dkirkman

4 ms·

1.
by dkirkman 8y ago
Tahoe has a surprising number of jurisdictions! I'm on the Nevada side, so I don't have personal experience with the SLT enforcement. Here there seems to be a fair amount of teeth gnashing about airbnb -- there are clearly more p
2.
by dkirkman 8y ago
I think in general, it's very difficult if not impossible to realistically explore the counterfactual of "what would this property be if not for Airbnb". However, in my neighborhood long term 12 month lease rentals most defin
3.
by dkirkman 13y ago
The whole issue of whether or not nanotech would end up just looking like enzymes was a big part of the famous Drexler/Smalley debate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%93Smalley_debate_... ) I always foun
4.
by dkirkman 13y ago
> Your are not required to use exceptions or templates if you don't want to. This is absolutely true -- at least if you're working alone. But I've always found the whole "let's use a subset of c++" to be un
5.
by dkirkman 13y ago
Yes, there are pills that will both increase insulin sensitivity (metformin), and to stimulate insulin secretion (the sulfonylureas). These are basically the first line of treatment. But the disease tends to progress to the point where th
6.
by dkirkman 13y ago
This isn't entirely snarky. The ACCORD trial was a spectacular failure ( http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0802743 ). Nobody really knows why (as far as I know), but since high blood glucose is
7.
by dkirkman 13y ago
The precision of the timing and dosing depends a lot on what kind of diabetic you are. A type 1 with no endogenous production is going to need precision, and I can't imagine somebody wanting tight control giving up their pump and goin
8.
by dkirkman 13y ago
Living with a type 1 for a number of years has given me a similar view. On the other hand, very real (and often hyped) advances really do happen. When pumps first came out, they were almost magic, ditto with continuous glucose monitoring.
9.
by dkirkman 13y ago
To be fair, the c++ programmer can also use reference semantics via pointers. Granted, garbage collection is not built into the language, but if desired, we can always write java-style code by using pointers for everything and using the Bo
10.
by dkirkman 13y ago
> If I had to guess, I'd say it's based on the fact that math involves a lot of critical thinking and critical thinking is very difficult to teach. I think it's even worse than that -- I suspect that many teachers in American public sch
11.
by dkirkman 13y ago
The problem is that in terms of getting jobs, promotions, and tenure, producing code has no value. Except for the people that actually write it, "programming" is generally considered to be a trivial task. So if you invest time writing dat
12.
by dkirkman 13y ago
> Thanks for posting. I would have thought narrow lines would produce the problem that those specific lines would become unavailable for study, or would be freely mixed with the "real" data in confusing ways. It didn't occur to me that
13.
by dkirkman 13y ago
On Mauna Kea (big island of Hawaii) the biggest sources of light pollution are the airports and harbors. For the telescopes near big cities, I'm not sure if anybody has worked out the relative contributions of street lights to say billboard
14.
by dkirkman 13y ago
Street lights that emit narrow spectral lines are not a problem at all for spectroscopy, except of course at the line wavelengths. I have a bit of experience here -- a few more than 400 nights observing spectroscopically at Lick Observator
15.
by dkirkman 13y ago
There are a few good reasons that one might prefer common lisp to scheme. It has been stable for a good long time. Which is nice if you've got a giant repository of old code that you dust off and run from time to time. CL has a standard wa