Ask a tribe of tropical hunter-gatherers whether it's possible to live in the Arctic - where it's freezing cold through most of the year, the sun does not shine for months and nothing grows there and they will tell you that no way, you must be crazy to think that it's possible.
That's exactly how European anthropologists managed to get the expected answers from primitive tribes the world over for hundreds of years. Just when you think you've asked a neutral question about the afterlife, the whole of Christianity was baked in.
Dark?
Bad.
Cold?
Bad.
Sterile?
Wait just a minute here, are you pulling my skinny leg again?
[This followed by a sarcastic aside to the rest of the village in the joual of the local dialect of the language isolate, which makes everyone else laugh, and leaves you red-faced, even though you barely understood a single syllable.]
No reward in it for you apart from the taste, baw hah hah. Don't you live in a little fantasy world. I can assure you if you are drinking fully decaffeinated coffee, it is the caffeine that has you hooked, regardless of whether you accept it or not.
This sounds like an exit poll conducted after a secret AA meeting.
The vast majority of coffee drinkers are operating in the dependency zone. This is where you can't go without coffee for more than 24 hours without at least feeling lethargic, and more likely, getting a gripping headache at the top of the neck.
Caffeine has a stimulating effect, it has a toleration effect, and it has a flat affect effect.
As I have an N24 sleep disorder, I pretty much lived in the caffeine abuse zone in the mid-nineties, until I came to my senses.
Now I drink a single cup of coffee on waking, made with 10 g of ground beans, and 180 g of water (high-quality light-roast single origins often brew best at 18:1, whereas cheaper coffees often brew better at 16:1 by mass). For all you Americans, that's a single six ounce serving per day. I use a gram scale to weigh my beans to 10.0 grams every morning. This prevents escalation. (Your subjective sense is that every morning should begin with one more bean than the day before. This adds up quick.)
Six ounces per day is very close to caffeine's peak window as a stimulant, with low dependency, and minimal flattening of affect. I really dislike it on the rare days when I run out of beans, but I function just fine. Because I only have one coffee, the caffeine is almost completely cleared from my system at bedtime, and has minimal effect on my sleep quality.
I like the taste of coffee, and if the natural beans had half as much caffeine in them, I'd surely drink a second 6 ounce cup mid morning. But now that I've come to my senses, there's no way I would ever increase my caffeine levels above my current consumption level. I learned my lesson the hard way.
It actually feels good to finally escape the flattened affect, but this is hard to notice initially, while you're still in the shit-warmed-over headache zone.
It's extremely easy to kick (or control) your caffeine habit without going through the shit-warmed-over zone.
What you need is a slow downward taper. But this is almost impossible to achieve in modern coffee culture, where the amount of caffeine in whatever random coffee you drink is highly variable (and excessive, in many of the most popular brands). One Mermaid, in particular, will laugh at you if you try to order a four ounce coffee (probably the appropriate size given the typically high caffeine levels in this brand) as if your dick is 4" long. Avoid the Mermaid, she's nothing but trouble.
Make every coffee yourself at home in the morning. Pour-over is the best method for controlling consumption. It takes me 3 minutes and 45 seconds to heat the kettle (on the stove) and a ceramic cone (in the microwave). Then it takes me 2 minutes and 30 seconds to finish pouring the coffee (plus another 30 seconds for it to finish steeping). It's pretty much guaranteed I can find 5 minutes of kitchen chores to complete every morning while my coffee brews.
Taper down by 2% per day (i.e. constantly multiply your previous day by 0.98). By the rule of 70, your consumption will decline by half in 35 days. Depending where you start, you'll arrive at your final destination in one month, or two months, or three months. No headaches, no shit-warmed-over trudge, with better energy, better affect, and better sleep.
Make sure you have no other major caffeine sources (I limit myself to small pieces of chocolate and the occasional green tea).
Every so often, my sleep deteriorates for its own reasons, and I'll drink a second coffee (brewed with 7 to 10 grams of beans) to get me through a personal crisis of sluggishness and lethargy.
If I draw from this treacherous well two days in a row, once I return to my standard discipline, I'll end up consta
In reality, how do you entangle enough qubits to be useful? How do you prevent noise or correct for the errors of noise? How do you ensure your qubits are properly entangled? How do you accurately send your quantum program to the qubits for processing? How do you aide in processing the qubits accurately without generating more noise?
I've never believed in quantum computing, because I've never seen a lay publication that does half of these questions justice.
Under you've seen the ceiling properly described, a technology simply doesn't exist.
No one in this field ever bothers to describe the ceiling.
In CMOS, you always had "when does the transistor become too small?" Some of the early answers were wrong (100 nm was once mooted as a frightening bogie man), but at least you would read sensible speculation.
At what point, in a practical sense, does the quantum entanglistor become inseparable from local environmental noise?
Silence. Crickets. Crickets on top of crickets. Crickets inside of crickets. Crickets alive and dead at the same time. All kinds of crickets. But never any sensible speculation.
Of all the problems in the sleep medicine world, I think the biggest is patient ignorance ("it's just snoring") and underscreening. Data obscurity isn't in the top 5, in my book, but I still understand the right to obtain one's own data.
One of the reasons you hold this view is that you're looking at sleep medicine through the narrowest possible end of the telescope. Apnea has the thinnest etiology of all major sleep problems. The dimensionality is low enough that it almost becomes possible (even preferable) to delegate micro-management of the therapeutic parameters to your amazingly convenient (and under-worked) sleep specialist.
But in sleep medicine, that's only true in apnea.
I've had sighted-N24 for thirty years. Melatonin wasn't even legal in Canada during the 1990s, so I didn't get onto the melatonin train until 2005. Using off-the-shelf melatonin available to me then, I managed to reduce an 85 minute daily drift to a 10 minute daily drift, and while mostly better, and extremely encouraging at first, this did not prove to be a great life. I still had to discontinue melatonin once a month, progress through night mode (advancing 1.5 hours per day) until I realigned again at the early AM. There was intense daily fatigue in the later afternoon, and sometimes an associated emotional roller coaster, and the part of my life I could carve out free from all this nonsense was sufficient to work only; I was living to work, and barely coping the rest of the time. I don't think my quality of life was much better than a normal person assigned to a multiyear stint on the DEW Line, functional enough to remain employed, with nothing but SAD as your reward between the end of the work shift and finally hitting the hay, day after day after day. I cracked after struggling with this for about three years.
Then I tried formally free-running for about three years, during which time I was unemployable. I went around the clock every 16.5 calendar days (15.5 personal days). Out of that 2.25 week cycle, I would have three spectacularly good days, three good days, three mediocre days, three nightmare days, and three wildly unstable days. And then the cycle would repeat. Even within those parameters, I could have made this work if only the cycle hadn't so insanely brisk. Each of those changes takes about a day to accommodate (this after three years experience singularly devoted to riding the irregular surf). I had access to my best self—able to constructively direct that energy—for two day chunks, twice a month.
Then I found sustained release melatonin and with that I managed to reduce my drift to zero minutes per day, under absolutely maximal adherence, with narrow tolerances on the dose taken and the precise time of administration. One time, for three months, I managed -1 minutes per day, my best result ever. This was in advance of setting up shop for a week in a major city for my wife to undergo major elective surgery, where I needed to be on regulation day-mode like never before. I managed to roll my 09:30 wake up time back to about 08:00—after three months of flawless adherence—which was good enough.
I can adjust my wake-up time in the forward direction by 2 hours in one day by taking melatonin at bedtime (just a little longer than my natural drift). I can adjust my wake-up time backwards by an hour in a month or two by fanatical devotion to my medication regime.
The older, simpler model of the circadian clock doesn't explain my structural depression and my cognitive irregularities as I cycled through my free-running sleep pattern (which, I might add, was as stable as a metronome, despite being slightly eccentric in how fast I advanced during the daylight/darkness portions of the cycle—effectively, there would be an extra four hour jump during the "wildly unstable" three days before the next cycle began again at the 00:00 early AM).
If I can fiddle my blood level melatonin profile just a little bit more, maybe I can
Basically, Bell's Theorem states that quantum entanglement MUST transmit quantum information faster than light
I've never entirely agreed with that formulation. Any machine you can build that verifies this theory does so using only information that travels at the speed of light.
So your other explanation is that all the information flows in this experiment, from the entangled particle, through the physical apparatus remain entangled until the final green light goes on (Bell's theorem verified).
All it takes is a much larger view of entanglement.
I am not a physicist, but my semi-informed view is that you can't prove entanglement without your conclusion itself having becoming entangled with the entangled particles during its inception. Every information flow in the conclusion takes place at the speed of light.
It's only when you abstract the experiment from the experimenter that it becomes attractive to insert "and then a miracle happened" (because you didn't feel the urge to trace the entanglement back through macroscopic systems all the way to the green light bulb).
Even if I'm wrong, I'm 50% correct. Because any explanation of entanglement that posits the instantaneous modification of probability distributions at a distance needs to explain that our experimental verification of this doesn't contain a hidden back channel though regular, speed-limit obeying information flows.
In my view, all particles are entangled until proven otherwise. So any starting point where the pairs of entangled particles under test is the only source of entanglement you might potentially need to explain (in your apparatus) is a bizarre conceptual conceit.
I would also venture that in a universe where entanglement of all particles is the norm and not the exception (prove otherwise...) that by the theory of entropic entanglement, all entanglements about which you lack special insight are indistinguishable from random background noise (hence the unknown entanglements can almost be universally neglected—except perhaps when you build a contraption with a green light that goes on to signal Bell's theorem confirmed, under the [sort of] faster-than-light school of interpretation).
Dear Richard Feynman,
I wish to build a black-box experimental apparatus to confirm Bell's inequality, one that is fully automatic, and the entire experiment ending with only the signal of a green or red light.
To ensure that I don't fool myself (this having a colossally low bar), I wish to confirm before beginning the test run that no two particles in the apparatus itself are themselves entangled, so that the only entanglement present in the system is the entanglement under test.
While it's not clear how Cook's aggressive comments directly provoked Zuckerberg into issuing his Android-only order, it's still a rational decision to make Americans use Android.
What?
Am I the only one who can barely even parse the argument embedded here?
Take, for example, that sous vide: "Someone could hack your Wi-Fi, crank up the cooking temperature on your sous vide, and overcook your steak," reads the entry, presenting a worst-case scenario that's not quite grade A.
It's a bad scenario if the person cooking my food thinks that overcooking is the worst-case scenario.
The bacteria grow best at warm temperatures. It thrives at water temperatures between 25 and 45 C with an optimum temperature of 35 C.
Temperatures above 60 C (140 F) kill it.
Sources where temperatures allow the bacteria to thrive include hot water tanks, cooling towers, and evaporative condensers of large air conditioning systems, such as those commonly found in hotels and large office buildings.
Lots of sous-vide recipes specify less than 140 degrees F. This is already in the wheel house of one strain of bacteria, with a 10% human fatality rate once contracted.
This is why sous-vide cookers go the extra mile to ensure precise thermal regulation.
Not too many bacteria in food will actually kill you (yet) if only undercooked by a small amount. But as they say in antibiotics and cipher breaking, your adversary's attacks and defenses only ever improve.
What the hell is wrong with the Mozilla Foundation? Just focus on making a minimal, high-quality, open source browser.
That's funny. I think Nassim Taleb is a bit of a blowhard. He was interviewed again not so long ago on EconTalk about Skin in the Game. There he spends about twenty minutes pointing out the obvious: he who doesn't survive doesn't play. By the end of this, I'm left holding my head in both hands and groaning from the obviousness of it all.
And then here I am on Slashdot, and the received wisdom (+5) is "just keep doing what you're doing, the absorbing boundary of non-existence is smaller than it appears in your side view mirror".
The fires of Isengard will spread. And the woods of Tuckborough and Buckland will burn. And all that was once green and good in this world will be gone. There won't be a Shire, Pippin.
But here we just +5ed a post more naive than Pippin's least prudent half hour from the entire trilogy. And my god, there were moments when Pippin should have thrown himself down just about any deep well available.
We're probably going to buy the Mac mini i5 anyway, to replace my wife's 2008 iMac, with a game plan to run it into the ground for another eight to ten years.
Personally, I don't see the repairability problem. Unless we go crazy writing to the internal storage (unlikely), there's very little to break on this system. Everything but two memory sticks is soldered down. The vast majority of peripherals are tangled up a giant dongle mess behind the cute little box. Those will break and can be unplugged.
Apart from failed DRAM, the smallest possible electronics repair is to swap the main logic board. (The most likely repair is not electronics: it's the power supply and fan, neither of which are protected by the T2 chip, unless Apple is far more Big Brother than anyone back in 1984 even began to imagine.)
I will likely confirm before purchase that it remains possible to install Windows 10 though Boot Camp on an external drive (just an actual TB3 drive would be acceptable as a fail safe; but far better if USB drive were also allowed).
I would be extremely surprised if such a minimalistic system board had more than a 5% failure rate over ten years (unless Apple has completely screwed the cooling envelope, and if there's anything Apple knows, it's confining warm things in tight places, all the while making your think it's your warm thing, in your tight place of choice).
So we'll just self-insure on the books to replace this box if it fails with any damn thing at hand. And we'll keep layers of hot backups on the nearby NAS box. That means we basically won't ever buy any macOS-specific software we can't afford to lose at the first Apple glitch.
It seriously sucks that the world has come to this, but we're going to temporise for one more long product generation. We both hate Windows 10. Every other machine in the house is BSD or Linux. My Android phone doesn't even have its data modem enabled (I can't stand the Android security model), so it's exclusively used for phone calls, text messages, and accessing my personal web server on the internal Wi-Fi. My wife's phone is a recent iPhone from her place of employment, which she only uses for text messages to me and a few other people, and for real work.
It's nice to have one machine in the place compatible with recent, mainstream things. It makes her place of employment happy when she teleworks from a platform they've ever heard of before. That's why she has an iMac in the first place.
The T2 is that chick with the hammer. What's she's smashing is any narrative at all you can understand—to be replaced by the blinding wall of dazzling white light of Apple arrogance.
On November 11th, 2018, Apple Computer will introduce the T2 solder-flash refresh. And you'll see why 2018 will be exactly like "1984."
I fudged the date a little, but why not Remembrance day, for good measure? Because I remember the 1984 advertisement (as a scary harbinger), and I always will.
Who can watch that old commercial now, and not read it as foretelling a dark future?
Actually, that was all really good, but the author failed to notice that management functions were being overlaid on what he called a mere human abstraction.
He probably has a good idea of how this management function could be done more elegantly in this alternate world, and maybe I could figure it for myself with more time and another read through.
But it shouldn't have been neglected in the original narrative, because the view from elegance is not a first language for the reader until the reader has read and digested this document three times.
Kind of entertaining so far, but here's the first stupid:
In truth, that really is just complicating things. Now your operating system has to first look up the ethernet address of 192.168.1.1, find out it's 11:22:33:44:55:66, and finally generate a packet with destination ethernet address 11:22:33:44:55:66 and destination IP address 10.1.1.1. 192.168.1.1 shows up nowhere in the packet; it's just an abstraction at the human level.
Do you really want your routing table full of hard addresses like 11:22:33:44:55:66 that are node-locked to a particular chunk of metal?
No, not just an abstraction at the human level. Rather, a sane mitigation for the inevitability of failure and change.
That does not mean that the lecture hall defied the model. It just means that when the model was developed, the important aspects of the reality being modeled were not considered properly and some were left out.
When reality defies equations: error between world and (momentarily) conical graphite core. There is no hubris in this world quite like reality leaving a cossetted wonk slack-jawed.
Murderous millennial preachers and prophets take over the German city of Munster after Martin Luther unleashes a Pandoraâ(TM)s Box of religious anarchy with the Protestant Reformation.
And if that doesn't cure you, scaphism certainly will.
Early generation technologies are often fragile in superficial ways.
Big whoop.
The main counterexamples come from startup ventures who define turd polishing as job #1.
Eventually even the sane do have to polish the turd (in the context of an adversarial arms race) to achieve mass deployment. Ideally, you financed your startup to also succeed at stage Number Two.
If most people provided a completely false click-through and browsing information it would diminish the value of ads entirely.
Your analysis is not even on the right set of train tracks.
Current compensation formulas might well involve relative conversion rates (I don't follow this closely), but that's merely convention.
What actually matters is the absolute conversion rate: number of widgets sold, and average selling price. As long as those two quantities are in the black, advertising will remain a going concern.
(There are a fair number of retail ventures where the price paid depends on your history of arrival. Amazon has tried this in house, but other places astroturf apparently independent outlets and then work to steer customers to the most expensive outlet, at or below willingness to pay. Willingness to pay is measured by having the deepest discount associated with filling out many bullshit forms, poor shipping terms, and generally poor terms in every other respect. Professionals very quickly elect to protect their time and energy by paying more under the general heading of "convenience". Gradually the industry trains consumers to accept their general convenience category, and to only shop within those parameters. This is half the function of advertising, as viewed from the systemic perspective.)
Bullshitting a lot of click-throughs (with no conversion possible) inflates the cost of delivering electrons (very marginal these days, though enough to make to make Amazon even richer).
It doesn't fall into hardly anyone's convenience category.
And it's fundamentally non-verifiable. Because while you fantasize over how this creates difficulties at the other end, all this sophisticated new AI isn't fooled (for long) in the slightest.
It's not like SSDs naturally degrade during their service life by sticking their thumb into a high voltage socket every time you press the "erase" button.
And it's not like the mysterious T2 security chip couldn't prevent you from booting into a future macOS from external media if Apple decides the obsolescence message isn't penetrating your thick skull.
Trust, but keep replacement parts close to hand in a desk drawer.
Sticking to DST year-round means that I'll at least have some dusk and natural light for the drive home, or even when Iâ(TM)m at home after work.
Small fly in the ointment: your body's response to light exposure at dawn and dusk differs. For most people, half an hour of bright light first thing in the morning helps to entrain a consistent, early sleep rhythm.
For many people, without any early light, their sleep phase drifts towards the owl pole. This won't stop you from sleeping at your chosen time. But it will cause your sleep to be lite, easily interrupted, and less refreshing. In more severe cases, you can wind up waking up for an hour or two, a few hours after hitting the hay. If accumulated fatigue fails to deepen your sleep, this can further devolve into chronic insomnia. (Maintaining high levels of accumulated fatigue is a lousy way to live in the first place.)
People who do attempt to maintain high levels of accumulated fatigue usually fall into a pattern called "social jetlag" where they either sleep a whole lot more on the weekends, or stay up very late and sleep very late (or both), turning Monday morning into a total ordeal. And the ordeal is not just something unpleasant to endure. Your associated performance decline is painfully obvious in any competent sleep study. Sleep quality effects on cognitive performance are one of the easiest things to demonstrate in any good sleep lab. One sleep researcher has a standing bet for any sleep-deprivation warrior to show up and sleep six hours or less a night, and not show immediate cognitive decline on fairly simple tests. Last I heard, no-one has collected.
Chorus: Put your linear models away, children, and start looking at what is already known.
And, oh yes, breaking news: the pancreas is now known to have a melatonin receptor. So your sugary foods spike your blood sugar differently in the morning than later in the day.
Chorus: Put your linear models away, children, and start looking at what is already known.
"Gait analysis can't be fooled by simply limping, walking with splayed feet or hunching over, because we're analyzing all the features of an entire body."
Bullshit. That's what they want people to think.
But you probably have to put a really painful object in one shoe, and smoke some weed, and listen to a lot of reggae.
Pretty soon, everyone with a Keyser So:ze limp will be arrested on sight. And he won't talk himself out of that one, because of the international Chinese gesture of "speak to the hand", which will actually be a palm-sized voice recorder, connected to an AI application, with only one defined output: "not convinced".
So AlphaZero becomes exceptionally good at chess with only 4000 TPU-hours of computation, self-playing something on the order of 40 million chess games.
Now just imagine the Mother of AlphaZero where you train an expert system to train up 10 million different AlphaZero-class AIs, so that it can devise the optimal network for any future AI task on pure gut instinct.
A mere 4.5 million TPU years later, and now AI is really cooking with gas.
The AI of the AI remains a little bit out of reach at current computational cost.
Turned out they hadn't taught it to distinguish between US and Russian tanks, they had taught it to distinguish between high quality photos (used for marketing meetings with Congresscritters for funding), and crappy, grainy Polaroids (which was all they had of the Russian tanks).
If there was no refund for the work performed, this may have been the intended outcome.
And then some people pretend to be embarrassed, but magically their re-election fund is well stuffed behind the scenes (you don't think your Congresscritter was so stupid as to not receive some appreciative campaign contributions?)
Turns out, the vast majority of humans either over-discriminate or under-discriminate cynical/stupid all the damn time. The problem is so hard, that most people just run around with their needle stuck to one end or the other.
You CAN document, in detail, the exact requirements for a complex $15 million project, without building anything first. Proof is most every civil engineering project ever. My mentor routinely did that with software projects. But you can't do it if you haven't been taught how.
Was your mentor a civil engineer? That preconditions the kinds of software projects he might have taken on to those with tighter boundary conditions in the real world, that being a huge advantage in building requirements/specifications top down.
When coffee is bad, I do take both cream and sugar. In a job interview Iâ(TM)m likely going to assume any proferred coffee is going to be bad, so...
I actually take a test sip black, and then decide on the cream level. Rarely ever cream in a quality single-origin medium roast.
In the rare cases where I'm in the kind of chain that has two coffees available, usually a medium roast (which might be medium dark) and a dark roast (which is usually a very dark overroast) I take a small sip of both, and then blend, usually 80–20 in favour of the lighter roast.
When the medium/medium dark has no real character on its own, I don't mind borrowing a little character from the creosote/Talisker family tree.
Nothing screams Indonesian jungle sea-level plantation like an oil-pan dark roast.
Many (mostly boys) are playing video games with console. ... I don't know whether this guy is a just some quack wondering why some up and coming students can't stitch as well as he can with his decades of experience, or if there really is some decline, but if there is some decline, I'm certain this guy's theory as to why is completely wrong.
Like so many boys in the modern world, the distance between twitch and stitch remains undiscovered country.
What Kneebone is probably neglecting most seriously is the rampant inflation of admissions standards, in order to cope with the rampant inflation of medical knowledge. The good, old fashioned childhood arranging wooden alphabet blocks into long serpentine arcs is hardly an express train into modern medical school, no matter how hard you "choo choo".
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly how European anthropologists managed to get the expected answers from primitive tribes the world over for hundreds of years. Just when you think you've asked a neutral question about the afterlife, the whole of Christianity was baked in.
Dark?
Bad.
Cold?
Bad.
Sterile?
Wait just a minute here, are you pulling my skinny leg again?
[This followed by a sarcastic aside to the rest of the village in the joual of the local dialect of the language isolate, which makes everyone else laugh, and leaves you red-faced, even though you barely understood a single syllable.]
This sounds like an exit poll conducted after a secret AA meeting.
The vast majority of coffee drinkers are operating in the dependency zone. This is where you can't go without coffee for more than 24 hours without at least feeling lethargic, and more likely, getting a gripping headache at the top of the neck.
Caffeine has a stimulating effect, it has a toleration effect, and it has a flat affect effect.
As I have an N24 sleep disorder, I pretty much lived in the caffeine abuse zone in the mid-nineties, until I came to my senses.
Now I drink a single cup of coffee on waking, made with 10 g of ground beans, and 180 g of water (high-quality light-roast single origins often brew best at 18:1, whereas cheaper coffees often brew better at 16:1 by mass). For all you Americans, that's a single six ounce serving per day. I use a gram scale to weigh my beans to 10.0 grams every morning. This prevents escalation. (Your subjective sense is that every morning should begin with one more bean than the day before. This adds up quick.)
Six ounces per day is very close to caffeine's peak window as a stimulant, with low dependency, and minimal flattening of affect. I really dislike it on the rare days when I run out of beans, but I function just fine. Because I only have one coffee, the caffeine is almost completely cleared from my system at bedtime, and has minimal effect on my sleep quality.
I like the taste of coffee, and if the natural beans had half as much caffeine in them, I'd surely drink a second 6 ounce cup mid morning. But now that I've come to my senses, there's no way I would ever increase my caffeine levels above my current consumption level. I learned my lesson the hard way.
It actually feels good to finally escape the flattened affect, but this is hard to notice initially, while you're still in the shit-warmed-over headache zone.
It's extremely easy to kick (or control) your caffeine habit without going through the shit-warmed-over zone.
What you need is a slow downward taper. But this is almost impossible to achieve in modern coffee culture, where the amount of caffeine in whatever random coffee you drink is highly variable (and excessive, in many of the most popular brands). One Mermaid, in particular, will laugh at you if you try to order a four ounce coffee (probably the appropriate size given the typically high caffeine levels in this brand) as if your dick is 4" long. Avoid the Mermaid, she's nothing but trouble.
Make every coffee yourself at home in the morning. Pour-over is the best method for controlling consumption. It takes me 3 minutes and 45 seconds to heat the kettle (on the stove) and a ceramic cone (in the microwave). Then it takes me 2 minutes and 30 seconds to finish pouring the coffee (plus another 30 seconds for it to finish steeping). It's pretty much guaranteed I can find 5 minutes of kitchen chores to complete every morning while my coffee brews.
Taper down by 2% per day (i.e. constantly multiply your previous day by 0.98). By the rule of 70, your consumption will decline by half in 35 days. Depending where you start, you'll arrive at your final destination in one month, or two months, or three months. No headaches, no shit-warmed-over trudge, with better energy, better affect, and better sleep.
Make sure you have no other major caffeine sources (I limit myself to small pieces of chocolate and the occasional green tea).
Every so often, my sleep deteriorates for its own reasons, and I'll drink a second coffee (brewed with 7 to 10 grams of beans) to get me through a personal crisis of sluggishness and lethargy.
If I draw from this treacherous well two days in a row, once I return to my standard discipline, I'll end up consta
When you're typing with a beak, it's easy to lose the thread.
Parrots demand Google Glass!
I've never believed in quantum computing, because I've never seen a lay publication that does half of these questions justice.
Under you've seen the ceiling properly described, a technology simply doesn't exist.
No one in this field ever bothers to describe the ceiling.
In CMOS, you always had "when does the transistor become too small?" Some of the early answers were wrong (100 nm was once mooted as a frightening bogie man), but at least you would read sensible speculation.
At what point, in a practical sense, does the quantum entanglistor become inseparable from local environmental noise?
Silence. Crickets. Crickets on top of crickets. Crickets inside of crickets. Crickets alive and dead at the same time. All kinds of crickets. But never any sensible speculation.
One of the reasons you hold this view is that you're looking at sleep medicine through the narrowest possible end of the telescope. Apnea has the thinnest etiology of all major sleep problems. The dimensionality is low enough that it almost becomes possible (even preferable) to delegate micro-management of the therapeutic parameters to your amazingly convenient (and under-worked) sleep specialist.
But in sleep medicine, that's only true in apnea.
I've had sighted-N24 for thirty years. Melatonin wasn't even legal in Canada during the 1990s, so I didn't get onto the melatonin train until 2005. Using off-the-shelf melatonin available to me then, I managed to reduce an 85 minute daily drift to a 10 minute daily drift, and while mostly better, and extremely encouraging at first, this did not prove to be a great life. I still had to discontinue melatonin once a month, progress through night mode (advancing 1.5 hours per day) until I realigned again at the early AM. There was intense daily fatigue in the later afternoon, and sometimes an associated emotional roller coaster, and the part of my life I could carve out free from all this nonsense was sufficient to work only; I was living to work, and barely coping the rest of the time. I don't think my quality of life was much better than a normal person assigned to a multiyear stint on the DEW Line, functional enough to remain employed, with nothing but SAD as your reward between the end of the work shift and finally hitting the hay, day after day after day. I cracked after struggling with this for about three years.
Then I tried formally free-running for about three years, during which time I was unemployable. I went around the clock every 16.5 calendar days (15.5 personal days). Out of that 2.25 week cycle, I would have three spectacularly good days, three good days, three mediocre days, three nightmare days, and three wildly unstable days. And then the cycle would repeat. Even within those parameters, I could have made this work if only the cycle hadn't so insanely brisk. Each of those changes takes about a day to accommodate (this after three years experience singularly devoted to riding the irregular surf). I had access to my best self—able to constructively direct that energy—for two day chunks, twice a month.
Then I found sustained release melatonin and with that I managed to reduce my drift to zero minutes per day, under absolutely maximal adherence, with narrow tolerances on the dose taken and the precise time of administration. One time, for three months, I managed -1 minutes per day, my best result ever. This was in advance of setting up shop for a week in a major city for my wife to undergo major elective surgery, where I needed to be on regulation day-mode like never before. I managed to roll my 09:30 wake up time back to about 08:00—after three months of flawless adherence—which was good enough.
I can adjust my wake-up time in the forward direction by 2 hours in one day by taking melatonin at bedtime (just a little longer than my natural drift). I can adjust my wake-up time backwards by an hour in a month or two by fanatical devotion to my medication regime.
The older, simpler model of the circadian clock doesn't explain my structural depression and my cognitive irregularities as I cycled through my free-running sleep pattern (which, I might add, was as stable as a metronome, despite being slightly eccentric in how fast I advanced during the daylight/darkness portions of the cycle—effectively, there would be an extra four hour jump during the "wildly unstable" three days before the next cycle began again at the 00:00 early AM).
If I can fiddle my blood level melatonin profile just a little bit more, maybe I can
I've never entirely agreed with that formulation. Any machine you can build that verifies this theory does so using only information that travels at the speed of light.
So your other explanation is that all the information flows in this experiment, from the entangled particle, through the physical apparatus remain entangled until the final green light goes on (Bell's theorem verified).
All it takes is a much larger view of entanglement.
I am not a physicist, but my semi-informed view is that you can't prove entanglement without your conclusion itself having becoming entangled with the entangled particles during its inception. Every information flow in the conclusion takes place at the speed of light.
It's only when you abstract the experiment from the experimenter that it becomes attractive to insert "and then a miracle happened" (because you didn't feel the urge to trace the entanglement back through macroscopic systems all the way to the green light bulb).
Even if I'm wrong, I'm 50% correct. Because any explanation of entanglement that posits the instantaneous modification of probability distributions at a distance needs to explain that our experimental verification of this doesn't contain a hidden back channel though regular, speed-limit obeying information flows.
In my view, all particles are entangled until proven otherwise. So any starting point where the pairs of entangled particles under test is the only source of entanglement you might potentially need to explain (in your apparatus) is a bizarre conceptual conceit.
I would also venture that in a universe where entanglement of all particles is the norm and not the exception (prove otherwise ...) that by the theory of entropic entanglement, all entanglements about which you lack special insight are indistinguishable from random background noise (hence the unknown entanglements can almost be universally neglected—except perhaps when you build a contraption with a green light that goes on to signal Bell's theorem confirmed, under the [sort of] faster-than-light school of interpretation).
Dear Richard Feynman,
I wish to build a black-box experimental apparatus to confirm Bell's inequality, one that is fully automatic, and the entire experiment ending with only the signal of a green or red light.
To ensure that I don't fool myself (this having a colossally low bar), I wish to confirm before beginning the test run that no two particles in the apparatus itself are themselves entangled, so that the only entanglement present in the system is the entanglement under test.
Please advise.
TIA,
a concerned fool
What?
Am I the only one who can barely even parse the argument embedded here?
It's a bad scenario if the person cooking my food thinks that overcooking is the worst-case scenario.
Legionnaires' disease
Lots of sous-vide recipes specify less than 140 degrees F. This is already in the wheel house of one strain of bacteria, with a 10% human fatality rate once contracted.
This is why sous-vide cookers go the extra mile to ensure precise thermal regulation.
Not too many bacteria in food will actually kill you (yet) if only undercooked by a small amount. But as they say in antibiotics and cipher breaking, your adversary's attacks and defenses only ever improve.
That's funny. I think Nassim Taleb is a bit of a blowhard. He was interviewed again not so long ago on EconTalk about Skin in the Game. There he spends about twenty minutes pointing out the obvious: he who doesn't survive doesn't play. By the end of this, I'm left holding my head in both hands and groaning from the obviousness of it all.
And then here I am on Slashdot, and the received wisdom (+5) is "just keep doing what you're doing, the absorbing boundary of non-existence is smaller than it appears in your side view mirror".
But here we just +5ed a post more naive than Pippin's least prudent half hour from the entire trilogy. And my god, there were moments when Pippin should have thrown himself down just about any deep well available.
We're probably going to buy the Mac mini i5 anyway, to replace my wife's 2008 iMac, with a game plan to run it into the ground for another eight to ten years.
Personally, I don't see the repairability problem. Unless we go crazy writing to the internal storage (unlikely), there's very little to break on this system. Everything but two memory sticks is soldered down. The vast majority of peripherals are tangled up a giant dongle mess behind the cute little box. Those will break and can be unplugged.
Apart from failed DRAM, the smallest possible electronics repair is to swap the main logic board. (The most likely repair is not electronics: it's the power supply and fan, neither of which are protected by the T2 chip, unless Apple is far more Big Brother than anyone back in 1984 even began to imagine.)
I will likely confirm before purchase that it remains possible to install Windows 10 though Boot Camp on an external drive (just an actual TB3 drive would be acceptable as a fail safe; but far better if USB drive were also allowed).
I would be extremely surprised if such a minimalistic system board had more than a 5% failure rate over ten years (unless Apple has completely screwed the cooling envelope, and if there's anything Apple knows, it's confining warm things in tight places, all the while making your think it's your warm thing, in your tight place of choice).
So we'll just self-insure on the books to replace this box if it fails with any damn thing at hand. And we'll keep layers of hot backups on the nearby NAS box. That means we basically won't ever buy any macOS-specific software we can't afford to lose at the first Apple glitch.
It seriously sucks that the world has come to this, but we're going to temporise for one more long product generation. We both hate Windows 10. Every other machine in the house is BSD or Linux. My Android phone doesn't even have its data modem enabled (I can't stand the Android security model), so it's exclusively used for phone calls, text messages, and accessing my personal web server on the internal Wi-Fi. My wife's phone is a recent iPhone from her place of employment, which she only uses for text messages to me and a few other people, and for real work.
It's nice to have one machine in the place compatible with recent, mainstream things. It makes her place of employment happy when she teleworks from a platform they've ever heard of before. That's why she has an iMac in the first place.
1984 Apple's Macintosh Commercial
The T2 is that chick with the hammer. What's she's smashing is any narrative at all you can understand—to be replaced by the blinding wall of dazzling white light of Apple arrogance.
I fudged the date a little, but why not Remembrance day, for good measure? Because I remember the 1984 advertisement (as a scary harbinger), and I always will.
Who can watch that old commercial now, and not read it as foretelling a dark future?
Actually, that was all really good, but the author failed to notice that management functions were being overlaid on what he called a mere human abstraction.
He probably has a good idea of how this management function could be done more elegantly in this alternate world, and maybe I could figure it for myself with more time and another read through.
But it shouldn't have been neglected in the original narrative, because the view from elegance is not a first language for the reader until the reader has read and digested this document three times.
Kind of entertaining so far, but here's the first stupid:
Do you really want your routing table full of hard addresses like 11:22:33:44:55:66 that are node-locked to a particular chunk of metal?
No, not just an abstraction at the human level. Rather, a sane mitigation for the inevitability of failure and change.
This just in from the Devil's Dictionary:
Ecology — the formal study of insufficient models and their mutinous deficits.
When reality defies equations: error between world and (momentarily) conical graphite core. There is no hubris in this world quite like reality leaving a cossetted wonk slack-jawed.
You're a millennial, right? For you, the dividing line on ancient history is Y2K?
Well, I have I got the cure for you (for a whole $2):
Hardcore History: Prophets of Doom — April 2013
And if that doesn't cure you, scaphism certainly will.
Early generation technologies are often fragile in superficial ways.
Big whoop.
The main counterexamples come from startup ventures who define turd polishing as job #1.
Eventually even the sane do have to polish the turd (in the context of an adversarial arms race) to achieve mass deployment. Ideally, you financed your startup to also succeed at stage Number Two.
Your analysis is not even on the right set of train tracks.
Current compensation formulas might well involve relative conversion rates (I don't follow this closely), but that's merely convention.
What actually matters is the absolute conversion rate: number of widgets sold, and average selling price. As long as those two quantities are in the black, advertising will remain a going concern.
(There are a fair number of retail ventures where the price paid depends on your history of arrival. Amazon has tried this in house, but other places astroturf apparently independent outlets and then work to steer customers to the most expensive outlet, at or below willingness to pay. Willingness to pay is measured by having the deepest discount associated with filling out many bullshit forms, poor shipping terms, and generally poor terms in every other respect. Professionals very quickly elect to protect their time and energy by paying more under the general heading of "convenience". Gradually the industry trains consumers to accept their general convenience category, and to only shop within those parameters. This is half the function of advertising, as viewed from the systemic perspective.)
Bullshitting a lot of click-throughs (with no conversion possible) inflates the cost of delivering electrons (very marginal these days, though enough to make to make Amazon even richer).
It doesn't fall into hardly anyone's convenience category.
And it's fundamentally non-verifiable. Because while you fantasize over how this creates difficulties at the other end, all this sophisticated new AI isn't fooled (for long) in the slightest.
It's not like SSDs naturally degrade during their service life by sticking their thumb into a high voltage socket every time you press the "erase" button.
And it's not like the mysterious T2 security chip couldn't prevent you from booting into a future macOS from external media if Apple decides the obsolescence message isn't penetrating your thick skull.
Trust, but keep replacement parts close to hand in a desk drawer.
Small fly in the ointment: your body's response to light exposure at dawn and dusk differs. For most people, half an hour of bright light first thing in the morning helps to entrain a consistent, early sleep rhythm.
For many people, without any early light, their sleep phase drifts towards the owl pole. This won't stop you from sleeping at your chosen time. But it will cause your sleep to be lite, easily interrupted, and less refreshing. In more severe cases, you can wind up waking up for an hour or two, a few hours after hitting the hay. If accumulated fatigue fails to deepen your sleep, this can further devolve into chronic insomnia. (Maintaining high levels of accumulated fatigue is a lousy way to live in the first place.)
People who do attempt to maintain high levels of accumulated fatigue usually fall into a pattern called "social jetlag" where they either sleep a whole lot more on the weekends, or stay up very late and sleep very late (or both), turning Monday morning into a total ordeal. And the ordeal is not just something unpleasant to endure. Your associated performance decline is painfully obvious in any competent sleep study. Sleep quality effects on cognitive performance are one of the easiest things to demonstrate in any good sleep lab. One sleep researcher has a standing bet for any sleep-deprivation warrior to show up and sleep six hours or less a night, and not show immediate cognitive decline on fairly simple tests. Last I heard, no-one has collected.
Chorus: Put your linear models away, children, and start looking at what is already known.
And, oh yes, breaking news: the pancreas is now known to have a melatonin receptor. So your sugary foods spike your blood sugar differently in the morning than later in the day.
Chorus: Put your linear models away, children, and start looking at what is already known.
Bullshit. That's what they want people to think.
But you probably have to put a really painful object in one shoe, and smoke some weed, and listen to a lot of reggae.
Pretty soon, everyone with a Keyser So:ze limp will be arrested on sight. And he won't talk himself out of that one, because of the international Chinese gesture of "speak to the hand", which will actually be a palm-sized voice recorder, connected to an AI application, with only one defined output: "not convinced".
So AlphaZero becomes exceptionally good at chess with only 4000 TPU-hours of computation, self-playing something on the order of 40 million chess games.
Now just imagine the Mother of AlphaZero where you train an expert system to train up 10 million different AlphaZero-class AIs, so that it can devise the optimal network for any future AI task on pure gut instinct.
A mere 4.5 million TPU years later, and now AI is really cooking with gas.
The AI of the AI remains a little bit out of reach at current computational cost.
If there was no refund for the work performed, this may have been the intended outcome.
And then some people pretend to be embarrassed, but magically their re-election fund is well stuffed behind the scenes (you don't think your Congresscritter was so stupid as to not receive some appreciative campaign contributions?)
Turns out, the vast majority of humans either over-discriminate or under-discriminate cynical/stupid all the damn time. The problem is so hard, that most people just run around with their needle stuck to one end or the other.
Was your mentor a civil engineer? That preconditions the kinds of software projects he might have taken on to those with tighter boundary conditions in the real world, that being a huge advantage in building requirements/specifications top down.
I actually take a test sip black, and then decide on the cream level. Rarely ever cream in a quality single-origin medium roast.
In the rare cases where I'm in the kind of chain that has two coffees available, usually a medium roast (which might be medium dark) and a dark roast (which is usually a very dark overroast) I take a small sip of both, and then blend, usually 80–20 in favour of the lighter roast.
When the medium/medium dark has no real character on its own, I don't mind borrowing a little character from the creosote/Talisker family tree.
Nothing screams Indonesian jungle sea-level plantation like an oil-pan dark roast.
Like so many boys in the modern world, the distance between twitch and stitch remains undiscovered country.
What Kneebone is probably neglecting most seriously is the rampant inflation of admissions standards, in order to cope with the rampant inflation of medical knowledge. The good, old fashioned childhood arranging wooden alphabet blocks into long serpentine arcs is hardly an express train into modern medical school, no matter how hard you "choo choo".