True. If Elon Musk is a moron who wants to flush any credibility he has with his existing customers hyping that as if it were a revolutionary improvement.
Which I have to say is par for the course in the US automotive industry. I guess we'll find out whether Musk has lost his grip when the actual announcement comes out.
At least it doesn't act like it does. For example, it is notoriously unwilling to allow us have our cake and eat it too.
In this case Nature doesn't permit our language to have both unlimited adaptability and unlimited stability. A language moves with the mass of people who employ it every day, adapting to changes of mores, media, and needs without need of some kind of central coordinating authority. Which is near miraculous if you think about it. The downside is you need an interpreter to follow Shakespeare's dialog.
The trade-off for having effortlessly adaptable, good-enough communication is that at no point in time is it perfectly satisfactory. It is understandably galling to someone who prides himself on his mastery of a language to have that language re-made by the largely ignorant masses. But that ideal language of his (usually) school days is itself the handiwork of generations of largely ignorant masses, who while typically hopeless at precision of expression are nonetheless geniuses at linguistic adaptation.
"Prescriptivists" are fighting a pointless battle, because their objective (preserving the language as they learned it) simply isn't possible. The best guides to optimal written usage are style manuals crafted by people who in the practical business of editing written communication. These are like taking a moving average of the chaos of recent language changes.
In the end we all have to accept that whatever our favorite edition of our language is, it will eventually make us sound like old fogies to younger people (some of us managed that while still in our teens), and like foreigners to future generations.
I looked into this when it came time to decide whether to circumcise my son. There are certain medical conditions which are treated by adult circumcision, and according to the literature there doesn't seem to be any patient reported impact on function other than a slightly higher propensity for premature ejaculation.
Despite claims on both sides I found no conclusive evidence of benefit either way, so I decided not to on the theory it's easier as an adult to get circumcised than it is to get un-circumcised.
I have a younger relative who, in addition to be an anti-vaxxer, is an "intactivist". While I agree with her that circumcision shouldn't be done on children except for compelling medical reasons, I strongly disapprove the hysterical, one-sided tone of the intactivist movement, which I think has potential to harm the body image of circumcised children who grow up with it.
empowers data mining companies to track and correlate your cash purchases with your credit card purchases.
At least of I were CTO of a company developing something like this I'd be talking with one of those big consumer data aggregators that has everyone's data but almost nobody has ever heard of. Which is why I'd never work on something like this. I wouldn't want the conflict between public responsibility and duty to the shareholders.
The notion that "science is getting things increasingly wrong" is so misguided, it's not even wrong. Let me illustrate what I mean when I say "science is defensible belief" with a parable.
Suppose God knows that X is true. At first Alice doesn't believe X but Bob does. Later on she changes her mind to agree with Bob (and God) that X is true. Then they both die and are brought before the throne of God to prove they've been good scientists.
"I am a good scientist," Bob says, "Because I got to God's truth before anyone else."
"I am a good scientist," Alice says, "Because I believed whatever was best supported by the balance of evidence."
Then God says, "Alice has better scientific judgment, but you're both going to hell because you didn't publish."
illustrates the Dunning-Kruger effect on a planetary scale.
It's easy to get engineers and people with a largely physical science background to get optimistic about terraforming because in the broadest possible sense a biosphere is just nature converting sunshine into entropy. So simple, it happens on its own.
When you can get a soil ecologist optimistic about terraforming, then you'll be close.
I think it's ironic that you don't see that the point is wind and solar aren't really related either. They fill different niches and so there's no competition in which wind can "kick solar's ass". That's a totally nonsensical statement.
Look here. A KWh from a big wind turbine cost half as much as one from a photovoltaic panel. But that doesn't mean anything because you put solar in places where you can't put wind.
When you're considering putting a solar array on your roof, you don't say, "Well, the 300 foot tall wind turbine I can't put here would generate twice the ROI so I guess to hell with that solar array." You look at the cost and financial return of the solar array as if wind turbines didn't exist, because for purposes of your decision they might as well not.
This is in fact one of the possible outcomes, although not necessarily by design. Since the environmental resources represented by "E" are not unlimited, and the level of consumption represented by "S" is not indefinitely reducible, without improved technology at some point the growth of P is curbed -- by death of people who can't extract enough resources from the environment to survive.
Where
E = Environmental impact
P = Population
S = Standard of living
T = Technology
I was at a symposium some twenty years ago when I saw a well known environmentalist write that on the board. He wasn't being literal mind you; this equation was a metaphor for how these factors interact.
The world's population is increasing, and already many people are living in dire poverty. We naturally want to raise their standard of living, but that will raise their level of consumption which combined with their growing numbers could have devastating environmental consequences. Fortunately raising the living standards of people tends to reduce the number of children they have, so we have something of a lucky break there, but populations are still likely to grow under any development scenario.
The message was this: if we want to preserve the environment AND raise living standards, we have to get our asses in gear on green technology.
Now I think it's premature to declare success based on preliminary data about one year; the "win" could disappear with the discovery of a few accounting errors. But I think there's no question technology has got greener and that helps.
In case you haven't notice, photovolatics is taking off too. So saying "wind is kicking solar's ass" is like sitting around in 1930 and saying "radio is kicking the automobile's ass".
And in many instances photovoltaics and wind occupy niches where the other would be impractical. Naturally if you had a piece of real estate where you had plenty of wind and plenty of sunshine and no other constraints, you'd go with wind. But if that were the roof of your suburban house, you'd probably go with solar panels.
If you eliminated police entirely, reports of crime would *certainly* go down. If police simply stopped responding to calls, reports of crime would certainly go down.
This is my problem with concluding that choppers deter crime from police crime statistics; while it seems plausible, "reports of crime" are just an approximate proxy for "incidence of crime". Gaming this has been an unfortunate consequence of "data driven" approaches to policing (see Campell's Law).
Which is not to say that helicopters don't deter crime. It seems perfectly plausible. But it's also possible they cause crime to move elsewhere, timeshift,or take forms which are harder to spot.
This gets to how you use data effectively for anything. When something in the data jumps out at you, it's tempting to believe your initial interpretation of it because it's so compellingly satisfying. But what you really need to do is *test* that interpretation, beat on it as hard as you can. If it can stand up to that you really have something. There's a world of difference between "promising" and "conclusive".
I had a Toshiba laptop where none of the built-in devices like sound or network worked if you booted with ACPI on. It turned out the fix was to fool the bios into thinking it was running Windows by editing the DSDT code. The firmware on this machine actually shut off all the peripherals if it thought it was running some version of Linux.
I've always been mystified as to why Toshiba's engineers did this. And even having that capability in ACPI seems architecturally suspect. I can't see any legitimate reason for the machine's firmware to second guess what to do based on which OS is running on it.
He was a satirist, a master of a fine and under-appreciated art.
Satire in the hands of a master isn't mere travesty. Great satirists traffic in insight, in what is familiar yet goes unnoticed. Travesty makes you laugh at other people, but great satire makes us laugh at ourselves.
And nobody laughs at a joke they don't understand.
Thanks for the tip. I've seen Soviet era Vostoks on ebay and have definitely been tempted. I have to be discreet though because my wife already thinks I'm crazy.
Well, I can certainly see surfing, although you do have to factor in that you're probably not going to lose much sleep over a $15 watch. There are 200m rated watches for under $30, but I'm not a big fan of the G shock look. But for someone who liked the big plastic aesthetic it'd be a good choice.
I also believe water resistance ratings of mid-range sport watches are exaggerated. I got into cheap watches after I had a $100 "dive" watch fog up on me after swimming laps. Now I swim with $15 watch rated to 50m that has never given me any problem, but if it did I'd chuck it out satisfied with the service it's already given me.
I would be shocked if you were under 50 and you'd ever seen anyone diving with a "dive" watch. They were standard equipment in the 50's through 70's and were popularized by the James Bond movies, which probably sold more Rolex Submariners than there divers in the world.
To this day most sub $30 "dive" watches have unidirectional crowns, even though nobody in his right mind would trust his life to one. One of the things I like about the Casio MRW200H-7EV is that it has a smooth bi-directional friction mechanism rather than a cheap ratchet. I find the bezel quite handy.
Nice choice on the Movado. They make the kind of watches I'd wear if I were into $300+ watches rather than $30-.
Why would you debate over getting a $10 watch? Nice choices, by the way. You obvious get what I'm talking about with the cheap aesthetic. To get a "good" watch that elegant you might end up sending over $100.
I once had a $100 (nominallly $300) "dive" watch that was rated for 200m fog up after I wore it swimming laps. It was only two years old. I'm reasonably certain that the problem was that they skipped greasing the seals at the factory.
Restoring a "dive" watch's waterproofing isn't hard, and you don't need any expensive special tools aside from a case opener. What's hard is testing the waterproofing after. It's just about the simplest watch repair you can do, but the reason repair shops charge so much is that they're going to have to buy you a new watch if the seal fails.
So this is a pretty good DIY repair if you're into that sort of thing. You can find the instructions on the Internet. Testing your work involves assembling the movement without the works and putting it in a pressure chamber, which you won't have, so you'll have to wear it and hope for the best. You could I suppose find a deep enough body of water and lower the case down on some fishing line.
I'm actually something of a watch nut; but collecting expensive watches is... expensive. I collect *cheap* watches, which is in its way just as interesting. There's still that interplay between expense, features and design, but the constraining factor is low cost.
I actually think that in terms of pragmatic qualities, watches become worse as the price climbs from $30 to $100. Why? Because watches accrete features that undermine their ergonomics or have little practical value. Take water resistance. What you want in a cheap watch is 50m or 100m, which are adequate for any practical purpose. Above that you're paying for fantasy value. Watches rated at 200m and above might as well claim a gazillion meters; you'll never be the wiser.
Also as price rises, dials become more cluttered with features and design elements that actually make them harder to read. Nobody needs a second redundant hour subdial, it's only there to look expensive. And then you go from cheap and every accurate to expensive and quite a bit less accurate mechanical movements. It's a bit like paying to watch a circus act where dogs walk on their hind legs; the whole point of the act is that it's ridiculously hard.
My favorite watch is a $16 quartz analog day/date Casio "dive" style watch with a rotating bezel and day date at 3:00. The watch face is based on Rolex's classic submariner watch, which costs $10,000 and keeps worse time. Of course the submariner is a much more elegant watch, but it is in no sense any more practical. My next favorite watch is another Casio, the digital F-91W ($9), which happens to be Al Qaeda's standard issue training camp watch. They also use it for bomb detonators. It's cheap, accurate and simple and has a elegantly straightforward design -- something you get only on very cheap or very expensive watches.
I also own a Pebble, which is in my view ugly as sin and quickly developed a screen tearing problem. But in terms of combining timekeeping and notifications it'd be hard to improve upon functionally. As for the phone in my pocket I'd be less worried about it than my leg in a mishap that might break it.
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This good be big with Americans, depending on what kind of guns they'll let us use.
True. If Elon Musk is a moron who wants to flush any credibility he has with his existing customers hyping that as if it were a revolutionary improvement.
Which I have to say is par for the course in the US automotive industry. I guess we'll find out whether Musk has lost his grip when the actual announcement comes out.
At least it doesn't act like it does. For example, it is notoriously unwilling to allow us have our cake and eat it too.
In this case Nature doesn't permit our language to have both unlimited adaptability and unlimited stability. A language moves with the mass of people who employ it every day, adapting to changes of mores, media, and needs without need of some kind of central coordinating authority. Which is near miraculous if you think about it. The downside is you need an interpreter to follow Shakespeare's dialog.
The trade-off for having effortlessly adaptable, good-enough communication is that at no point in time is it perfectly satisfactory. It is understandably galling to someone who prides himself on his mastery of a language to have that language re-made by the largely ignorant masses. But that ideal language of his (usually) school days is itself the handiwork of generations of largely ignorant masses, who while typically hopeless at precision of expression are nonetheless geniuses at linguistic adaptation.
"Prescriptivists" are fighting a pointless battle, because their objective (preserving the language as they learned it) simply isn't possible. The best guides to optimal written usage are style manuals crafted by people who in the practical business of editing written communication. These are like taking a moving average of the chaos of recent language changes.
In the end we all have to accept that whatever our favorite edition of our language is, it will eventually make us sound like old fogies to younger people (some of us managed that while still in our teens), and like foreigners to future generations.
Agreed. And I'll be celebrating Pi Day on July 22.
I looked into this when it came time to decide whether to circumcise my son. There are certain medical conditions which are treated by adult circumcision, and according to the literature there doesn't seem to be any patient reported impact on function other than a slightly higher propensity for premature ejaculation.
Despite claims on both sides I found no conclusive evidence of benefit either way, so I decided not to on the theory it's easier as an adult to get circumcised than it is to get un-circumcised.
I have a younger relative who, in addition to be an anti-vaxxer, is an "intactivist". While I agree with her that circumcision shouldn't be done on children except for compelling medical reasons, I strongly disapprove the hysterical, one-sided tone of the intactivist movement, which I think has potential to harm the body image of circumcised children who grow up with it.
empowers data mining companies to track and correlate your cash purchases with your credit card purchases.
At least of I were CTO of a company developing something like this I'd be talking with one of those big consumer data aggregators that has everyone's data but almost nobody has ever heard of. Which is why I'd never work on something like this. I wouldn't want the conflict between public responsibility and duty to the shareholders.
The notion that "science is getting things increasingly wrong" is so misguided, it's not even wrong. Let me illustrate what I mean when I say "science is defensible belief" with a parable.
Suppose God knows that X is true. At first Alice doesn't believe X but Bob does. Later on she changes her mind to agree with Bob (and God) that X is true. Then they both die and are brought before the throne of God to prove they've been good scientists.
"I am a good scientist," Bob says, "Because I got to God's truth before anyone else."
"I am a good scientist," Alice says, "Because I believed whatever was best supported by the balance of evidence."
Then God says, "Alice has better scientific judgment, but you're both going to hell because you didn't publish."
illustrates the Dunning-Kruger effect on a planetary scale.
It's easy to get engineers and people with a largely physical science background to get optimistic about terraforming because in the broadest possible sense a biosphere is just nature converting sunshine into entropy. So simple, it happens on its own.
When you can get a soil ecologist optimistic about terraforming, then you'll be close.
is indistinguishable from Star Trek technobabble, apparently.
"I've noticed several incidents of this happening" doesn't constitute a trend.
And science isn't immutable truth. It's defensible belief.
I think it's ironic that you don't see that the point is wind and solar aren't really related either. They fill different niches and so there's no competition in which wind can "kick solar's ass". That's a totally nonsensical statement.
Look here. A KWh from a big wind turbine cost half as much as one from a photovoltaic panel. But that doesn't mean anything because you put solar in places where you can't put wind.
When you're considering putting a solar array on your roof, you don't say, "Well, the 300 foot tall wind turbine I can't put here would generate twice the ROI so I guess to hell with that solar array." You look at the cost and financial return of the solar array as if wind turbines didn't exist, because for purposes of your decision they might as well not.
This is in fact one of the possible outcomes, although not necessarily by design. Since the environmental resources represented by "E" are not unlimited, and the level of consumption represented by "S" is not indefinitely reducible, without improved technology at some point the growth of P is curbed -- by death of people who can't extract enough resources from the environment to survive.
Did you just pick two unrelated things at random?
Irony is not your strong suit, I take it?
Where
E = Environmental impact
P = Population
S = Standard of living
T = Technology
I was at a symposium some twenty years ago when I saw a well known environmentalist write that on the board. He wasn't being literal mind you; this equation was a metaphor for how these factors interact.
The world's population is increasing, and already many people are living in dire poverty. We naturally want to raise their standard of living, but that will raise their level of consumption which combined with their growing numbers could have devastating environmental consequences. Fortunately raising the living standards of people tends to reduce the number of children they have, so we have something of a lucky break there, but populations are still likely to grow under any development scenario.
The message was this: if we want to preserve the environment AND raise living standards, we have to get our asses in gear on green technology.
Now I think it's premature to declare success based on preliminary data about one year; the "win" could disappear with the discovery of a few accounting errors. But I think there's no question technology has got greener and that helps.
In case you haven't notice, photovolatics is taking off too. So saying "wind is kicking solar's ass" is like sitting around in 1930 and saying "radio is kicking the automobile's ass".
And in many instances photovoltaics and wind occupy niches where the other would be impractical. Naturally if you had a piece of real estate where you had plenty of wind and plenty of sunshine and no other constraints, you'd go with wind. But if that were the roof of your suburban house, you'd probably go with solar panels.
If you eliminated police entirely, reports of crime would *certainly* go down. If police simply stopped responding to calls, reports of crime would certainly go down.
This is my problem with concluding that choppers deter crime from police crime statistics; while it seems plausible, "reports of crime" are just an approximate proxy for "incidence of crime". Gaming this has been an unfortunate consequence of "data driven" approaches to policing (see Campell's Law).
Which is not to say that helicopters don't deter crime. It seems perfectly plausible. But it's also possible they cause crime to move elsewhere, timeshift ,or take forms which are harder to spot.
This gets to how you use data effectively for anything. When something in the data jumps out at you, it's tempting to believe your initial interpretation of it because it's so compellingly satisfying. But what you really need to do is *test* that interpretation, beat on it as hard as you can. If it can stand up to that you really have something. There's a world of difference between "promising" and "conclusive".
I had a Toshiba laptop where none of the built-in devices like sound or network worked if you booted with ACPI on. It turned out the fix was to fool the bios into thinking it was running Windows by editing the DSDT code. The firmware on this machine actually shut off all the peripherals if it thought it was running some version of Linux.
I've always been mystified as to why Toshiba's engineers did this. And even having that capability in ACPI seems architecturally suspect. I can't see any legitimate reason for the machine's firmware to second guess what to do based on which OS is running on it.
He was a satirist, a master of a fine and under-appreciated art.
Satire in the hands of a master isn't mere travesty. Great satirists traffic in insight, in what is familiar yet goes unnoticed. Travesty makes you laugh at other people, but great satire makes us laugh at ourselves.
And nobody laughs at a joke they don't understand.
Thanks for the tip. I've seen Soviet era Vostoks on ebay and have definitely been tempted. I have to be discreet though because my wife already thinks I'm crazy.
Well, I can certainly see surfing, although you do have to factor in that you're probably not going to lose much sleep over a $15 watch. There are 200m rated watches for under $30, but I'm not a big fan of the G shock look. But for someone who liked the big plastic aesthetic it'd be a good choice.
I also believe water resistance ratings of mid-range sport watches are exaggerated. I got into cheap watches after I had a $100 "dive" watch fog up on me after swimming laps. Now I swim with $15 watch rated to 50m that has never given me any problem, but if it did I'd chuck it out satisfied with the service it's already given me.
I would be shocked if you were under 50 and you'd ever seen anyone diving with a "dive" watch. They were standard equipment in the 50's through 70's and were popularized by the James Bond movies, which probably sold more Rolex Submariners than there divers in the world.
To this day most sub $30 "dive" watches have unidirectional crowns, even though nobody in his right mind would trust his life to one. One of the things I like about the Casio MRW200H-7EV is that it has a smooth bi-directional friction mechanism rather than a cheap ratchet. I find the bezel quite handy.
Nice choice on the Movado. They make the kind of watches I'd wear if I were into $300+ watches rather than $30-.
Why would you debate over getting a $10 watch? Nice choices, by the way. You obvious get what I'm talking about with the cheap aesthetic. To get a "good" watch that elegant you might end up sending over $100.
I once had a $100 (nominallly $300) "dive" watch that was rated for 200m fog up after I wore it swimming laps. It was only two years old. I'm reasonably certain that the problem was that they skipped greasing the seals at the factory.
Restoring a "dive" watch's waterproofing isn't hard, and you don't need any expensive special tools aside from a case opener. What's hard is testing the waterproofing after. It's just about the simplest watch repair you can do, but the reason repair shops charge so much is that they're going to have to buy you a new watch if the seal fails.
So this is a pretty good DIY repair if you're into that sort of thing. You can find the instructions on the Internet. Testing your work involves assembling the movement without the works and putting it in a pressure chamber, which you won't have, so you'll have to wear it and hope for the best. You could I suppose find a deep enough body of water and lower the case down on some fishing line.
I'm actually something of a watch nut; but collecting expensive watches is ... expensive. I collect *cheap* watches, which is in its way just as interesting. There's still that interplay between expense, features and design, but the constraining factor is low cost.
I actually think that in terms of pragmatic qualities, watches become worse as the price climbs from $30 to $100. Why? Because watches accrete features that undermine their ergonomics or have little practical value. Take water resistance. What you want in a cheap watch is 50m or 100m, which are adequate for any practical purpose. Above that you're paying for fantasy value. Watches rated at 200m and above might as well claim a gazillion meters; you'll never be the wiser.
Also as price rises, dials become more cluttered with features and design elements that actually make them harder to read. Nobody needs a second redundant hour subdial, it's only there to look expensive. And then you go from cheap and every accurate to expensive and quite a bit less accurate mechanical movements. It's a bit like paying to watch a circus act where dogs walk on their hind legs; the whole point of the act is that it's ridiculously hard.
My favorite watch is a $16 quartz analog day/date Casio "dive" style watch with a rotating bezel and day date at 3:00. The watch face is based on Rolex's classic submariner watch, which costs $10,000 and keeps worse time. Of course the submariner is a much more elegant watch, but it is in no sense any more practical. My next favorite watch is another Casio, the digital F-91W ($9), which happens to be Al Qaeda's standard issue training camp watch. They also use it for bomb detonators. It's cheap, accurate and simple and has a elegantly straightforward design -- something you get only on very cheap or very expensive watches.
I also own a Pebble, which is in my view ugly as sin and quickly developed a screen tearing problem. But in terms of combining timekeeping and notifications it'd be hard to improve upon functionally. As for the phone in my pocket I'd be less worried about it than my leg in a mishap that might break it.
Junis has something to upgrade to.