Steuard

20 ms·

121.
by Steuard 9y ago
Right: As I said earlier, the list in this archive includes rec.humor.funny but not rec.arts.books.tolkien. (And I seem to recall that the alt.* hierarchy was a little less broadly propagated, which might possibly be related to why it wasn&
122.
by Steuard 9y ago
No apologies necessary: creating the archive in the first place was awesome! Like I said, this just shows how massive and complex Usenet is (or maybe, was), and how it's not easy at all to create a comprehensive archive. It's far
123.
by Steuard 9y ago
It's great to see some Usenet archives out there to partly make up for the disappointment of Google Groups. But I'm sad that this archive seems to be incomplete, even within its stated date range. Back in the day, I was active on
124.
by Steuard 9y ago
Google Groups was great when they first acquired all those archives! It just got progressively worse and worse over time, and I've never understood why. (Stagnation I could understand, but how did the same searches get less effective
125.
by Steuard 9y ago
[I'm a physics professor, for what it's worth, and I've spent more time than I care to admit trying to find a good textbook for this.] For folks with a programming background, I suspect it would be hard to do better than Mat
126.
by Steuard 9y ago
This sounds like a perfectly natural description of the estimated date range to me. Is there some significantly more efficient way of phrasing it that I'm overlooking? (Without resorting to scientific ± notation, at least?)
127.
by Steuard 9y ago
The US Geological Survey gives a slightly more nuanced answer ( https://water.usgs.gov/edu/whyoceansalty.html ), based (as I understand it) on comparatively recent progress in understanding this question. It turns out th
128.
by Steuard 9y ago
And indeed there is a concept of "neighborhood" here: a set of parameters characterizing the conformal field theory in question.
129.
by Steuard 9y ago
Where by "crypto" you mean "cryptocurrencies", rather than the more common "cryptography" (which I think is still overwhelmingly appreciated here), right?
130.
by Steuard 9y ago
They should put a higher priority on "don't kill an innocent person" than on "immediately eliminate anything that could be a threat". Police officers should be trained based on the principle that the loss of an offi
131.
by Steuard 9y ago
For what it's worth, I've heard a whole lot of above-average teachers complain about standardized testing, too. The things that one does in a classroom to optimize standardized testing performance are often not the same things o
132.
by Steuard 9y ago
I don't see "long-term financial success" as being obviously the right metric for judging education at all. It's worth considering, absolutely! But people choose to forego maximum wealth for other priorities all the time
133.
by Steuard 9y ago
Well, yes: I think that's the point (or at least, the debate). How do you translate such a multifaceted word when there is nothing with the same collection of meanings and implications in the target language? It's a brilliantly id
134.
by Steuard 9y ago
Quite a few people who oppose abortion also believe that emergency contraception commonly operates by killing fertilized eggs (by preventing implantation), which would qualify as abortion under their definitions. If that is your belief, and
135.
by Steuard 9y ago
From what I've seen, there are strong feminist advocates on both sides of the issue. The article gives examples of both. One side insists that prostitution is inherently coercive and especially focuses on how often women in prostitutio
136.
by Steuard 9y ago
The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions to it. You have just described what I profoundly loathed about practically every restaurant website in the early 2000s.
137.
by Steuard 9y ago
If you're an anomaly, then my wife and I are, too: that was exactly our experience. We were already pretty decent cooks, but in a bit of a rut. We used Blue Apron as a way to push ourselves to try new ingredients and new recipes. Once
138.
by Steuard 9y ago
This isn't a "science reporting" site: arXiv.org is providing the actual scientific article. The paper is supposed to require a specialized degree to understand: that's the intended audience of the vast majority of con
139.
by Steuard 9y ago
As the parent of a five year old, this isn't news to me! From all I read when she was dealing with lice, the over the counter pesticide shampoos in the US hardly work for anyone anymore (we tried anyway, at the firm insistence of our d
140.
by Steuard 9y ago
I used to sometimes see random volumes from the middle of The History of Middle-earth series sitting in airport bookstores. I'd look at that and just feel sorry for anyone who thought "Oh, I loved The Hobbit ! I'm looking fo
141.
by Steuard 9y ago
Tolkien's writings have been one of my chief hobbies for years ( http://tolkien.slimy.com/ ), so I've been really curious about what this new book would be and how it would be received. Having read a fair bit about
142.
by Steuard 9y ago
Different categories of diplomatic/consular staff have different levels of diplomatic immunity. Here's a complicated chart that details some of that: https://www.state.gov/m/ds/c9127.htm Note in particul
143.
by Steuard 9y ago
My understanding (which seems consistent with comments in the article) is that at that time, not telling the child was fairly standard medical practice, and thus would likely have been the doctors' recommendation to the parents. I&#x27
144.
by Steuard 9y ago
Here's an earlier NY Times article about a coastal Virginia community where property values are plummeting because a combination of rising sea levels and sinking land levels is gradually flooding the whole place out: https:/&#x2F
145.
by Steuard 9y ago
First and foremost: This is really cool, and thank you for sharing! (It's also the first explanation of the terms in the matrix equation for SVD that I've happened across that has really clocked for me: much appreciated.) Here&#x2
146.
by Steuard 9y ago
My librarian friends talk a lot these days about the changing roles that libraries play in their communities. There are certainly a lot of people who have less need for them purely as a place to borrow books and look up reference materials.
147.
by Steuard 9y ago
The desire to encourage home ownership to encourage savings was addressed in the article, I think. They pointed out that lower income people usually rent (because they can't afford to own, maybe particularly the down payment) and middl
148.
by Steuard 9y ago
Tom Moore's Six Ideas That Shaped Physics is one of my favorites. It upends the traditional order of topics in an intro physics class: it starts with conservation laws rather than F=ma, both because they're more fundamental (you
149.
by Steuard 9y ago
OpenStax is a really cool project, I agree. ( https://openstax.org/ ) It's organized by Rice University, with support from big name foundations like Gates and Hewlitt. The textbooks are free online, or campus bookstores
150.
by Steuard 9y ago
I think that the despair that people in these situations are facing is terrible and destructive and yes, a crisis. We need to find some way as a society to address the deep structural issues that has created this malaise. It's a really

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