks you get every time the price of oil goes up. (For a good book on this subject, I recommend: http://www.amazon.com/The-Economics-Food-Feeding-Fueling/dp/0137006101/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top)
>>Already it has displaced chemicals like MTBE, and all cars built since the early 2000s can handle E85, and most service stations seem capable of delivering the now-common 10% ethanol gasoline.
It only displaced MTBE in the sense that MTBE got banned, and so ethanol was the only readily available alternative.
Earlier cars can be damaged by higher levels of ethanol in gas, which is one of the reasons IIRC, why they backed away from a 15% fuel blend mandate. But we do have a legal mandate requiring the 10% blend, so it's no coincidence that gas stations can handle it.
The amount of biofuel mandates to be produced in the US is going to double in the next five years or so, but to avoid price shocks, corn ethanol is going to be capped (at a rather large number). "Advanced biofuels" from other sources is supposed to make up the difference.
>>The current one seems to think that corporations are people.
I hear this a lot from Colbert-heads.
Do corporations have freedom of speech? Should they be immune to the government taking their shit whenever it wants?
If you say yes, than you think "corporations are people" the same way the SCOTUS does. Corporate personhood isn't an especially novel or pernicious concept.
What *is* the actual issue is if corporations should be able to bribe politicians with campaign donations. I don't think they should. Corporations can't vote, so they shouldn't be allowed to donate. I have no problem with them running whatever sort of free speech themselves they want to do, but actual cash donations by corporations should be completely prohibited.
>>Lose your sense of entitlement. $80K/year, -20K taxes, -18K rent = $42K/year. You are doing way better than most people.
$26,000 taxes (we're in California, don't forget - I just ran the tax calculator)
$22,000 rent
$3,000 power/water/gas
$2,000 insurance
This leaves you with about $2,000 a month for student loans, car, retirement savings, gas, and food.
>You still have $1K/month for food, drink, and fun. You are doing pretty damn well for a young person.
I wouldn't categorize it as "pretty damn well". Shit in the Bay Area is ridiculously expensive. That's $33/day for all of your living expenses, including food and gas.
You're not homeless or anything, but on only $80k/year in the Bay Area, you'll probably want a roommate.
>Helium is a non-renewable resource
Uh, no.
Helium is produced as a byproduct of radioactive decay. Alpha particles, after all, are just helium nuclei.
If there was any reason to, we could make helium on demand.
It's just cheaper to extract it naturally right now.