A few years ago I spent some time studying ontology technologies. In a nutshell ontology is a branch of philosophy having to do with "being" and existence, but in an information technology context it refers to models of reality that are built around taxonomic models (e.g. statements like "security problems" are a kind of "software bug"). This has most obvious applications in object oriented class hierarchies, but taxonomic models are also a big part of database design and also implicitly arise in the design of data interchange formats.
Here's what I took away from my dive into the intersection of metaphysics and software engineering: taxonomic models are only valid within a specific domain of application. Even if you intend to model objective reality, you end up modeling just the parts you work with.
This is a perfect example. Torvalds is effectively saying while some security problems may not be bugs, but for practical purposes nearly all of them are. Clearly this is true for him, so true that he literally doesn't know how to work with people concerned with non-bug security problems. What he is saying has really more to do with what he does on a day to day basis, rather than about the overall field of security. In that field you also have to deal with issues like trust delegation, agency, physical security and and social engineering. Clearly Torvalds must know these things exist, but for him they might as well not.
People are very seldom concerned with some kind of universal model of capital T Truth; they're almost always concerned with creating models that help them get their job done. This is inevitable, and it creates problems when you try to glue data from different sources together. The unnecessary problems that arise come from people who don't accept that their useful domain-specific models don't describe all of objective reality.
While it's helpful for a number of reasons to plant trees, note that humans put about 40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's a lot of trees -- equivalent to growing 30,000 Giant Sequoias from seed to maturity in one year, every single year.
A mature 100 acre woodland captures enough carbon annually to offset seven automobiles driven an average amount.
So while trees help for many reasons like flood and erosion control, and can be part of a strategy to reduce fossil fuel emissions (e.g. by cooling cities), they're not really a attractive climate engineering option for bulk removal of CO2. Fertilizing the ocean to increase phytoplankton production is more easily scalable, but has potentially devastating side effects.
Old it may be, but to this day a number of reactors similar to the GE model that melted down continue to be run around the world and in the US. In fact there's one not far from where I live: the Pilgrim Nuclear Power station has the same GE BWR-3 with Mark 1 containment as Fukushima Daichi 1.
Chernobyl's vintage is neither here nor there; it is an entirely different Soviet design in a completely different design lineage.
But where both Fukushima and Chernobyl are relevant is the role that managerial misconduct and operational error played in the disaster. It is not the technology of early reactors that concerns me so much as the capacity of organizations to run such things responsibly.
First, I don't bother with bad, or even mediocre pizza. At 272 calories/slice for plain jane cheese it'd damn well better be awesome pizza. Second, I plan ahead by reducing my calorie intake in the run up to my splurge. Here's a secret from the ancient Greek philosphers known as the stoics: a little self-denial makes things taste better. If you've been fasting, plain bread is delicious. Pizza eaten after a fast is indescribable.
Call this sensory hacking if you will. Get a small, very good pizza, and eat it slowly and mindfully in a semi-fasted state, along with a nutrient dense side dish like a salad (no dressing -- you don't want flavor clash here you just want to space the pizza out with something less intense and it may as well be good for you). I guarantee you'll get more enjoyment that you would mindlessly scarfing down an extra large from a pizza chain.
People have a deeply held belief that they can measure portions with their eyeballs
That's one of actually two important misconceptions. The other is that stomach fullness is reliable measure of how much you've eaten. Your belly only has three feedback settings: feed me now, you could eat a bit more, and if you eat more you're going to get sick.
Recent research suggests that it's the amount of time you spend eating, and the amount of chewing you do that affects perceptions of how much you've eaten. I've confirmed this myself. Eating slower and chewing more definitely creates the subjective impression of having eaten more for any given size portion. The flip side of this is that so many processed foods which are easy to eat quickly bypass your primary satiety mechanisms.
On the eyeballing portion size, there's a lab at Cornell that does consumer behavior research that has studied this, and they've come up with a number of interesting results about how people estimate portion size. One is that the size of the plate has a big impact on how much you think you're eating; the same serving on a small plate gives the impression that you've eaten more. If they pour a serving from a large cereal box, it'll be larger than a serving they pour from a small one. If you give them a small box of stale popcorn, they'll eat a little of it then complain. If you give them a large box of stale pop corn, they'll eat a lot then complain.
As I say elsewhere, the *best* place to start if you want to change your lifestyle is accepting what you are like now. If you feel bad about how much you weigh, you'll avoid weighing yourself.
In order to gain control over anything you have to measure it. If you have strong emotional reactions to the results of a measurement, that will skew your measurements or make you avoid measuring at all.
Depends on where the clams were harvested. In the US states regulate shellfishing; in my state (where the clams were harvested), shellfish beds are mapped and classified; some are entirely prohibited, others are entirely permitted, and some (where fecal-oral route pathogens in the water are a concern) require treatment in a depuration plant.
Small amounts of bioaccumulating toxins like metals aren't any reason to avoid an occasional shellfish feast here, although you might not want to eat them every day. I might avoid shellfish altogether when visiting China with its poor environmental practices and lax health regulation enforcement.
The biggest concern with occasional fried clam is exposure to rancid fat -- because that's something you can be continually exposed to in many places if you habitually eat fried food from not-very-good restaurants.
I have no problem with GMO grains, but I consume grains overall in moderation because they pack a large calorie wallop for their limited nutrient payload. That makes it hard to incorporate large amount of grain (GMO or not) into a calorie limited nutrient complete diet. As for health advice, I stick to information in peer-reviewed literature review papers in high impact factor journals, plus common sense.
I agree with most of what you're saying here. Notice also I qualified "hypertension": mild hypertension. And of course everyone's different. But a lot of the time people are less different than they think; they're just rationalizing their habits. People would rather think of themselves as special than as unsuccessful.
The power of lifestyle change is greatly underestimated, because so many people find it difficult. Certainly if you can't control your borderline hypertension with lifestyle change you *should* use medications, particularly if you have other complications like diabetes. But healtheir something everyone with this kind of problem should attempt, with or without medication.
The trouble for many people is that the impetus for change comes from dissatisfaction with themselves, and that dissatisfaction undermines their efforts. They are afraid to weigh themselves because they see weight gain (which happens even in the course of dramatic weight loss) as failure, and a sign that they're weak, bad people. I actually think you set yourself up better for success if you can accept yourself as you are now, and focus on the things you will gain.
Modern medicine isn't just going to keep you alive for another year; it's going to keep you alive for decades in bad health.
By the way I don't deny myself anything. I do everything in moderation -- even moderation. Yesterday I went out to a fried clam shack and ate 4000 calories worth of fried clams in one sitting. But my average calorie intake for the week is still under 2000, because I planned for my fried seafood bender accordingly.
Controlling mild hypertension with prescriptions is a choice. You *can* do it with lifestyle changes.
I did it; I dropped my blood pressure from 128/86 to 105/60, without medication, through diet and exercise. It's not that hard, but the reason I succeeded where many like me fail is that as a geek measuring, tracking and evaluating data comes naturally to me. Measure everything; weigh your food, log it, analyze the results. If you try to obtain 100% of all your required nutrients without supplementation and within a wight maintenance level of calorie intake you're automatically forced to eat healthy.
Eating healthy and exercise in moderation will turn most borderline cases of hypertension around, but it takes some discipline.
Why did I bother? Becuase the consequences of hypertension really really suck. It's a disease with no symptoms but horrible complications. Think of all the things you consider as part of "aging" -- physical frailty, loss of memory and in some cases thinking ability. A lot of this isn't a result of the unavoidable genetics of aging; they're the result of things like heart attacks, strokes, and vascular dementia all of which are consequences of high blood pressure.
I thought the whole point that these trucks are significantly cheaper per mile to operate -- 22% less per mile, according to Tesla's predictions.
If Tesla can actually deliver (and tha'ts a big if!) on a truck that is that much cheaper to run, the economics are a straightforward NPV calculation over the projected lifetime of the truck against the purchase price. And as usual as an individual investor your investment decisions depend on a lot of other things, like cash on hand and opportunity costs.
There are some areas where a truck like this, if it doesn't cost too much more than diesel, is a no brainer. A lot of the goods that come into the port of Los Angeles are trucked to warehouses surrounding LA, and then trucked to stores throughout the area. Round trips are easily within the promised range.
There are also routes in which the promised torque will make a significant reduction in transit time, say from Sacramento to Reno - about 130 miles each way over the Sierra Mountains over Route 80, which boasts a 30 mile stretch with a 3-6% grade.
It's not like there's only "rape" and "innocent flirting" and nothing in between. There's a lot of ground in between those, and many lines to be crossed. While there certainly is the potential for a witch hunt, I think it's good to talk about those lines and where they should be drawn.
Unfortunately there's no way of doing that without inviting at least some public hysteria.
One thing I think it's absolutely vital to talk about isn't just the behavior of people like Harvey Weinstein; it's all the people around him, men and women, who enabled him. The scale of his actions was only possible because of an army of people who decided to enable it to get worse because letting him assault, rape and extort was good for their careers. In a way I think those people are morally worse; at least no better. It's one very bad thing to have no control over your impulses, it's another thing to make such a callous calculation with the lives of so many.
I suspect our problem isn't an obsession with sex; it's reverence for power.
You should never take what a liar says at face value. He wasn't talking about friendship; he was talking about using his enormous power to ruin careers, which in fact he did.
So, in other words, a person should not be able to try to hook up or date anyone below their "strata"?
Depending on your definition of "'hook up" and "strata" the answer can be yes. For example, if by "hook up" you mean engage in consensual sex, and the strata occupied are "legal juvenile" and "legal adult", the answer is yes. If by "hook up" you mean "engage in some non-consensual sex act" then the answer is "yes" regardless of strata. If by "hook up" you mean "surprise a woman by showing her your dick" the answer is "yes".
People act as if this stuff is incomprehensible. It's not. For the most part it's not even complicated. Rape is wrong. Assault is wrong. Extortion to cover up those things is wrong.
What gets a little complicated is that behavior runs along a spectrum : perfectly polite, rude, legal but scumbaggy, misdemeanor assault, sexual battery, and rape. Often placing a particular act the correct side of a particular line can be tricky. For example it's not clear whether the Al Franken incident is legal but scumbaggy or misdemeanor assault. What Harvey Weinstein did rand along the line between sexual battery and rape, compounded with extortion and tortious interference.
Somehow you have a mistaken perception of what Weinstein did. He didn't say, "would you engage in this sexual act in return for a part in this movie," he used deception, surprise, and in some cases force. Technically what he did wasn't solicitation, it ran from assault to rape.
Now as for "whores not being victims", that may be true in Amsterdam where it takes place under the watchful eye of the police and many of the prostitutes are unionized, but if you're frequenting prostitutes here in the US there's a good chance that they are under the violently coercive control of a pimp. For young non-American prostitutes there is a good chance that they are the victims of human trafficking.
It's like trying to be "creative". If you set out to do something creative, you end up posturing, which is pretending to be creative. Real creativity comes when you set out to do something that's a little beyond what you're comfortable with.
Focus is what allows you to achieve agility. If you just try to be "agile" you end up rushing, which is pretending to be agile.
How would we *know* whether the AI is better than humans? How do you *know* the AI's false positive and false negative rate without some kind of oracle to compare the result to? Can an AI algorithm somehow outperform the human-made classifications it is trained on, and if it appears to do so should we trust that result?
I'm not doing the usual Slashdot thing of assuming that experts are too dumb to see the objections that immediately occurred to me; I just think that people take a headline like above for granted when you can't really even understand what it is saying without a lot more information.
I don't think you understand how Agile is supposed to work, not that you'd apply it to something like an OS. But the underlying principle still applies: focus. Focus really is the secret sauce, agility is almost a side effect.
The US has had a hypersonic weapon program for years -- called Prompt Global Strike. The idea wouldn't necessarily be to fly all the way around the world in the atmosphere; there are several delivery modes envisioned, one of which is to launch the vehicle on an ICBM; it would then re-enter the atmosphere in controlled, hypersonic flight, evading any terminal phase missile defenses like Russia's S-400.
However there are treaty limits on ballistic missiles (regardless of their payload), and a ballistic missile launch risks triggering early warning systems in Russia and China. So I think a submarine or airplane launched system is more likely to happen. This would provide the same "anywhere in the world in 30 minutes" capability without necessarily even being detected.
Elon Musk and Sergei Brin are immigrants, as are several of the founders of LInkedIn, and the founders of a number of the fastest growing US tech companies.
Before 1870 or so 0%. The technology needed to remove the endosperm from the germ and bran on an industrial scale did not exist.
The bread we eat, even most "wheat" bread, is made up almost entirely of the endosperm. So my point is that the variety of wheat hardly makes any difference compared to the changes in how we prepare it.
There are some people who believe that semi-dwarf wheat -- whose thicker stalks allow for a much heavier seed head -- is responsible for the rise of gluten intolerance. It's an Internet thing. I've done a literature search on the problem, and while there is reason to think that modern varieties might have some marginal differential effect on certain genetically susceptible individuals, popular literature has gotten way ahead of where the evidence is. In addition to the marginal increase in gliadin content of wheat, Americans are simply consuming far, far more wheat than they did thirty or forty years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago I spent some time studying ontology technologies. In a nutshell ontology is a branch of philosophy having to do with "being" and existence, but in an information technology context it refers to models of reality that are built around taxonomic models (e.g. statements like "security problems" are a kind of "software bug"). This has most obvious applications in object oriented class hierarchies, but taxonomic models are also a big part of database design and also implicitly arise in the design of data interchange formats.
Here's what I took away from my dive into the intersection of metaphysics and software engineering: taxonomic models are only valid within a specific domain of application. Even if you intend to model objective reality, you end up modeling just the parts you work with.
This is a perfect example. Torvalds is effectively saying while some security problems may not be bugs, but for practical purposes nearly all of them are. Clearly this is true for him, so true that he literally doesn't know how to work with people concerned with non-bug security problems. What he is saying has really more to do with what he does on a day to day basis, rather than about the overall field of security. In that field you also have to deal with issues like trust delegation, agency, physical security and and social engineering. Clearly Torvalds must know these things exist, but for him they might as well not.
People are very seldom concerned with some kind of universal model of capital T Truth; they're almost always concerned with creating models that help them get their job done. This is inevitable, and it creates problems when you try to glue data from different sources together. The unnecessary problems that arise come from people who don't accept that their useful domain-specific models don't describe all of objective reality.
While it's helpful for a number of reasons to plant trees, note that humans put about 40 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's a lot of trees -- equivalent to growing 30,000 Giant Sequoias from seed to maturity in one year, every single year.
A mature 100 acre woodland captures enough carbon annually to offset seven automobiles driven an average amount.
So while trees help for many reasons like flood and erosion control, and can be part of a strategy to reduce fossil fuel emissions (e.g. by cooling cities), they're not really a attractive climate engineering option for bulk removal of CO2. Fertilizing the ocean to increase phytoplankton production is more easily scalable, but has potentially devastating side effects.
Old it may be, but to this day a number of reactors similar to the GE model that melted down continue to be run around the world and in the US. In fact there's one not far from where I live: the Pilgrim Nuclear Power station has the same GE BWR-3 with Mark 1 containment as Fukushima Daichi 1.
Chernobyl's vintage is neither here nor there; it is an entirely different Soviet design in a completely different design lineage.
But where both Fukushima and Chernobyl are relevant is the role that managerial misconduct and operational error played in the disaster. It is not the technology of early reactors that concerns me so much as the capacity of organizations to run such things responsibly.
It is. So you fit it into your calorie budget.
First, I don't bother with bad, or even mediocre pizza. At 272 calories/slice for plain jane cheese it'd damn well better be awesome pizza. Second, I plan ahead by reducing my calorie intake in the run up to my splurge. Here's a secret from the ancient Greek philosphers known as the stoics: a little self-denial makes things taste better. If you've been fasting, plain bread is delicious. Pizza eaten after a fast is indescribable.
Call this sensory hacking if you will. Get a small, very good pizza, and eat it slowly and mindfully in a semi-fasted state, along with a nutrient dense side dish like a salad (no dressing -- you don't want flavor clash here you just want to space the pizza out with something less intense and it may as well be good for you). I guarantee you'll get more enjoyment that you would mindlessly scarfing down an extra large from a pizza chain.
People have a deeply held belief that they can measure portions with their eyeballs
That's one of actually two important misconceptions. The other is that stomach fullness is reliable measure of how much you've eaten. Your belly only has three feedback settings: feed me now, you could eat a bit more, and if you eat more you're going to get sick.
Recent research suggests that it's the amount of time you spend eating, and the amount of chewing you do that affects perceptions of how much you've eaten. I've confirmed this myself. Eating slower and chewing more definitely creates the subjective impression of having eaten more for any given size portion. The flip side of this is that so many processed foods which are easy to eat quickly bypass your primary satiety mechanisms.
On the eyeballing portion size, there's a lab at Cornell that does consumer behavior research that has studied this, and they've come up with a number of interesting results about how people estimate portion size. One is that the size of the plate has a big impact on how much you think you're eating; the same serving on a small plate gives the impression that you've eaten more. If they pour a serving from a large cereal box, it'll be larger than a serving they pour from a small one. If you give them a small box of stale popcorn, they'll eat a little of it then complain. If you give them a large box of stale pop corn, they'll eat a lot then complain.
and being able to live without medical intervention
And your point would differ from ine how?
As I say elsewhere, the *best* place to start if you want to change your lifestyle is accepting what you are like now. If you feel bad about how much you weigh, you'll avoid weighing yourself.
In order to gain control over anything you have to measure it. If you have strong emotional reactions to the results of a measurement, that will skew your measurements or make you avoid measuring at all.
Depends on where the clams were harvested. In the US states regulate shellfishing; in my state (where the clams were harvested), shellfish beds are mapped and classified; some are entirely prohibited, others are entirely permitted, and some (where fecal-oral route pathogens in the water are a concern) require treatment in a depuration plant.
Small amounts of bioaccumulating toxins like metals aren't any reason to avoid an occasional shellfish feast here, although you might not want to eat them every day. I might avoid shellfish altogether when visiting China with its poor environmental practices and lax health regulation enforcement.
The biggest concern with occasional fried clam is exposure to rancid fat -- because that's something you can be continually exposed to in many places if you habitually eat fried food from not-very-good restaurants.
I have no problem with GMO grains, but I consume grains overall in moderation because they pack a large calorie wallop for their limited nutrient payload. That makes it hard to incorporate large amount of grain (GMO or not) into a calorie limited nutrient complete diet. As for health advice, I stick to information in peer-reviewed literature review papers in high impact factor journals, plus common sense.
I agree with most of what you're saying here. Notice also I qualified "hypertension": mild hypertension. And of course everyone's different. But a lot of the time people are less different than they think; they're just rationalizing their habits. People would rather think of themselves as special than as unsuccessful.
The power of lifestyle change is greatly underestimated, because so many people find it difficult. Certainly if you can't control your borderline hypertension with lifestyle change you *should* use medications, particularly if you have other complications like diabetes. But healtheir something everyone with this kind of problem should attempt, with or without medication.
The trouble for many people is that the impetus for change comes from dissatisfaction with themselves, and that dissatisfaction undermines their efforts. They are afraid to weigh themselves because they see weight gain (which happens even in the course of dramatic weight loss) as failure, and a sign that they're weak, bad people. I actually think you set yourself up better for success if you can accept yourself as you are now, and focus on the things you will gain.
Modern medicine isn't just going to keep you alive for another year; it's going to keep you alive for decades in bad health.
By the way I don't deny myself anything. I do everything in moderation -- even moderation. Yesterday I went out to a fried clam shack and ate 4000 calories worth of fried clams in one sitting. But my average calorie intake for the week is still under 2000, because I planned for my fried seafood bender accordingly.
Controlling mild hypertension with prescriptions is a choice. You *can* do it with lifestyle changes.
I did it; I dropped my blood pressure from 128/86 to 105/60, without medication, through diet and exercise. It's not that hard, but the reason I succeeded where many like me fail is that as a geek measuring, tracking and evaluating data comes naturally to me. Measure everything; weigh your food, log it, analyze the results. If you try to obtain 100% of all your required nutrients without supplementation and within a wight maintenance level of calorie intake you're automatically forced to eat healthy.
Eating healthy and exercise in moderation will turn most borderline cases of hypertension around, but it takes some discipline.
Why did I bother? Becuase the consequences of hypertension really really suck. It's a disease with no symptoms but horrible complications. Think of all the things you consider as part of "aging" -- physical frailty, loss of memory and in some cases thinking ability. A lot of this isn't a result of the unavoidable genetics of aging; they're the result of things like heart attacks, strokes, and vascular dementia all of which are consequences of high blood pressure.
I thought the whole point that these trucks are significantly cheaper per mile to operate -- 22% less per mile, according to Tesla's predictions.
If Tesla can actually deliver (and tha'ts a big if!) on a truck that is that much cheaper to run, the economics are a straightforward NPV calculation over the projected lifetime of the truck against the purchase price. And as usual as an individual investor your investment decisions depend on a lot of other things, like cash on hand and opportunity costs.
There are some areas where a truck like this, if it doesn't cost too much more than diesel, is a no brainer. A lot of the goods that come into the port of Los Angeles are trucked to warehouses surrounding LA, and then trucked to stores throughout the area. Round trips are easily within the promised range.
There are also routes in which the promised torque will make a significant reduction in transit time, say from Sacramento to Reno - about 130 miles each way over the Sierra Mountains over Route 80, which boasts a 30 mile stretch with a 3-6% grade.
Wait, so because *some* women may have engaged in consensual relations, all of the women he assaulted and raped are "whores"?
It's not like there's only "rape" and "innocent flirting" and nothing in between. There's a lot of ground in between those, and many lines to be crossed. While there certainly is the potential for a witch hunt, I think it's good to talk about those lines and where they should be drawn.
Unfortunately there's no way of doing that without inviting at least some public hysteria.
One thing I think it's absolutely vital to talk about isn't just the behavior of people like Harvey Weinstein; it's all the people around him, men and women, who enabled him. The scale of his actions was only possible because of an army of people who decided to enable it to get worse because letting him assault, rape and extort was good for their careers. In a way I think those people are morally worse; at least no better. It's one very bad thing to have no control over your impulses, it's another thing to make such a callous calculation with the lives of so many.
I suspect our problem isn't an obsession with sex; it's reverence for power.
You should never take what a liar says at face value. He wasn't talking about friendship; he was talking about using his enormous power to ruin careers, which in fact he did.
So, in other words, a person should not be able to try to hook up or date anyone below their "strata"?
Depending on your definition of "'hook up" and "strata" the answer can be yes. For example, if by "hook up" you mean engage in consensual sex, and the strata occupied are "legal juvenile" and "legal adult", the answer is yes. If by "hook up" you mean "engage in some non-consensual sex act" then the answer is "yes" regardless of strata. If by "hook up" you mean "surprise a woman by showing her your dick" the answer is "yes".
People act as if this stuff is incomprehensible. It's not. For the most part it's not even complicated. Rape is wrong. Assault is wrong. Extortion to cover up those things is wrong.
What gets a little complicated is that behavior runs along a spectrum : perfectly polite, rude, legal but scumbaggy, misdemeanor assault, sexual battery, and rape. Often placing a particular act the correct side of a particular line can be tricky. For example it's not clear whether the Al Franken incident is legal but scumbaggy or misdemeanor assault. What Harvey Weinstein did rand along the line between sexual battery and rape, compounded with extortion and tortious interference.
Somehow you have a mistaken perception of what Weinstein did. He didn't say, "would you engage in this sexual act in return for a part in this movie," he used deception, surprise, and in some cases force. Technically what he did wasn't solicitation, it ran from assault to rape.
Now as for "whores not being victims", that may be true in Amsterdam where it takes place under the watchful eye of the police and many of the prostitutes are unionized, but if you're frequenting prostitutes here in the US there's a good chance that they are under the violently coercive control of a pimp. For young non-American prostitutes there is a good chance that they are the victims of human trafficking.
Yes.
It's like trying to be "creative". If you set out to do something creative, you end up posturing, which is pretending to be creative. Real creativity comes when you set out to do something that's a little beyond what you're comfortable with.
Focus is what allows you to achieve agility. If you just try to be "agile" you end up rushing, which is pretending to be agile.
How would we *know* whether the AI is better than humans? How do you *know* the AI's false positive and false negative rate without some kind of oracle to compare the result to? Can an AI algorithm somehow outperform the human-made classifications it is trained on, and if it appears to do so should we trust that result?
I'm not doing the usual Slashdot thing of assuming that experts are too dumb to see the objections that immediately occurred to me; I just think that people take a headline like above for granted when you can't really even understand what it is saying without a lot more information.
I don't think you understand how Agile is supposed to work, not that you'd apply it to something like an OS. But the underlying principle still applies: focus. Focus really is the secret sauce, agility is almost a side effect.
The US has had a hypersonic weapon program for years -- called Prompt Global Strike. The idea wouldn't necessarily be to fly all the way around the world in the atmosphere; there are several delivery modes envisioned, one of which is to launch the vehicle on an ICBM; it would then re-enter the atmosphere in controlled, hypersonic flight, evading any terminal phase missile defenses like Russia's S-400.
However there are treaty limits on ballistic missiles (regardless of their payload), and a ballistic missile launch risks triggering early warning systems in Russia and China. So I think a submarine or airplane launched system is more likely to happen. This would provide the same "anywhere in the world in 30 minutes" capability without necessarily even being detected.
I'm just pointing out how much less pragamtic we are now
Elon Musk and Sergei Brin are immigrants, as are several of the founders of LInkedIn, and the founders of a number of the fastest growing US tech companies.
Before 1870 or so 0%. The technology needed to remove the endosperm from the germ and bran on an industrial scale did not exist.
The bread we eat, even most "wheat" bread, is made up almost entirely of the endosperm. So my point is that the variety of wheat hardly makes any difference compared to the changes in how we prepare it.
There are some people who believe that semi-dwarf wheat -- whose thicker stalks allow for a much heavier seed head -- is responsible for the rise of gluten intolerance. It's an Internet thing. I've done a literature search on the problem, and while there is reason to think that modern varieties might have some marginal differential effect on certain genetically susceptible individuals, popular literature has gotten way ahead of where the evidence is. In addition to the marginal increase in gliadin content of wheat, Americans are simply consuming far, far more wheat than they did thirty or forty years ago.