The following terms are all etymologically related:
Draftsman -- someone who illustrates.
Draft horse -- a plow horse.
Draft beer -- beer on tap.
These all descend from the the Old English dræht, meaning to pull or drag. A draftsman drags a pen across the page. A draft horse pulls a plow. You draw a pint from the tap.
Actually, the church's involvement in astronomy predates modernism. From the time of the late Roman Empire the Catholic Church managed the calendar for Europe, a tasks that was made complicated by the Computus -- the calculation of the date of Easter, which unlike other feast days is not tied to a specific date in the calendar.
Easter is supposed to fall on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Note the combination cycles: solar, lunar, and day of week. Up until the late 1700s the first day of the new calendar year was March 21 in most places, not January 1, because March 21 was reckoned as the date of the vernal equinox and the start of spring.
Now Easter is a springtime festival and is supposed to occur soon after the start of the season, but over the years people began to notice that it was often falling in the middle of spring. This was because while the vernal equinox did occur on the conventional March 21 date back in 49 BC when the Julian calendar was established, by 1582 AD procession of the Earth's axis shifted the actual date of the equinox to March 9. Eventually this process would move Easter into the summer months.
This prompted the adoption of the more accurate Gregorian Calendar, with it's elaborate leap year mechanism. The Gregorian Calendar adoption also reset the equinox to March 21 by skipping the dates October 5, 1582 -- October 14 1582.
This was cutting edge applied astronomy at the time, and coincidentally occurred while Galileo Galilei was a student at university.
I've been following this situation, and the shelter in place order and early worker release are just sensible precautionary measures. At present there is no reason to expect any release of contamination.
Not that this is exactly a feather in the cap for the site's management; obviously it should never have happened. But the response at least is responsible: when the unexpected happens, you assume more unexpected events are in store until you're sure as sure can be.
What some politician called the site in the past is totally irrelevant to the present situation. This should, however, remind us that we do have a pretty big nuclear waste problem slowly building; and because it's slow we've been kicking the ball down the road and hoping for the best. That isn't a good enough. Unexpected things happen, and even if this event proves to be harmless, as is likely, they don't always happen in harmless ways.
You know what else goes to infinity these days? Marketing fashion over function to the ignorant masses who love that shit.
So much for common sense design.
Well, in a world where silliness sells, silly design *is* common sense design.
For years cell phones rudimentary, and data services over the air were bad, proprietary, and costly. You had to pay for an add-on service on some carriers to get your photos off your phone. Then Steve Jobs picked the weakest carrier that was big enough -- in the US that was AT&T -- and made them an offer. That's how the stranglehold of carriers on phone features was broken, and the results were for many people a revelation. But not for those of us working on mobile apps before the iPhone... to us this was how things should have been all along.
But as much as Jobs deserves credit for cutting off the carrers' balls, he also introduced the phone using public to the assumption that a flagship phone was supposed to be ground breaking. And maybe that was OK for the first few years, but ten years on now it's not a reasonable expectation. But until the public gives up the equation of pointless novelty with "cool", we're stuck with it.
While there is an element of truth in what you say, it's also true that people exploit the broad license given to humor for purposes other than getting a laugh. The lines between advocacy, humor, and trolling are increasingly blurred.
What matters in the current media environment isn't ideas, it's attitudes. It doesn't really matter that Obama isn't a Muslim; what matter is how hearing somebody say that makes you feel. An idea like this has political power even for people who don't actually believe it
This is what "telling it like it is" is all about; it doesn't mean saying things that correspond to some objective truth; it's about a kind of subjective authenticity. "Telling it like it is" means speaking with sincere feeling, even when contradicting yourself. It doesn't matter which alternative version of reality you presented is true (if either is). Philosophers have only recently begun to examine such truth-irrelevant utterances, and the term they use for it is "bullshit".
The claim of humor arises when you try to nail someone's bullshit politics down, but if you look at the alleged joke, it's invariably not humorous, it's just smug. There is such a thing as political humor, but it by definition takes a position. Alt-right "humor" is all about arousing feelings without being tied to any falsifiable position.
Humor is actually a really good way to teach, because that unmistakable moment of recognition gives your audience both instant feedback that you're on the right track, and instant reward for the effort.
Remote tracking from earth, or advanced software that lets someone on the ground say "shoot that", and who can prove it wasn't random space junk that took out that satellite.
Anyone who tracks pieces of space junk, I would think.
Look at this device in context. China, Russia and the US are all working on hypersonic weapons. With such a weapon, you could potentially strike any point on the Earth within an hour, combining the global reach of an ICBM and the precision terminal guidance of a smart bomb, without the political... well, fallout you'd get from the brute force of a nuclear strike.
You obviously could weaponize a space drone, but once you'd actually used it the cat would be out of the bag. Everyone would know you're stationing weapons in space, so next time there's a chance of a conflict all your space assets are a target, which of course is especially bad for the country with the most space assets. Oh, don't get me wrong. You'd surely keep your options open, probably even discreetly study the problem, especially in an cost-is-no-object procurement atmosphere.
But the thing that a military who's increasingly emphasizing precision from afar needs most is to know is the right chimney to drop the bomb down. So while I wouldn't be surprised if the program did have some space-based weapons goals, I'd be really surprised if it didn't have intelligence-gathering goals.
Well, if you're going to pick semantic nits, how about it being "worse than anyone thought." That would, from a pedantic point of view, be a stroke of luck.
The worst case would be where the flaw persisted for some time with some people being aware of its severity.
It always bothers me how easy it is to oversimplify something like this.
Nearly everyone would like to see some things change, and it's a certainty some of the people who voted for Macron would like to see a lot of things changed.
LePen characterizing this as a vote for "continuity" is a self-serving lie. "Continuity" and "Change" were not on the ballot. The only thing you can conclude is that French voters rejected the particular changes LePen represents.
Now I try to stay away from Holocaust/WW2 comparisons, because that trivializes crimes against humanity, but I do try to draw lessons from them. And the most important is that ordinary people take their cues from what people around them seem to be OK with. All those war criminals who claimed they were personally appalled by the Final Solution but were just following orders weren't necessarily telling self-serving lies; internally people people are often conflicted, but externally you can count on them to conform.
What makes Stallman irritating is his stubborn non-conformity, even in minor points. He always insists on discussing things on his terms, which is something everyone dislikes when it's turned on them. But his pig-headedness is not a valid reason to dismiss his concerns, particularly where you have concerns yourself and most especially in areas where you have concerns and yet somehow you find yourself going along.
In a society where ordinary people are conforming with madness, it's only the crackpots who are sane.
As easy as it is to overlook how dangerous a car is, it's also just as easy to overlook how much effort we put into dealing with that. An alien anthropologist would be astonished by how much time and money we put into automobile regulation.
We think of police as crime fighting organizations, but that hypothetical alien anthropologist, going strictly by observations, would conclude that their primary purpose is to control automobiles. Automobile licensing is the sole thing for which the majority of the population voluntarily submits itself to a competency test. It doesn't seem strange to us at all that all states have multiple major departments devoted in some way to the automobile -- the registry of motor vehicles, highway patrol, highway department etc.
The point of all this is to reduce the dangers posed by automobiles to a level that is tolerable in comparison to their benefits. At some point the risk is irreducible, because there's nothing you can do about a driver who is homicidal and suicidal; you just make a (implicit) value judgment that the benefits outweigh the costs.
The same logic, applied to drones, will surely lead to different places because while the dangers presented by drones are small, so are their benefits.
Nope. You're thinking of sea ice, which forms in salt water. Icebergs are formed by glacial calving or ice sheets that originate on land.
But even sea ice is less saline than seawater, because the freezing process expels brine. But because sea ice is flat like a pancake it has a larger surface area to volume ratio.
Actually, I believe it was an aircraft carrier and the material was composite of ice and wood pulp. The idea was to provide complete aerial coverage of the North Atlantic; the project was shelved when a combination of longer-range aircraft and small escort carriers became available. The project was delayed both by engineering problems and by feature creep, which ballooned the required hull size to a staggering 610m long, almost 2.5x as long as the largest aircraft carrier class in WW2.
Actually, there *is* quite useful way to define extremism that doesn't rely on on subjective value judgments about the admissiability someone's particular ideology.
To the degree that a person tends to perceive the world as polarized into two camps with no overlap or middle ground, that person is an extremist. It doesn't mean he's wrong on any particular issue.
So, socialists who think anyone who isn't a socialist is a fascist are extremist socialists. Likewise capitalists who see any departure from laisez-faire as tantamount to communism are extremist capitalists. Their comrades with similar views about issues but somewhat more flexible views about people are not extremists.
Extremists view the world as populated by the moral equivalent of angels and devils; consequently they have a severe difficulty with compromising or horse-trading, which is tantamount to a deal with the devil. This is why extremist movements are notorious for schism.
This also explains the resurgence of extremism in the age of social media. It's never been easier to surround yourself with like-minded people, no matter how outré your particular mania is.
Now "hate speech" is an entirely different matter. It's poorly named because "hate" is not the defining characteristic. The defining characteristic of hate speech is intimidation. Suppose you burn a cross on a black family's lawn, not because you have anything personal against blacks, but because you know that it's better for your property's value if the neighborhood is entirely white. That's still hate speech, even though you don't feel any hate. On the other hand if you politely inform your black neighbor so you'd prefer it if the two of you stayed out of each other's way because you hate blacks, that's not hate speech.
Hate speech is a crime against liberty: it's an attempt to force people not to live here or put their genitals there, when it's none of your damn business.
This is true of documentation as anything else. No matter how amazingly good your documentation is, it could stand to be a bit better.
So what standard do you write your documentation against? Well, unless you are being paid documentation by the users, like our friends over at O'Reilly are, the standard is "as cheap as you can get away with."
Which means the quality of Amazon's API documentation is a function of programmers' willingness to put up with Amazon's bullshit. So it's not Amazon's lack of respect for the value of the programmers' time that's the problem here.
I know this is a joke, but having been there, done that, and having the arthritic knees (currently asymptomatic) to prove it, I'd like to attest that it's not really that hard to dig yourself out of that hole.
Scientific research has shown that exercise, like everything else, has diminishing returns. At any given point, most of the health benefits of adding more exercise to your routine come in the next twenty minutes per week you add. The bad news is that it takes incredible dedication to be super-healthy; but the good news, if you aren't exercising at all, is that it's quite easy to be a lot healthier than you are now.
As for running 50 m, that's not health, it's fitness which are two different things. If I read the summary right, the pill in question gives some of the health benefits of exercise without exercise but not the fitness benefits.
Fitness is an adaptation of your body to the stress it "expects", so the trick isn't doing huge volumes of exercise, it's getting the intensity right. So if you want to adapt your body to running 50m, run at the pace you want to set for 50m, and drop back to walking until you've recovered and do it again. It doesn't matter if you can only run for 10m before you give up, you're telling your body it has to adapt to that level of effort. Again you don't have to put huge amounts of time and suffering into it, but there is some suffering.
The key isn't volume; it's consistency. You don't have to run 10km a day; 2km every other day is just as good unless you're training for a 10k race.
Anyhow, a lot of the attraction of a pill is that you wouldn't have to spend countless hours at the gym to get healthy, but the fact is you don't need that even without a magic pill. There are reasons to go to the gym but health isn't one of them. Anyhow, if you deduct the amount of time some people at the gym spend on their smartphones, they might as well stay home.
Mice reach sexual maturity at six weeks, have a lifespan of about a year over which they will produce as many as a hundred offspring. This makes them almost ideally suited for either artificial breeding or rapid population adaption by natural selection.
I'll bet if you tracked a wild mouse population, after a couple of successive lean years the average mouse would be measurably more metabolically thrifty. After a few good years the average mouse would be more aggressive in its use of energy. But the tail ends of the distribution would be preserved either way, hedging the population's metabolic bet.
Since the 70s SCOTUS has used something called the "act of production doctrine", which basically says that you have to produce some piece of evidence under subpoena unless the act of complying in itself bears on your possible guilt.
So a court can subpoena the contents of your safe, even though those contents will incriminate you. They can't say, "Deliver us all documents related to your bribing of an official," because to comply with that demand is to admit guilt.
Slashdot Mirror
The following terms are all etymologically related:
Draftsman -- someone who illustrates.
Draft horse -- a plow horse.
Draft beer -- beer on tap.
These all descend from the the Old English dræht, meaning to pull or drag. A draftsman drags a pen across the page. A draft horse pulls a plow. You draw a pint from the tap.
It just has to outperform cops.
Actually, the church's involvement in astronomy predates modernism. From the time of the late Roman Empire the Catholic Church managed the calendar for Europe, a tasks that was made complicated by the Computus -- the calculation of the date of Easter, which unlike other feast days is not tied to a specific date in the calendar.
Easter is supposed to fall on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Note the combination cycles: solar, lunar, and day of week. Up until the late 1700s the first day of the new calendar year was March 21 in most places, not January 1, because March 21 was reckoned as the date of the vernal equinox and the start of spring.
Now Easter is a springtime festival and is supposed to occur soon after the start of the season, but over the years people began to notice that it was often falling in the middle of spring. This was because while the vernal equinox did occur on the conventional March 21 date back in 49 BC when the Julian calendar was established, by 1582 AD procession of the Earth's axis shifted the actual date of the equinox to March 9. Eventually this process would move Easter into the summer months.
This prompted the adoption of the more accurate Gregorian Calendar, with it's elaborate leap year mechanism. The Gregorian Calendar adoption also reset the equinox to March 21 by skipping the dates October 5, 1582 -- October 14 1582.
This was cutting edge applied astronomy at the time, and coincidentally occurred while Galileo Galilei was a student at university.
I've been following this situation, and the shelter in place order and early worker release are just sensible precautionary measures. At present there is no reason to expect any release of contamination.
Not that this is exactly a feather in the cap for the site's management; obviously it should never have happened. But the response at least is responsible: when the unexpected happens, you assume more unexpected events are in store until you're sure as sure can be.
What some politician called the site in the past is totally irrelevant to the present situation. This should, however, remind us that we do have a pretty big nuclear waste problem slowly building; and because it's slow we've been kicking the ball down the road and hoping for the best. That isn't a good enough. Unexpected things happen, and even if this event proves to be harmless, as is likely, they don't always happen in harmless ways.
You know what else goes to infinity these days? Marketing fashion over function to the ignorant masses who love that shit.
So much for common sense design.
Well, in a world where silliness sells, silly design *is* common sense design.
For years cell phones rudimentary, and data services over the air were bad, proprietary, and costly. You had to pay for an add-on service on some carriers to get your photos off your phone. Then Steve Jobs picked the weakest carrier that was big enough -- in the US that was AT&T -- and made them an offer. That's how the stranglehold of carriers on phone features was broken, and the results were for many people a revelation. But not for those of us working on mobile apps before the iPhone ... to us this was how things should have been all along.
But as much as Jobs deserves credit for cutting off the carrers' balls, he also introduced the phone using public to the assumption that a flagship phone was supposed to be ground breaking. And maybe that was OK for the first few years, but ten years on now it's not a reasonable expectation. But until the public gives up the equation of pointless novelty with "cool", we're stuck with it.
Well, unless the genetic makeup is changing, it is difficult to explain trends this way.
You're being naive if you think trolling like this isn't political.
While there is an element of truth in what you say, it's also true that people exploit the broad license given to humor for purposes other than getting a laugh. The lines between advocacy, humor, and trolling are increasingly blurred.
What matters in the current media environment isn't ideas, it's attitudes. It doesn't really matter that Obama isn't a Muslim; what matter is how hearing somebody say that makes you feel. An idea like this has political power even for people who don't actually believe it
This is what "telling it like it is" is all about; it doesn't mean saying things that correspond to some objective truth; it's about a kind of subjective authenticity. "Telling it like it is" means speaking with sincere feeling, even when contradicting yourself. It doesn't matter which alternative version of reality you presented is true (if either is). Philosophers have only recently begun to examine such truth-irrelevant utterances, and the term they use for it is "bullshit".
The claim of humor arises when you try to nail someone's bullshit politics down, but if you look at the alleged joke, it's invariably not humorous, it's just smug. There is such a thing as political humor, but it by definition takes a position. Alt-right "humor" is all about arousing feelings without being tied to any falsifiable position.
Humor is actually a really good way to teach, because that unmistakable moment of recognition gives your audience both instant feedback that you're on the right track, and instant reward for the effort.
Remote tracking from earth, or advanced software that lets someone on the ground say "shoot that", and who can prove it wasn't random space junk that took out that satellite.
Anyone who tracks pieces of space junk, I would think.
Look at this device in context. China, Russia and the US are all working on hypersonic weapons. With such a weapon, you could potentially strike any point on the Earth within an hour, combining the global reach of an ICBM and the precision terminal guidance of a smart bomb, without the political ... well, fallout you'd get from the brute force of a nuclear strike.
You obviously could weaponize a space drone, but once you'd actually used it the cat would be out of the bag. Everyone would know you're stationing weapons in space, so next time there's a chance of a conflict all your space assets are a target, which of course is especially bad for the country with the most space assets. Oh, don't get me wrong. You'd surely keep your options open, probably even discreetly study the problem, especially in an cost-is-no-object procurement atmosphere.
But the thing that a military who's increasingly emphasizing precision from afar needs most is to know is the right chimney to drop the bomb down. So while I wouldn't be surprised if the program did have some space-based weapons goals, I'd be really surprised if it didn't have intelligence-gathering goals.
Well, if you're going to pick semantic nits, how about it being "worse than anyone thought." That would, from a pedantic point of view, be a stroke of luck.
The worst case would be where the flaw persisted for some time with some people being aware of its severity.
Maybe there's something to that running water thing.
It always bothers me how easy it is to oversimplify something like this.
Nearly everyone would like to see some things change, and it's a certainty some of the people who voted for Macron would like to see a lot of things changed.
LePen characterizing this as a vote for "continuity" is a self-serving lie. "Continuity" and "Change" were not on the ballot. The only thing you can conclude is that French voters rejected the particular changes LePen represents.
The way shooting yourself with your own gun is an American pasttime.
Now I try to stay away from Holocaust/WW2 comparisons, because that trivializes crimes against humanity, but I do try to draw lessons from them. And the most important is that ordinary people take their cues from what people around them seem to be OK with. All those war criminals who claimed they were personally appalled by the Final Solution but were just following orders weren't necessarily telling self-serving lies; internally people people are often conflicted, but externally you can count on them to conform.
What makes Stallman irritating is his stubborn non-conformity, even in minor points. He always insists on discussing things on his terms, which is something everyone dislikes when it's turned on them. But his pig-headedness is not a valid reason to dismiss his concerns, particularly where you have concerns yourself and most especially in areas where you have concerns and yet somehow you find yourself going along.
In a society where ordinary people are conforming with madness, it's only the crackpots who are sane.
As easy as it is to overlook how dangerous a car is, it's also just as easy to overlook how much effort we put into dealing with that. An alien anthropologist would be astonished by how much time and money we put into automobile regulation.
We think of police as crime fighting organizations, but that hypothetical alien anthropologist, going strictly by observations, would conclude that their primary purpose is to control automobiles. Automobile licensing is the sole thing for which the majority of the population voluntarily submits itself to a competency test. It doesn't seem strange to us at all that all states have multiple major departments devoted in some way to the automobile -- the registry of motor vehicles, highway patrol, highway department etc.
The point of all this is to reduce the dangers posed by automobiles to a level that is tolerable in comparison to their benefits. At some point the risk is irreducible, because there's nothing you can do about a driver who is homicidal and suicidal; you just make a (implicit) value judgment that the benefits outweigh the costs.
The same logic, applied to drones, will surely lead to different places because while the dangers presented by drones are small, so are their benefits.
Nope. You're thinking of sea ice, which forms in salt water. Icebergs are formed by glacial calving or ice sheets that originate on land.
But even sea ice is less saline than seawater, because the freezing process expels brine. But because sea ice is flat like a pancake it has a larger surface area to volume ratio.
Oh, well then I expect they'll give up, because your opinion is bound to be more important to them than water.
Actually, I believe it was an aircraft carrier and the material was composite of ice and wood pulp. The idea was to provide complete aerial coverage of the North Atlantic; the project was shelved when a combination of longer-range aircraft and small escort carriers became available. The project was delayed both by engineering problems and by feature creep, which ballooned the required hull size to a staggering 610m long, almost 2.5x as long as the largest aircraft carrier class in WW2.
There should be at least one person to actually use the cell phones.
Actually, there *is* quite useful way to define extremism that doesn't rely on on subjective value judgments about the admissiability someone's particular ideology.
To the degree that a person tends to perceive the world as polarized into two camps with no overlap or middle ground, that person is an extremist. It doesn't mean he's wrong on any particular issue.
So, socialists who think anyone who isn't a socialist is a fascist are extremist socialists. Likewise capitalists who see any departure from laisez-faire as tantamount to communism are extremist capitalists. Their comrades with similar views about issues but somewhat more flexible views about people are not extremists.
Extremists view the world as populated by the moral equivalent of angels and devils; consequently they have a severe difficulty with compromising or horse-trading, which is tantamount to a deal with the devil. This is why extremist movements are notorious for schism.
This also explains the resurgence of extremism in the age of social media. It's never been easier to surround yourself with like-minded people, no matter how outré your particular mania is.
Now "hate speech" is an entirely different matter. It's poorly named because "hate" is not the defining characteristic. The defining characteristic of hate speech is intimidation. Suppose you burn a cross on a black family's lawn, not because you have anything personal against blacks, but because you know that it's better for your property's value if the neighborhood is entirely white. That's still hate speech, even though you don't feel any hate. On the other hand if you politely inform your black neighbor so you'd prefer it if the two of you stayed out of each other's way because you hate blacks, that's not hate speech.
Hate speech is a crime against liberty: it's an attempt to force people not to live here or put their genitals there, when it's none of your damn business.
They're just abandoned.
This is true of documentation as anything else. No matter how amazingly good your documentation is, it could stand to be a bit better.
So what standard do you write your documentation against? Well, unless you are being paid documentation by the users, like our friends over at O'Reilly are, the standard is "as cheap as you can get away with."
Which means the quality of Amazon's API documentation is a function of programmers' willingness to put up with Amazon's bullshit. So it's not Amazon's lack of respect for the value of the programmers' time that's the problem here.
I know this is a joke, but having been there, done that, and having the arthritic knees (currently asymptomatic) to prove it, I'd like to attest that it's not really that hard to dig yourself out of that hole.
Scientific research has shown that exercise, like everything else, has diminishing returns. At any given point, most of the health benefits of adding more exercise to your routine come in the next twenty minutes per week you add. The bad news is that it takes incredible dedication to be super-healthy; but the good news, if you aren't exercising at all, is that it's quite easy to be a lot healthier than you are now.
As for running 50 m, that's not health, it's fitness which are two different things. If I read the summary right, the pill in question gives some of the health benefits of exercise without exercise but not the fitness benefits.
Fitness is an adaptation of your body to the stress it "expects", so the trick isn't doing huge volumes of exercise, it's getting the intensity right. So if you want to adapt your body to running 50m, run at the pace you want to set for 50m, and drop back to walking until you've recovered and do it again. It doesn't matter if you can only run for 10m before you give up, you're telling your body it has to adapt to that level of effort. Again you don't have to put huge amounts of time and suffering into it, but there is some suffering.
The key isn't volume; it's consistency. You don't have to run 10km a day; 2km every other day is just as good unless you're training for a 10k race.
Anyhow, a lot of the attraction of a pill is that you wouldn't have to spend countless hours at the gym to get healthy, but the fact is you don't need that even without a magic pill. There are reasons to go to the gym but health isn't one of them. Anyhow, if you deduct the amount of time some people at the gym spend on their smartphones, they might as well stay home.
Mice reach sexual maturity at six weeks, have a lifespan of about a year over which they will produce as many as a hundred offspring. This makes them almost ideally suited for either artificial breeding or rapid population adaption by natural selection.
I'll bet if you tracked a wild mouse population, after a couple of successive lean years the average mouse would be measurably more metabolically thrifty. After a few good years the average mouse would be more aggressive in its use of energy. But the tail ends of the distribution would be preserved either way, hedging the population's metabolic bet.
Since the 70s SCOTUS has used something called the "act of production doctrine", which basically says that you have to produce some piece of evidence under subpoena unless the act of complying in itself bears on your possible guilt.
So a court can subpoena the contents of your safe, even though those contents will incriminate you. They can't say, "Deliver us all documents related to your bribing of an official," because to comply with that demand is to admit guilt.