Speaking as a someone who's actually developed products that were successful in the market, this is not the right way to think about a technology. A technology has to meet some identifiable group's self-identified needs, not necessarily what everyone needs, or especially not what you think they should need.
At one end of the spectrum there are people who could use a handgun but don't because the danger of having a handgun taken from them and used against them. For example, prison guards. At the other end of the spectrum are people who routinely carry firearms in situations where daily maintenance is a challenge. For example deployed officers in places like Afghanistan.
On either end of the spectrum the smart gun question is easy. But most people who want to carry a gun fall in between those extremes; they have to weigh the probability that they'll actually pull the trigger and get a "click" against the probability that someone other than them will pull the trigger. There's likely no one-size-fits-all answer.
Now there's a marketing problem though, in that people are demonstrably irrational in their weapons choices. I've seen arguments that for personal self defense you need to carry an automatic with an eighteen round magazine, plus a spare magazine, plus a backup gun. I've seen some people claim that one ought to carry at least forty rounds to be adequately protected. This is fantasy, but nobody dares to say so. Statistically when handguns are used in self-defense seldom are more than one or two shots are fired. I think one would be hard pressed to find a single instance where any law-abiding citizen has had to fire more than three or four rounds in self-defense. On top of that if you're a law-abiding citizen your chance of needing to fire even a single shot is comparable to your chances of winning the lottery. Given all that the most practical weapon for most people would be a small to medium caliber double-action revolver -- especially if you buy the "I want to make sure this goes bang in a hurry" argument. In the astronomically unlikely case you need to fire four or five shots, it's less likely to jam. But despite this people choose automatic pistols with high capacity double stack magazines.
What this tells me is the self-defense handgun market is driven by the need to feel safe, not by any statistically defensible notion of what it takes to be safe. It's also clear to me that the feeling of empowerment people get by arming themselves is an important marketing factor too. I have nothing against that, by the way. If it makes you feel safer and more powerful to carry a gun, I don't have a problem with that. But I do have a problem with people carrying if they can't be bothered to inspect their weapon and secure it properly every time they arm themselves.
I did it by being a more virtuous person than everyone else who tried and failed. I'd tell you all about how great I am, but that would take a long time.
Please, please, please tell me there's some dome-headed scientist with a comical speech impediment engaged in an escalating series of attempts to foil the critter.
Well, I think you missed the poster's point about the difference between burning food in a calorimeter and converting it into energy the body can use.
It's true that according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, energy is conserved. But by the Second Law, some of that energy becomes unavailable for work. There is a process called gluconeogenesis in which glucose is created from fats and proteins. Blood glucose is closely regulated by your body; if there's too much it secretes insulin, which causes glucose molecules to be converted into fat. If later on blood glucose falls, gluconeogenesis will create new glucose, in part from fats previously created. But each step in the process of turning glucose into fat and back consumes energy. So even ignoring the calories that pass straight through you because you don't have the digestive equipment to break it down (e.g. cellulose), it's not necessarily true that a 9 calories of excess consumption will result in 1g of fat deposition, or that a nine calorie deficit will mobilize only 1 g of fat. There are losses.
But it's true that as a first approximation we can ignore a lot of this and assume that excess calories simply become fat without any energy loss, because the body is remarkably efficient.
That said, the matter of weight gain and weight loss is difficult for people because the body isn't good at regulating its calorie balance in a situation where you can walk ten feet to a refrigerator and take out a hot pocket with 300 highly refined, easily digestible calories in it. That hot pocket doesn't even register on your body's satiety mechanism in the two minutes it takes to snarf it down, so of course you get another. The food we evolved to eat came into forms. Either you spent hours chasing it down and killing it and it was mostly tough chewing, or you dug it up and it was also tough chewing, as well as being so full of roughage it gave your gut a major workout. Convenience foods are "stealth" foods as far as your body's satiety mechanism is concerned.
When you track everything you eat, you begin to see that the big problem is sugar and refined flour. One of my family's favorite meals is burritos; if I make a burrito with a quarter cup of rice, a quarter cup of beans, a half cup of lettuce, a quarter cup of tomatoes, a quarter cup of grated cheese, and four ounces of chicken, the calories break down this way:
Almost half the calories come from the tortilla, which while not devoid of nutrition, contributes very little in relation to the large slug of calories it delivers. But most importantly, it's just a wrapper, and it contributes nothing whatsoever to your sensation of satiety. In fact replacing the tortilla with extra large lettuce leaves actually increases the satiation value of the meal because it's trickier and more time consuming to eat. You literally feel equally full while losing almost half the calories. From your body's standpoint it thinks you've eaten just as much, but going by the calorimeter you've eaten much, much less, and in this case the calorimeter has the relevant information.
Having lost just shy of over a hundred pounds over the past three years, I have a perspective on "overeating".
The stereotype is some greedy, willpower-less person stuffing his face with mounds of food, but really gorging has very little to do with it. It's a very subtle difference between having calorie intake and output in equilibrium, and gaining or losing weight. In the thirty or so years between when I reached my current height and when I reached my maximum weight, I gained 120 pounds. That works out to nearly exactly 5 grams of weight gain per day -- about the weight of a US nickel. Now some of that weight gain was muscle -- I was active in sports all the way up to the point where I hit my maximum weight. I won't bore you with the calculations, but my lean body weight increased by about 45 pounds while I added 75 pounds of fat. But let's assume all of that was fat. How many calories in excess of equilibrium would you have to eat to gain 5 grams of fat? About 45 calories. In comparison a single slice of dry, white bread has about 75 calories. My "overeating" was the equivalent of an extra half an apple a day, every day for thirty years.
It's very easy to gain weight. You don't have to be a pig to do it. Conversely, I have found it's very easy to lose weight. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think that's the case. I believe anyone can do it, if they understand how their body works. I think the problem is that people believe the body has a kind of wisdom of its own; in my experience that's rubbish. Your body is a machine; a machine built for killing mammoths that's currently spending its days sitting in a chair churning out code. Of course it's not going to work right.
So screw all that "trust your body's wisdom" nonsense. Your body is dumb. It can't keep track of how much it has eaten; your stomach basically has three fullness settings: eat something right away, I could eat a little more, and I'm going to barf I'm so full. The rest of satiety is your dumb reptilian brain at work. Studies show that if you serve yourself cereal out of a larger box, you'll take a larger serving than if you serve yourself cereal out of a small box, and feel equally full either way. Same thing if you eat off a big plate. Smaller plates (and utensils) mean you feel full after eating less. Chewing more makes you think you've eaten more. Because you're an idiot, at least most of you (everything from your cortex down) is. Stop expecting your body to act reasonably. It can't.
Imagine you're in a space capsule. You've been trained to watch a gauge, and to manipulate a lever so that the gauge stays in a certain narrow range because if it goes out of that range the capsule fails. You'd watch that gauge like a hawk because if the capsule fails, you die. That capsule is your body, and if it fails, you die. So what I do is I (a) wear an activity monitor (b) measure/weigh everything that I am about to eat and log it in a calorie counting app religiously, (c) aim to maintain about a 500 calories deficit every day, and (d) weigh myself and take a body fat measurement every day. That's pretty much it. Oh, there's tricks you can play on your reptilian brain to make achieving calorie deficit easier (small plates, big volume/chewy food; getting choosier about what I eat because I don't get to eat without thinking, putting a timer on to pace myself to no more than 25 calories/min). But those things are peripheral. Measurement is central. You can't get the machine to do what you want unless you measure its inputs and outputs. It's best to maintain your intake and output goals separately, by the way -- that is don't automatically up your calorie intake because you've exercised, but if you've burned 5000 calories in a day (as I did recently) you're going to be hungrier than usual.
Now a to why Chinese kids are getting fat, you need evidence to answer a question like that, but if I were to conjecture I'd look at the availability of cheap, tasty, convenience foods engineered to disappear into your bo
It might be some Trump supporter, or it could just be a chaosmonger. Some people will do shit like that because they like to see people get riled up over something they've done.
There's been dirty tricks by "Clinton supporters" against Sanders social media. Likewise utterly meaningless. The truth is that except on-line there's not a lot of difference between Sanders and Clinton supporters, except Sanders supporters tend to be younger. Could be an oddball Clinton supporter, must just as likely it's just a plain oddball.
And speculation != waffling, so we're at least twice removed from direct evidence of Hawking's supposed senility.
In any case what sets Hawking apart isn't infallibility; it's creativity. If you want to be a creative genius you can't worry too much about being wrong, any more than you can be a chess master and worry too much about losing material. It's part of the game.
The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends
I guess this is really a great thing since the school district has all that excess money that they can't find a use for.
This is for a school system (orange county) with a budget of over 1.5 billion. And if 1.5 billion sounds excessive for a school system budget, consider that this school system has 190,000 students, so that works out to less than $7900 per student (average for the US is about $12000). That paints a picture of a pretty bare-bones school system, but amortized over the entire student body that $18,000 works out to less than a dime per student, so nobody is losing access to AP courses (or football) over that particular purchase.
Supposing that monitoring student social media use for cyberbullying is a good idea, it seems to me that $18,000 is a bargain compared to paying humans to sift through the postings from all the students in the 18 high schools and 32 middle schools in the district. There may be reasons to object to this, but expense isn't one of them.
Best decision I ever made. My career's basically in the toilet now, but I've spent the past eight years with all the time in the world for my kids when they needed me. The oldest is in college now and the youngest is looking at colleges, so I have more time for myself. In the past year I've lost nearly 100 pounds and reversed the Type 2 diabetes and am well on the way to reversing the arthritis that was starting to cripple me -- using my engineering skills, of course.
Still wish I could get a job doing what I feel like I was born to do, but I was born to do other things too beside being an engineer.
I do know that after a long and very successful career I took two years off to deal with health issues with one of my kids (now happily resolved) and thereafter as an over-50 engineer with an employment gap I was pretty much unemployable.
My experiences in the interviews I got suggest something subtly different than ageism -- at least of the sort that believes older engineers can't do the work. I'd meet with a bunch of people and everyone would seem excited and enthusiastic about my background... except the hiring manager. Whomever I was going to work for would seem distinctly colder, as if they'd decided I wasn't going to get the job before they even met me.
I think what's going on is that people don't like the idea of supervising someone who is older and highly experienced. Maybe they think a more experienced worker would be less cooperative. Or maybe they were afraid we'd be angling for their job. I don't think, given my resume, that anyone believed I couldn't do the work. They just doubted my word that I really wanted the job because of my experience.
Is that ageism?
I think it's very common for more experienced engineers who've reached the point where they've been doing engineering management to want to get back down and dirty, only to be frustrated by the fact that nobody wants you for that kind of work at your age. You hear it a lot -- I enjoyed being a project leader or program manager, it was rewarding and I'm glad I did it, but now I want to get back to the stuff that brought me into the field in the first place. Except once you've taken any kind of senior position nobody wants you for grunt work anymore, even if you've been armpit-deep in engineering on a day-to-day basis.
Because the world, when it offers you a choice, only ever offers you two choices, which conveniently will be completely diametrically opposed to each other. That's a boon because all you have to choose is between Good and Evil, never been good and better or bad and worse.
Neither are the vast majority of scientists that denialists like to cite. The difference is that Nye isn't claiming to have knowledge that the vast majority of scholars in the field don't have; he's agreeing with the people who do have the credentials to have an opinion worth citing.
Whenever I sit next to a scientist or scholar at a banquet I always take the opportunity to pick their brains. For example I once sat next to an aero-astro professor so I tried to get him to explain the Bernoulli effect in plain language -- and he almost succeeded. If I don't know anything about the person's field I'll ask him what the one thing he'd like his introductory level students to take away from his class.
So I was sitting next to a sociologists, and since I knew literally nothing about sociology she got the "one thing" question, and her response was that she wanted her students to understand how important it was to what she called "disaggregate the average"; that is when you're looking at an average figure for a population not to assume that it represents everyone, or even anyone in that group. You need to investigate how different subgroups can be very different from the overall group.
Thinking of a lifetime spent in STEM, STEM people can't be reduced to a single stereotype, but you can find support for any of the stereotypes of the science geek. Most science and engineering types are pretty normal socially. But you don't have to be socially normal to succeed in STEM, so there is a distinct minority who are socially impaired. They don't deal well with other people as people, but are more comfortable dealing with them as abstractions. And those are the kind of people who become fanatics -- aided by the fact that they're used to being right when most of the people around them are wrong, they're persuadable to almost anything because they are impervious to self-doubt.
Reading the article, it would seem that the system cannot be "scaled up" -- at least in terms of the acceleration produced. Thrust I suppose be scaled up arbitrarily, but not the geometry of the device would have to become larger as the amount of acceleration becomes larger.
Except there's been a long history of bogus espionage cases against Chinese scientists, going all the way back to Quan Xuesen, one of the founders of the JPL. We suspected that he was sharing his knowledge with China, so we exiled him to China, where he became the father of the Chinese missile and space programs.
There's only two forces in this world that produce behavior that fatuous: love and hate. And it comes to China we've got it bad both ways. It's like our relationship with Russia would be if we had a Russian restaurant in every town and we flocked to see movies with Russian action stars.
I don't automatically assume anything Americans do about China makes any sense. We're like a guy who keeps having massive breakups with the same girl but then somehow always end up back with her. China just makes us do crazy shit.
Actually, this reminds me a lot of the way the human brain works, particularly in the area of visual perception, where it processes exceedingly messy data to come up with useful, timely, but not particularly reliable results.
Your "innovative business model" makes no technical or economic sense for the customer.. Once you've paid for the high bandwidth, consistent latency you need for efficient streaming from any video service, your ISP may as well throw in better-than-necessary access to any email service.'
Your scenario only really make sense for customers who like the way old-fashioned cable TV works: choosing your provider and content as a package. If you only wanted Netflix and didn't want YouTube or Hulu, the Netflix-as-ISP model would give you that more cheaply.
But very few people like the way cable TV works. They live with it because their choices are limited.
I've never admined a major customer linux installation myself, but as a developer I've been called into rescue customers who messed up their databases, and let me tell you being able to root through the transaction log and undo mistakes like "delete * from foo where conditionThatIsAlwaysTrue" is a lifesaver. Oracle, which is a company I despise for a number of reasons, does a really good job of that.
The rule for production systems should be "never work without a safety net".
It took me a moment to figure out what you were writing about, then I realized you think that the body of the Earth somehow shields northern countries from the effects of geomagnetic storms. Solar storms don't work that way.
A geomagnetic storm occurs when a mass of charged particles from the Sun interact with the Earth's magnetosphere, which is many times the Earth's diameter. Those particles follow the magnetic lines of force down to the polar areas, (even to the pole that is experiencing winter) where the particles are absorbed by the ionosphere. This current flow generates a magnetic field which in turn creates numerous effects, such as geomagnetically induced currents inpower transmission lines.
There are basically no major inhabited areas as far south as Sweden is north; Stockholm is around 59N latitude; there are no major settlements south of 45S or so excepting a few villages and research stations. So the question should be if Sweden is suffering a geomagnetic storm, why not Russia, Norway, Finland and Russia?
Forgiveness doesn't come into it. The IRS can't simply say, "Oh, we're not going to tax this income but we'll tax that income." In fact it's inaccurate to say the IRS taxes anyone. Congress taxes people, and the IRS simply collects what Congress tells them to.. Your congressman would like you to believe it's the mean old IRS, but it's not; it's him.
Perhaps to sharpen your point: there are two concepts here, one of which is biological and the other of which is social. It doesn't matter how you label each of these concepts, the important question is which is relevant in any particular situation (e.g. which bathroom to use).
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as a someone who's actually developed products that were successful in the market, this is not the right way to think about a technology. A technology has to meet some identifiable group's self-identified needs, not necessarily what everyone needs, or especially not what you think they should need.
At one end of the spectrum there are people who could use a handgun but don't because the danger of having a handgun taken from them and used against them. For example, prison guards. At the other end of the spectrum are people who routinely carry firearms in situations where daily maintenance is a challenge. For example deployed officers in places like Afghanistan.
On either end of the spectrum the smart gun question is easy. But most people who want to carry a gun fall in between those extremes; they have to weigh the probability that they'll actually pull the trigger and get a "click" against the probability that someone other than them will pull the trigger. There's likely no one-size-fits-all answer.
Now there's a marketing problem though, in that people are demonstrably irrational in their weapons choices. I've seen arguments that for personal self defense you need to carry an automatic with an eighteen round magazine, plus a spare magazine, plus a backup gun. I've seen some people claim that one ought to carry at least forty rounds to be adequately protected. This is fantasy, but nobody dares to say so. Statistically when handguns are used in self-defense seldom are more than one or two shots are fired. I think one would be hard pressed to find a single instance where any law-abiding citizen has had to fire more than three or four rounds in self-defense. On top of that if you're a law-abiding citizen your chance of needing to fire even a single shot is comparable to your chances of winning the lottery. Given all that the most practical weapon for most people would be a small to medium caliber double-action revolver -- especially if you buy the "I want to make sure this goes bang in a hurry" argument. In the astronomically unlikely case you need to fire four or five shots, it's less likely to jam. But despite this people choose automatic pistols with high capacity double stack magazines.
What this tells me is the self-defense handgun market is driven by the need to feel safe, not by any statistically defensible notion of what it takes to be safe. It's also clear to me that the feeling of empowerment people get by arming themselves is an important marketing factor too. I have nothing against that, by the way. If it makes you feel safer and more powerful to carry a gun, I don't have a problem with that. But I do have a problem with people carrying if they can't be bothered to inspect their weapon and secure it properly every time they arm themselves.
I did it by being a more virtuous person than everyone else who tried and failed. I'd tell you all about how great I am, but that would take a long time.
Please, please, please tell me there's some dome-headed scientist with a comical speech impediment engaged in an escalating series of attempts to foil the critter.
Well, I think you missed the poster's point about the difference between burning food in a calorimeter and converting it into energy the body can use.
It's true that according to the First Law of Thermodynamics, energy is conserved. But by the Second Law, some of that energy becomes unavailable for work. There is a process called gluconeogenesis in which glucose is created from fats and proteins. Blood glucose is closely regulated by your body; if there's too much it secretes insulin, which causes glucose molecules to be converted into fat. If later on blood glucose falls, gluconeogenesis will create new glucose, in part from fats previously created. But each step in the process of turning glucose into fat and back consumes energy. So even ignoring the calories that pass straight through you because you don't have the digestive equipment to break it down (e.g. cellulose), it's not necessarily true that a 9 calories of excess consumption will result in 1g of fat deposition, or that a nine calorie deficit will mobilize only 1 g of fat. There are losses.
But it's true that as a first approximation we can ignore a lot of this and assume that excess calories simply become fat without any energy loss, because the body is remarkably efficient.
That said, the matter of weight gain and weight loss is difficult for people because the body isn't good at regulating its calorie balance in a situation where you can walk ten feet to a refrigerator and take out a hot pocket with 300 highly refined, easily digestible calories in it. That hot pocket doesn't even register on your body's satiety mechanism in the two minutes it takes to snarf it down, so of course you get another. The food we evolved to eat came into forms. Either you spent hours chasing it down and killing it and it was mostly tough chewing, or you dug it up and it was also tough chewing, as well as being so full of roughage it gave your gut a major workout. Convenience foods are "stealth" foods as far as your body's satiety mechanism is concerned.
When you track everything you eat, you begin to see that the big problem is sugar and refined flour. One of my family's favorite meals is burritos; if I make a burrito with a quarter cup of rice, a quarter cup of beans, a half cup of lettuce, a quarter cup of tomatoes, a quarter cup of grated cheese, and four ounces of chicken, the calories break down this way:
100 rice
147 beans
1 lettuce
8 tomato
105 cheese
300 tortilla
-----
661 total
Almost half the calories come from the tortilla, which while not devoid of nutrition, contributes very little in relation to the large slug of calories it delivers. But most importantly, it's just a wrapper, and it contributes nothing whatsoever to your sensation of satiety. In fact replacing the tortilla with extra large lettuce leaves actually increases the satiation value of the meal because it's trickier and more time consuming to eat. You literally feel equally full while losing almost half the calories. From your body's standpoint it thinks you've eaten just as much, but going by the calorimeter you've eaten much, much less, and in this case the calorimeter has the relevant information.
Yes, what has made Chinese kids fat is capitalism.
No, that's what made American kids fat.
Having lost just shy of over a hundred pounds over the past three years, I have a perspective on "overeating".
The stereotype is some greedy, willpower-less person stuffing his face with mounds of food, but really gorging has very little to do with it. It's a very subtle difference between having calorie intake and output in equilibrium, and gaining or losing weight. In the thirty or so years between when I reached my current height and when I reached my maximum weight, I gained 120 pounds. That works out to nearly exactly 5 grams of weight gain per day -- about the weight of a US nickel. Now some of that weight gain was muscle -- I was active in sports all the way up to the point where I hit my maximum weight. I won't bore you with the calculations, but my lean body weight increased by about 45 pounds while I added 75 pounds of fat. But let's assume all of that was fat. How many calories in excess of equilibrium would you have to eat to gain 5 grams of fat? About 45 calories. In comparison a single slice of dry, white bread has about 75 calories. My "overeating" was the equivalent of an extra half an apple a day, every day for thirty years.
It's very easy to gain weight. You don't have to be a pig to do it. Conversely, I have found it's very easy to lose weight. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think that's the case. I believe anyone can do it, if they understand how their body works. I think the problem is that people believe the body has a kind of wisdom of its own; in my experience that's rubbish. Your body is a machine; a machine built for killing mammoths that's currently spending its days sitting in a chair churning out code. Of course it's not going to work right.
So screw all that "trust your body's wisdom" nonsense. Your body is dumb. It can't keep track of how much it has eaten; your stomach basically has three fullness settings: eat something right away, I could eat a little more, and I'm going to barf I'm so full. The rest of satiety is your dumb reptilian brain at work. Studies show that if you serve yourself cereal out of a larger box, you'll take a larger serving than if you serve yourself cereal out of a small box, and feel equally full either way. Same thing if you eat off a big plate. Smaller plates (and utensils) mean you feel full after eating less. Chewing more makes you think you've eaten more. Because you're an idiot, at least most of you (everything from your cortex down) is. Stop expecting your body to act reasonably. It can't.
Imagine you're in a space capsule. You've been trained to watch a gauge, and to manipulate a lever so that the gauge stays in a certain narrow range because if it goes out of that range the capsule fails. You'd watch that gauge like a hawk because if the capsule fails, you die. That capsule is your body, and if it fails, you die. So what I do is I (a) wear an activity monitor (b) measure/weigh everything that I am about to eat and log it in a calorie counting app religiously, (c) aim to maintain about a 500 calories deficit every day, and (d) weigh myself and take a body fat measurement every day. That's pretty much it. Oh, there's tricks you can play on your reptilian brain to make achieving calorie deficit easier (small plates, big volume/chewy food; getting choosier about what I eat because I don't get to eat without thinking, putting a timer on to pace myself to no more than 25 calories/min). But those things are peripheral. Measurement is central. You can't get the machine to do what you want unless you measure its inputs and outputs. It's best to maintain your intake and output goals separately, by the way -- that is don't automatically up your calorie intake because you've exercised, but if you've burned 5000 calories in a day (as I did recently) you're going to be hungrier than usual.
Now a to why Chinese kids are getting fat, you need evidence to answer a question like that, but if I were to conjecture I'd look at the availability of cheap, tasty, convenience foods engineered to disappear into your bo
It might be some Trump supporter, or it could just be a chaosmonger. Some people will do shit like that because they like to see people get riled up over something they've done.
There's been dirty tricks by "Clinton supporters" against Sanders social media. Likewise utterly meaningless. The truth is that except on-line there's not a lot of difference between Sanders and Clinton supporters, except Sanders supporters tend to be younger. Could be an oddball Clinton supporter, must just as likely it's just a plain oddball.
And speculation != waffling, so we're at least twice removed from direct evidence of Hawking's supposed senility.
In any case what sets Hawking apart isn't infallibility; it's creativity. If you want to be a creative genius you can't worry too much about being wrong, any more than you can be a chess master and worry too much about losing material. It's part of the game.
The school district says it will pay about $18,000 annually for SnapTrends
I guess this is really a great thing since the school district has all that excess money that they can't find a use for.
This is for a school system (orange county) with a budget of over 1.5 billion. And if 1.5 billion sounds excessive for a school system budget, consider that this school system has 190,000 students, so that works out to less than $7900 per student (average for the US is about $12000). That paints a picture of a pretty bare-bones school system, but amortized over the entire student body that $18,000 works out to less than a dime per student, so nobody is losing access to AP courses (or football) over that particular purchase.
Supposing that monitoring student social media use for cyberbullying is a good idea, it seems to me that $18,000 is a bargain compared to paying humans to sift through the postings from all the students in the 18 high schools and 32 middle schools in the district. There may be reasons to object to this, but expense isn't one of them.
Best decision I ever made. My career's basically in the toilet now, but I've spent the past eight years with all the time in the world for my kids when they needed me. The oldest is in college now and the youngest is looking at colleges, so I have more time for myself. In the past year I've lost nearly 100 pounds and reversed the Type 2 diabetes and am well on the way to reversing the arthritis that was starting to cripple me -- using my engineering skills, of course.
Still wish I could get a job doing what I feel like I was born to do, but I was born to do other things too beside being an engineer.
Not without being a mind-reader.
I do know that after a long and very successful career I took two years off to deal with health issues with one of my kids (now happily resolved) and thereafter as an over-50 engineer with an employment gap I was pretty much unemployable.
My experiences in the interviews I got suggest something subtly different than ageism -- at least of the sort that believes older engineers can't do the work. I'd meet with a bunch of people and everyone would seem excited and enthusiastic about my background... except the hiring manager. Whomever I was going to work for would seem distinctly colder, as if they'd decided I wasn't going to get the job before they even met me.
I think what's going on is that people don't like the idea of supervising someone who is older and highly experienced. Maybe they think a more experienced worker would be less cooperative. Or maybe they were afraid we'd be angling for their job. I don't think, given my resume, that anyone believed I couldn't do the work. They just doubted my word that I really wanted the job because of my experience.
Is that ageism?
I think it's very common for more experienced engineers who've reached the point where they've been doing engineering management to want to get back down and dirty, only to be frustrated by the fact that nobody wants you for that kind of work at your age. You hear it a lot -- I enjoyed being a project leader or program manager, it was rewarding and I'm glad I did it, but now I want to get back to the stuff that brought me into the field in the first place. Except once you've taken any kind of senior position nobody wants you for grunt work anymore, even if you've been armpit-deep in engineering on a day-to-day basis.
Is that ageism?
I dunno. But it does suck.
Because the world, when it offers you a choice, only ever offers you two choices, which conveniently will be completely diametrically opposed to each other. That's a boon because all you have to choose is between Good and Evil, never been good and better or bad and worse.
Neither are the vast majority of scientists that denialists like to cite. The difference is that Nye isn't claiming to have knowledge that the vast majority of scholars in the field don't have; he's agreeing with the people who do have the credentials to have an opinion worth citing.
Whenever I sit next to a scientist or scholar at a banquet I always take the opportunity to pick their brains. For example I once sat next to an aero-astro professor so I tried to get him to explain the Bernoulli effect in plain language -- and he almost succeeded. If I don't know anything about the person's field I'll ask him what the one thing he'd like his introductory level students to take away from his class.
So I was sitting next to a sociologists, and since I knew literally nothing about sociology she got the "one thing" question, and her response was that she wanted her students to understand how important it was to what she called "disaggregate the average"; that is when you're looking at an average figure for a population not to assume that it represents everyone, or even anyone in that group. You need to investigate how different subgroups can be very different from the overall group.
Thinking of a lifetime spent in STEM, STEM people can't be reduced to a single stereotype, but you can find support for any of the stereotypes of the science geek. Most science and engineering types are pretty normal socially. But you don't have to be socially normal to succeed in STEM, so there is a distinct minority who are socially impaired. They don't deal well with other people as people, but are more comfortable dealing with them as abstractions. And those are the kind of people who become fanatics -- aided by the fact that they're used to being right when most of the people around them are wrong, they're persuadable to almost anything because they are impervious to self-doubt.
All monopolies require state protection.
...Never heard of Standard Oil I take it? Or U.S. Steel?
Reading the article, it would seem that the system cannot be "scaled up" -- at least in terms of the acceleration produced. Thrust I suppose be scaled up arbitrarily, but not the geometry of the device would have to become larger as the amount of acceleration becomes larger.
I always assumed it was some crab's rangoons.
Except there's been a long history of bogus espionage cases against Chinese scientists, going all the way back to Quan Xuesen, one of the founders of the JPL. We suspected that he was sharing his knowledge with China, so we exiled him to China, where he became the father of the Chinese missile and space programs.
There's only two forces in this world that produce behavior that fatuous: love and hate. And it comes to China we've got it bad both ways. It's like our relationship with Russia would be if we had a Russian restaurant in every town and we flocked to see movies with Russian action stars.
I don't automatically assume anything Americans do about China makes any sense. We're like a guy who keeps having massive breakups with the same girl but then somehow always end up back with her. China just makes us do crazy shit.
Actually, this reminds me a lot of the way the human brain works, particularly in the area of visual perception, where it processes exceedingly messy data to come up with useful, timely, but not particularly reliable results.
From an accounting standpoint it is income. It's not cash coming in, but it's an increase in net worth, which is technically what income is.
Your "innovative business model" makes no technical or economic sense for the customer.. Once you've paid for the high bandwidth, consistent latency you need for efficient streaming from any video service, your ISP may as well throw in better-than-necessary access to any email service.'
Your scenario only really make sense for customers who like the way old-fashioned cable TV works: choosing your provider and content as a package. If you only wanted Netflix and didn't want YouTube or Hulu, the Netflix-as-ISP model would give you that more cheaply.
But very few people like the way cable TV works. They live with it because their choices are limited.
Four words: filesystem with automatic snapshots.
I've never admined a major customer linux installation myself, but as a developer I've been called into rescue customers who messed up their databases, and let me tell you being able to root through the transaction log and undo mistakes like "delete * from foo where conditionThatIsAlwaysTrue" is a lifesaver. Oracle, which is a company I despise for a number of reasons, does a really good job of that.
The rule for production systems should be "never work without a safety net".
It took me a moment to figure out what you were writing about, then I realized you think that the body of the Earth somehow shields northern countries from the effects of geomagnetic storms. Solar storms don't work that way.
A geomagnetic storm occurs when a mass of charged particles from the Sun interact with the Earth's magnetosphere, which is many times the Earth's diameter. Those particles follow the magnetic lines of force down to the polar areas, (even to the pole that is experiencing winter) where the particles are absorbed by the ionosphere. This current flow generates a magnetic field which in turn creates numerous effects, such as geomagnetically induced currents inpower transmission lines.
There are basically no major inhabited areas as far south as Sweden is north; Stockholm is around 59N latitude; there are no major settlements south of 45S or so excepting a few villages and research stations. So the question should be if Sweden is suffering a geomagnetic storm, why not Russia, Norway, Finland and Russia?
And the IRS is not so forgiving.
Forgiveness doesn't come into it. The IRS can't simply say, "Oh, we're not going to tax this income but we'll tax that income." In fact it's inaccurate to say the IRS taxes anyone. Congress taxes people, and the IRS simply collects what Congress tells them to.. Your congressman would like you to believe it's the mean old IRS, but it's not; it's him.
Perhaps to sharpen your point: there are two concepts here, one of which is biological and the other of which is social. It doesn't matter how you label each of these concepts, the important question is which is relevant in any particular situation (e.g. which bathroom to use).