The very first sentence of the article says they tried to adjust for health (which is not a surprise):
For older people, getting out of the house regularly may contribute to a longer life - and the effect is independent of medical problems or mobility issues, according to new research from Israel.
The article is available for money from here, but the abstract says they adjusted for:
* social (sex, marital status, financial status, loneliness) * functional (sex, self-rated health, fatigue, depression, physical activity, activity of daily living difficulty) * medical (sex, chronic pain, visual impairment, hearing impairment, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, chronic kidney disease)
26.8% of the population – almost 720,000 people – qualify as “food insecure” based on risk factors such as missing meals, relying on food banks or food stamps, borrowing money for food, or neglecting bills and rent in order to buy groceries.
Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), which is what the article is talking about, and Oriented Strand Board (OSB) are very different products. CLT is more like plywood, but 5 inches thick with 1-inch plys.
As an example, Stadthaus / Murray Grove in London is a 9 story building of CLT, with no other structural materials. The walls, floors, lift shafts, etc. are all entirely CLT. I'm sure CLT is used in some US buildings, but I doubt it's very common (yet).
It's fairly straight forward. The "s" array holds numbers from 0 to N, and represents the positions of queens on the board, for example if s[3]==5 then there's a queen at position (3,5). This method of representing the board automatically ensures no two queens share a row or column, so you just have to worry about diagonals.
The "energy" function compares every queen with every other queen to see if they are on the same diagonal, and returns the number that are.
The code starts with numbers all in order in the array (so s[0]==0, s[1]==1, s[2]==2, etc.), representing the queens all along the same diagonal from corner to corner. It then just keeps swaping entries at random until there are no queens on the same diagonal. The exact details of which swaps to keep, and which to undo is determined using simulated annealing
How long did it take to run for n=1,000?
On my system it takes a couple of minutes for n=1000. However, there's an obvious optimisation, that instead of recalculating the energy every iteration, you just adjust the current value every time you swap two elements. That brings the running time to under a second.
How long will it take to run for n=1,000,000?
For n=10,000 the time goes up to 3 minutes, so as it stands I don't think 1,000,000 is feasible with this algorithm.
Traditionally in Europe, it was much more common than the US to have written employment contracts for everyone, even part-time 18-year-olds stacking supermarket shelves. There were defined procedures for firing, where the employer had to be able to prove the employee wasn't doing his or her job (e.g a number of written warnings must be given, extra training provided, etc.)
This is changing, with zero-hour contracts, Uber style quasi-employees, the gigging economy and the like. For better or worse, commercial competitiveness is slowly trumping employee protections.
I've asked a few vegetarians why they don't eat meet, and they seem about 50/50 split between ethical reasons, and just not liking the taste. I also can't remember any saying it was bad for ones health.
Might be cheaper to plant trees and landscaping in an urban environment
It sounds like that's the plan. From the fine article:
Two years ago, the councilman had passed a motion to test a new cool pavement that, with more trees and reflective rooftop solar panels, he thought could counter longer and extreme heat waves.
I make good money now, and my job isn't bad, but if I had $1k/month in extra money, I'd really have to consider trying to find a job like more, even if it paid less.
I don't think that's how it works. If a UBI of $1k/month is introduced, everyone currently in a job is going to be taxed an extra $1k/month (give or take, and one way or another) to pay for it. Everyone currently without a job is hopefully already getting a UBI from welfare. That makes it more or less cost-neutral. What UBI does is reduce administration overhead, and increase people's confidence that if they take a risk by leaving a job they hate, starting on some new endeavour, or moving across the country on a whim, they're not going to be starving or on the streets if it all goes wrong.
Theoretically, the current system already provides that confidence (at least in the commie European country I live in), but you have to prove to a bureaucracy you qualify for benefits. With UBI you don't, as you already get it, as does everyone.
I imagine minimum wage will be abolished if UBI is introduced. A crappy no-skills job is only going to get 1 or 2 Euros/Dollars an hour take-home pay. That's if such a thing still exists, and they haven't all been replaced by robots by then.
In VMS (or rather Files-11) it's called INDEXF.SYS. It is a visible, readable file (as system/root). I've never tried to delete it, to see what happens. Must do that one day, before all the systems I have access to are gone:(
The fact that if you advance one letter in the alphabet with 2001's "HAL" you get "IBM", and if you do the same with "VMS" you get "WNT" is supposedly a coincidence.
Classic Unix had the.login file, which might contain "logout". How do you bypass that if you have no admin rights? I have no idea, I wonder if it's possible to recover in any way.
VMS allows you to add qualifiers to your username when logging in, so you can tweak your environment. In VMS this would do what you ask: Username: SANDORZOO/NOCOMMAND Password: <PASSWORD>
I always thought that was a neat idea that other OSes should copy.
The EPA can use "Common Science", reports from private parties, and medical research, but only if sufficient data is provided that the conclusions of the reports can be independently verified. Note that without this information, even the EPA cannot validate the conclusions of the reports it was using. The problem, therefore, is that without some kind of requirement like this, who and what EPA chooses to use as the basis for decision making is incredibly discretionary.
Thanks for the link to the bill. The actual text for the bill reads "publicly available online in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results". How about things like ESA's Copernicus Programme of Earth observation satellites? The data access requirements say that public online access is only available to a "rolling on-line archive covering the last month(s) of selected Sentinels core products". You need at least an "International Agreement" (whatever that is) to access the full data set. Does that mean the EPA can't use any science based on Copernicus/Sentinel data?
It's convenient as long as you have access to it. I put my entire music collection in FLAC on a microSD card and can listen to it when I walk my dog without worrying about if my phone has enough charge, data rates, cell phone coverage or any other bullshit because I have dedicated media player.
Google Play (another $10/month on-demand add-free music streaming service) lets you download albums via wifi for playing later, so you don't need to worry about data rates or cell phone coverage. I would assume other similar services allow the same. Admittedly you're still SOL if you can't manage to keep your cell phone charged.
Ubikeys look like secuity dongles, but present themeselves as keyboards so instead of retyping a long one-time-key, you just press a button and it "types" it for you. All without needing OS specific drivers. But they doen't look like a keyboard.
As well as the Bussard Ramjet you describe, there's also Robert L. Forward's idea of Starwisp, an extremely light weight maser powered "light" sail that's rapidly accelerated up to 10% lightspeed, and then coasts the rest of the way. It won't be able to slow down, so can only do a high-speed flyby of its destination star system. There it would use its launch maser a second time, this time to power instruments and transmitters.
I think that greatly depends. Without a strong magnetic field, the Earth would look a lot like Mars, with much of its ancient primordial atmosphere blown away.
I don't see why that's a given. Venus doesn't have much of a magnetic field, but has plenty of atmosphere.
((space junk) fighting) cable = "a cable that fights space-junk" (space junk) (fighting cable) = "a fighting-cable that is space-junk" (space (junk fighting)) cable = "a space-ready cable intended for fighting junk" space (junk (fighting cable)) = "a broken fighting-cable found in space space ((junk fighting) cable) = "a TV cable channel showing junk-fighting tournaments that is broadcast to space"
When the company collects VAT, it's INCLUDED in the sticker price - it's illegal in the UK, I understand, to show customers who they are really paying by listing it as "+0.80 purchase price plus VAT".
It's not illegal to show the price before VAT in the UK. However, for goods aimed at consumers, the price you pay at the till (including any applicable taxes) must be the most prominently displayed price. My understanding is it's the opposite in the US, where it's common not to show customers how much they will be paying, by not including taxes, mail in rebates, service charges, etc. That seems bizarre to me.
That's odd, considering that all the colors the human eye/mind perceives is made up of signals from three types of color receptors in the eye.
That's because the eye's colour receptors respond to a range of wavelengths and those ranges overlap.
The RGB wavelengths emitted by a TV are over fairly narrow ranges, and correspond to the wavelengths where the eye is most sensitive. For example, pure blue from a TV will be around 470nm as that most strongly excites the blue receptors of the eye, but it also weakly excites the green and red receptors.
In nature a wavelength of 400 nm will weakly excite the blue receptors only, and not the green and red receptors at all. A TV can't do this - it would need to be able to support "negative" values for the red and green channels.
[...]the social model has already collapsed, many times over, and we have never had a revolt before.
It came close a few times in England, for example with the Luddites in the 1810s, which also had the Pentrich rising, Ely riots, Spa Fields riots, and the Peterloo massacre. The English parliament of the time certainly feared a revolution, and passed the Six Acts in response. Ten years later saw the Swing Riots, also protesting unemployment following agricultural mechanisation.
The main problem arises when you start trying to have agreements with owners of land where you want to lay the cable. And God save you from trying to put it through a forest.
In this case the land owers were local farmers who also had rubbish interent (often dial-up), and really wanted better interent. In some cases their businesses almost required it, as far as I can tell. From the article, quoting Christine Conder:
"So the farmers have been incredibly supportive of this and that's why they've given us free rein throughout the fields, which we go through to connect them and then we get to the villages which subsidise the farmers' connections.
"You couldn't do it just for the farmers alone, but you couldn't get to the village without the farmers so it's tit for tat."
Earth observation satellite orbits are typically polar and only slightly retrograde, with an inclination of around 100 degrees. If it was one of those coming down, it would been north-south or south-north, not east-west like this was.
Slashdot Mirror
The very first sentence of the article says they tried to adjust for health (which is not a surprise):
For older people, getting out of the house regularly may contribute to a longer life - and the effect is independent of medical problems or mobility issues, according to new research from Israel.
The article is available for money from here, but the abstract says they adjusted for:
* social (sex, marital status, financial status, loneliness)
* functional (sex, self-rated health, fatigue, depression, physical activity, activity of daily living difficulty)
* medical (sex, chronic pain, visual impairment, hearing impairment, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, chronic kidney disease)
What does it even mean to be "at risk" of hunger?
TFA defines it thus:
26.8% of the population – almost 720,000 people – qualify as “food insecure” based on risk factors such as missing meals, relying on food banks or food stamps, borrowing money for food, or neglecting bills and rent in order to buy groceries.
Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), which is what the article is talking about, and Oriented Strand Board (OSB) are very different products. CLT is more like plywood, but 5 inches thick with 1-inch plys.
As an example, Stadthaus / Murray Grove in London is a 9 story building of CLT, with no other structural materials. The walls, floors, lift shafts, etc. are all entirely CLT. I'm sure CLT is used in some US buildings, but I doubt it's very common (yet).
At least some of rest of world get it weekly on Netflix. The first two episodes are available where I am.
There's an onmousedown event in the page's javascript that changes the link when you click on it. I wish browsers would disallow such sneakiness.
I confess I didn't understand the code
It's fairly straight forward. The "s" array holds numbers from 0 to N, and represents the positions of queens on the board, for example if s[3]==5 then there's a queen at position (3,5). This method of representing the board automatically ensures no two queens share a row or column, so you just have to worry about diagonals.
The "energy" function compares every queen with every other queen to see if they are on the same diagonal, and returns the number that are.
The code starts with numbers all in order in the array (so s[0]==0, s[1]==1, s[2]==2, etc.), representing the queens all along the same diagonal from corner to corner. It then just keeps swaping entries at random until there are no queens on the same diagonal. The exact details of which swaps to keep, and which to undo is determined using simulated annealing
How long did it take to run for n=1,000?
On my system it takes a couple of minutes for n=1000. However, there's an obvious optimisation, that instead of recalculating the energy every iteration, you just adjust the current value every time you swap two elements. That brings the running time to under a second.
How long will it take to run for n=1,000,000?
For n=10,000 the time goes up to 3 minutes, so as it stands I don't think 1,000,000 is feasible with this algorithm.
California is a Right to Work state
Right-to-work law prohibits compelled employees to join a union. You're thinking of at-will employment.
GP is presumably thinking of at-will employment, not right-to-work law.
Traditionally in Europe, it was much more common than the US to have written employment contracts for everyone, even part-time 18-year-olds stacking supermarket shelves. There were defined procedures for firing, where the employer had to be able to prove the employee wasn't doing his or her job (e.g a number of written warnings must be given, extra training provided, etc.)
This is changing, with zero-hour contracts, Uber style quasi-employees, the gigging economy and the like. For better or worse, commercial competitiveness is slowly trumping employee protections.
I've asked a few vegetarians why they don't eat meet, and they seem about 50/50 split between ethical reasons, and just not liking the taste. I also can't remember any saying it was bad for ones health.
Might be cheaper to plant trees and landscaping in an urban environment
It sounds like that's the plan. From the fine article:
Two years ago, the councilman had passed a motion to test a new cool pavement that, with more trees and reflective rooftop solar panels, he thought could counter longer and extreme heat waves.
I make good money now, and my job isn't bad, but if I had $1k/month in extra money, I'd really have to consider trying to find a job like more, even if it paid less.
I don't think that's how it works. If a UBI of $1k/month is introduced, everyone currently in a job is going to be taxed an extra $1k/month (give or take, and one way or another) to pay for it. Everyone currently without a job is hopefully already getting a UBI from welfare. That makes it more or less cost-neutral. What UBI does is reduce administration overhead, and increase people's confidence that if they take a risk by leaving a job they hate, starting on some new endeavour, or moving across the country on a whim, they're not going to be starving or on the streets if it all goes wrong.
Theoretically, the current system already provides that confidence (at least in the commie European country I live in), but you have to prove to a bureaucracy you qualify for benefits. With UBI you don't, as you already get it, as does everyone.
I imagine minimum wage will be abolished if UBI is introduced. A crappy no-skills job is only going to get 1 or 2 Euros/Dollars an hour take-home pay. That's if such a thing still exists, and they haven't all been replaced by robots by then.
In VMS (or rather Files-11) it's called INDEXF.SYS. It is a visible, readable file (as system/root). I've never tried to delete it, to see what happens. Must do that one day, before all the systems I have access to are gone :(
The fact that if you advance one letter in the alphabet with 2001's "HAL" you get "IBM", and if you do the same with "VMS" you get "WNT" is supposedly a coincidence.
Classic Unix had the .login file, which might contain "logout". How do you bypass that if you have no admin rights? I have no idea, I wonder if it's possible to recover in any way.
VMS allows you to add qualifiers to your username when logging in, so you can tweak your environment. In VMS this would do what you ask:
/NOCOMMAND
Username: SANDORZOO
Password: <PASSWORD>
I always thought that was a neat idea that other OSes should copy.
The EPA can use "Common Science", reports from private parties, and medical research, but only if sufficient data is provided that the conclusions of the reports can be independently verified. Note that without this information, even the EPA cannot validate the conclusions of the reports it was using. The problem, therefore, is that without some kind of requirement like this, who and what EPA chooses to use as the basis for decision making is incredibly discretionary.
Thanks for the link to the bill. The actual text for the bill reads "publicly available online in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results". How about things like ESA's Copernicus Programme of Earth observation satellites? The data access requirements say that public online access is only available to a "rolling on-line archive covering the last month(s) of selected Sentinels core products". You need at least an "International Agreement" (whatever that is) to access the full data set. Does that mean the EPA can't use any science based on Copernicus/Sentinel data?
It's convenient as long as you have access to it. I put my entire music collection in FLAC on a microSD card and can listen to it when I walk my dog without worrying about if my phone has enough charge, data rates, cell phone coverage or any other bullshit because I have dedicated media player.
Google Play (another $10/month on-demand add-free music streaming service) lets you download albums via wifi for playing later, so you don't need to worry about data rates or cell phone coverage. I would assume other similar services allow the same. Admittedly you're still SOL if you can't manage to keep your cell phone charged.
Ubikeys look like secuity dongles, but present themeselves as keyboards so instead of retyping a long one-time-key, you just press a button and it "types" it for you. All without needing OS specific drivers. But they doen't look like a keyboard.
I guess this article is the one AC is referring to. Seems legit, but a little too esoteric for me to follow. It has links to other sources.
As well as the Bussard Ramjet you describe, there's also Robert L. Forward's idea of Starwisp, an extremely light weight maser powered "light" sail that's rapidly accelerated up to 10% lightspeed, and then coasts the rest of the way. It won't be able to slow down, so can only do a high-speed flyby of its destination star system. There it would use its launch maser a second time, this time to power instruments and transmitters.
I think that greatly depends. Without a strong magnetic field, the Earth would look a lot like Mars, with much of its ancient primordial atmosphere blown away.
I don't see why that's a given. Venus doesn't have much of a magnetic field, but has plenty of atmosphere.
Being Slashdot, we could use parentheses instead:
((space junk) fighting) cable = "a cable that fights space-junk"
(space junk) (fighting cable) = "a fighting-cable that is space-junk"
(space (junk fighting)) cable = "a space-ready cable intended for fighting junk"
space (junk (fighting cable)) = "a broken fighting-cable found in space
space ((junk fighting) cable) = "a TV cable channel showing junk-fighting tournaments that is broadcast to space"
I had to struggle with some of those...
When the company collects VAT, it's INCLUDED in the sticker price - it's illegal in the UK, I understand, to show customers who they are really paying by listing it as "+0.80 purchase price plus VAT".
It's not illegal to show the price before VAT in the UK. However, for goods aimed at consumers, the price you pay at the till (including any applicable taxes) must be the most prominently displayed price. My understanding is it's the opposite in the US, where it's common not to show customers how much they will be paying, by not including taxes, mail in rebates, service charges, etc. That seems bizarre to me.
That's odd, considering that all the colors the human eye/mind perceives is made up of signals from three types of color receptors in the eye.
That's because the eye's colour receptors respond to a range of wavelengths and those ranges overlap.
The RGB wavelengths emitted by a TV are over fairly narrow ranges, and correspond to the wavelengths where the eye is most sensitive. For example, pure blue from a TV will be around 470nm as that most strongly excites the blue receptors of the eye, but it also weakly excites the green and red receptors.
In nature a wavelength of 400 nm will weakly excite the blue receptors only, and not the green and red receptors at all. A TV can't do this - it would need to be able to support "negative" values for the red and green channels.
[...]the social model has already collapsed, many times over, and we have never had a revolt before.
It came close a few times in England, for example with the Luddites in the 1810s, which also had the Pentrich rising, Ely riots, Spa Fields riots, and the Peterloo massacre. The English parliament of the time certainly feared a revolution, and passed the Six Acts in response. Ten years later saw the Swing Riots, also protesting unemployment following agricultural mechanisation.
The main problem arises when you start trying to have agreements with owners of land where you want to lay the cable. And God save you from trying to put it through a forest.
In this case the land owers were local farmers who also had rubbish interent (often dial-up), and really wanted better interent. In some cases their businesses almost required it, as far as I can tell. From the article, quoting Christine Conder:
"So the farmers have been incredibly supportive of this and that's why they've given us free rein throughout the fields, which we go through to connect them and then we get to the villages which subsidise the farmers' connections.
"You couldn't do it just for the farmers alone, but you couldn't get to the village without the farmers so it's tit for tat."
Earth observation satellite orbits are typically polar and only slightly retrograde, with an inclination of around 100 degrees. If it was one of those coming down, it would been north-south or south-north, not east-west like this was.