iguy

83 ms·

871.
by iguy 8y ago
Indeed, there could have been some other critical shortage barring the way. (IIRC the soviet bomb-makers mined half their uranium in germany, but something else maybe.) But aggregate industrial capacity wasn't obviously a show-stopper,
872.
by iguy 8y ago
Wikipedia thinks that the V2 project cost 50% more than the Manhattan project. If this is credible (and it roughly matches what I remember) then the Germans' problem wasn't that they were unable to (afford to) build factories fast
873.
by iguy 8y ago
Not even a front, I'd say, that implies this was somewhat hidden. The first thing anyone thought about Sputnik was that it could as well be a bomb. Rockets reliable enough to fly celebrities to orbit were pretty direct advertising of e
874.
by iguy 8y ago
There's also a strategic purpose: it's easier to hire ICBM designers if designing ICBMs isn't the sole career path for them.
875.
by iguy 8y ago
Besides cowing the USSR, I think that a valid war aim was fully cowing Japan. One of the lessons of WWI was that military victory wasn't enough, too many Germans could tell themselves afterwards that they were stabbed in the back, etc.
876.
by iguy 8y ago
Instead of making the famous mountain of butter (beside a lake of milk) they now pay famers not to farm, which has its own oddities. Including discouraging of re-wilding I think, as the land has to be plausibly farm-able to get the cash. Th
877.
by iguy 8y ago
Thanks! Turns out there is a whole trolleybus youtube, amazing.
878.
by iguy 8y ago
Not so obvious this is a downside. Apartments with good transport links often earn higher rents, and the builder cares about rents decades into the future... and an immovable tram line is a stronger indication than just a bus stop.
879.
by iguy 8y ago
Do the hybrid ones have any clever way to re-connect? All the busses I've seen have this system where the driver has to walk to the back and pull on some rubber bands to put the tentacles back on the wires. If this could be automated,
880.
by iguy 8y ago
Right I genuinely don't mean that as an insult, perhaps my cooking example was flip. There is lots of genuine progress made by other means -- anyone think that Toyota's process inventions in were done by double-blind trials on a l
881.
by iguy 8y ago
But these post-tenure 49% positions are the new thing to encourage people to go -- the previous option was emeritus, not only 0% but also unable to be the PI on grants etc. So they must have found a magic money tree somewhere to pay for the
882.
by iguy 8y ago
> Why don't the peer reviewers demand higher standards? I'm not sure peer review can change a field's direction. Say the top journal in a field used to publish the top 10% of papers. If only 1% of papers meet some higher s
883.
by iguy 8y ago
Then it sounds like people are doing something quite far from science. That's not a criticism, there is lots of knowledge which isn't scientific... for example if you want to know how to run a restaurant, you need to talk to lots
884.
by iguy 8y ago
> Part of the effort of reproducing work is certainly figuring out which aspects of the model design are critical or incidental Isn't this the work of writing up? A paper is a claim that you have discovered something, and implicitly
885.
by iguy 8y ago
Do you know how Japanese norms/laws around child car seats differ? I feel this is part of what's changed in the US: the 70s station wagon worked for 3-4 kids in a row, but to fit 4 enormous small-person seats you need a minivan.
886.
by iguy 8y ago
The story with the Transit Connect is that it counts as a car (for this tax) while it has the seats, but would counts as a truck when configured for cargo. But if this same tax discourages (say) Toyota from importing SUVs, then they must co
887.
by iguy 8y ago
And no mention of plows. IIRC almost the entire reason that northern europe could have a much larger society in medieval times (compared to roman) was that they had more metal, for making better plows, to turn over the heavy soil. That&#x27
888.
by iguy 8y ago
As a non-OOP-thinker, this seems completely natural to me. The verb hit doesn't belong completely to one noun, so it shouldn't be forced to live within the struct/class with the data (which really is about only that noun). Wh
889.
by iguy 8y ago
I've actually had good luck round-tripping lyx-latex-lyx repeatedly to collaborate with lyx-phobic co-authors. (As long as they don't mind equations they typed getting auto-formatted, etc.)
890.
by iguy 8y ago
On a recent mac, you can enable Greek as a second keyboard, and tick the box there to make caps lock switch keyboards. As long as you don't need caps lock as your escape key...
891.
by iguy 8y ago
Machine learning papers are a particularly toxic brew of people in a rush, who like to show off, and who spend all day fiddling with code & little time reading or writing mathematics. Lots of formulas for quite simple things are at best
892.
by iguy 8y ago
I think China might be the outlier here, not Europe. (Thinking of the last 1000 years, say.) India was very fragmented -- the Mughals achieved great extent and then great longevity, but not both at the same time.
893.
by iguy 8y ago
Indeed, discounting the American civil war seems to be the crucial step for making the 19th C look safe. While obviously not physically in Europe, it was the closest fore-taste of what determined modern states could do to each other. But co
894.
by iguy 8y ago
That pre-colonial farming in Africa required relatively few hours of labor is well-known. I don't have a great link but "female farming system" is a term to start from (seriously, I didn't make it up). The reason, if I u
895.
by iguy 8y ago
I hope those diaries do get translated. I know of some efforts to do this for Partition stories, including oral histories (starting in the 80s). Don't forget also that vast numbers of european men were also simply conscripted, as unwil
896.
by iguy 8y ago
For downvoters (who perhaps don't like my swipe at commies): my point here is that not all of these were honest if misguided attempts to improve farm productivity. Some, like in Ethiopia, were closer to ethnic cleansing -- deliberately
897.
by iguy 8y ago
There are varying levels of communist madness, from "you must pursue this strategy, sub-optimal for conditions here" all the way to "you will stay in this barbed-wire pen until you all starve". In the 60s/70s Tanzan
898.
by iguy 8y ago
This is a great book, and easy to read. For russia I also like Yegor Gaidar, there's a book but the summary is http://www.aei.org/feature/the-soviet-collapse/
899.
by iguy 8y ago
Growing corn or wheat is indeed super-efficient in its use of human labor. But pretty wasteful in topsoil, chemicals, energy. And other crops (like fruit, or herbs) are much more labor-intensive. So that's two directions where it would
900.
by iguy 8y ago
The west has been decoupled from Malthusian equilibrium for two to three centuries. At earlier times, say 800 years ago, I think it can be argued that population densities in Europe were lower than in China because farming was optimized mor

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