thisrod

11 ms·

61.
by thisrod 6y ago
I was about to reply: because no one ever recovers from HIV infection. Then I realised it isn't true. People being treated for HIV are not contagious, so they "recover" in the epidemiological sense the moment they start tre
62.
by thisrod 6y ago
Quick question (and don't look it up). One government spends 35% of GDP, another spends 37%. Which is Australia, and which the USA? That's a normal year: COVID stimulus sent both off the charts, of course. The difference is tha
63.
by thisrod 6y ago
> There’s been a repeated surge after wars wrap up What are you referring to? The Second World War seems like the obvious case. I think there were two things at play there. European climbers returned to the Himalayas, and resumed wher
64.
by thisrod 6y ago
I suspect that, before the industrial revolution, everyday life was adventurous enough. Climbing didn't take off until the 19th Century, when the romantic movement was reacting against the safety and boredom of modern life, at least f
65.
by thisrod 6y ago
> the lack of syntax highlighting is pure elitism in my book That might be true. When you get past the snark, there is a strong argument against syntax highlighting in Plan 9. If your desk is too messy to find anything, tidy it up; if y
66.
by thisrod 6y ago
> But can you call a theory true if no one understands it? I understand non-relativistic quantum mechanics, i.e. the Schrodinger equation, so close to perfectly as makes no difference. So do thousands of other physicists. We don't
67.
by thisrod 6y ago
The mathematicians have a saying: the shortest path between two facts about real numbers often passes through the complex plane.
68.
by thisrod 6y ago
Do you mean wave packet solutions? The Schrodinger equation is linear, so I don't think it can have solitons.
69.
by thisrod 6y ago
> I suspect that our president’s mode of discourse has dramatically shifted what is seen as acceptable Why isn't that a rational response? Many of Trump's actions were wrong. However, he got away with them, and acceptable and
70.
by thisrod 6y ago
Apparently Orwell entered the public domain in Australia 20 years ago. I've been meaning to read some of this. http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-n-z.html#orwell
71.
by thisrod 6y ago
> Is that Crystallizing Public Opinion? Propaganda . > For voters, improve their ability to make the right choice via education and representative (not direct) democracy The common theme of Le Bon and Bernays was that such groups as
72.
by thisrod 6y ago
Good timing! I've just finished Le Bon and Bernays. > people may draw completely different conclusions from the same facts Le Bon points out a more basic issue. He wrote about the kinds of crowds who used to storm the Bastille and
73.
by thisrod 6y ago
> In the US, treaties are law. In Britain and Australia, they're not. (Except for the Tasmanian Dams Case.) Parliament has to, in effect, cut and paste the treaty into legislation, and only then will courts enforce it. Sometimes
74.
by thisrod 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1efOs0BsE0g There was an amusing twist after this was published. The creators got in trouble with the Australian Government, who were concerned about their use of the Australian coat of arms
75.
by thisrod 6y ago
There are a lot of basic mistakes in this article. It claims that cells haven't changed much in 1.5 billon years, when in fact eukaryotic cells and multicellular life are only 0.5 billon years old. The details of action potentials ar
76.
by thisrod 6y ago
Note that this case was decided in Australia. It certainly isn't the Soviet Union, but neither is it the USA. Especially where unions and employment law are concerned. It's also worth noting that the Fair Work Commission has bee
77.
by thisrod 6y ago
As an extreme point for comparison, Australia's annual deaths due to respiratory disease have reduced in 2020. Yes, you read that right: the net effect of COVID here has been to save people who would otherwise have died from pneumon
78.
by thisrod 6y ago
> There's a little bit about how chance can exist in determinism that is little more than sophistry, imo. I read that bit as a really good answer to a question famously posed by Knuth: 7 is a random number iff the reasons it isn&#x2
79.
by thisrod 6y ago
Literate.jl comes close. You maintain a file README.jl, with a mixture of Markdown text, example code in Julia, and hidden code in Julia. Inspired by Knuth's literate programming idea, there are several things you can do with that fil
80.
by thisrod 6y ago
> Geometric algebra is to exterior algebra as inner product spaces are to vector spaces To get from x∧x to |x|², you need a norm. And I guess linearity must break down somewhere unless that norm is compatible with an inner product. Tha
81.
by thisrod 6y ago
Thanks for this! Now I understand what geometric algebra refers to. When people talk about it, it always sounds like a simple generalization of exterior algebra. And so it is. You allow a formal sum of a 0-form, a 1-form, and so on up to
82.
by thisrod 6y ago
> NZ is still getting new cases In fairness, those are due to quarantine failures, which were anticipated and planned for. Why would a region with one person per square kilometer plan to quarantine people in a crowded hotel in the centre
83.
by thisrod 6y ago
Lol at the nominative determinism!
84.
by thisrod 6y ago
This gets even more fun when several communities discover the same thing independently, and each comes up with a different name for it. My favorite is the idea of "let's expand functions over a set of Gaussians". That is var
85.
by thisrod 6y ago
The classical music app that I want is surtitles. I.e, your phone figures out what is being sung on the radio, and displays an English translation of the lyrics.
86.
by thisrod 6y ago
The problem with that argument is that industries are consumers too. If anything is going to send Australian firms bankrupt, it's forcing them to pay exorbitant prices for steel and network routers that their competitors can buy cheap
87.
by thisrod 6y ago
I think the discussion of trade here misses two points. First, it can be argued that Australia started this trade war. Long before China put any restrictions on imports from Australia, we were putting "anti-dumping" tariffs on Ch
88.
by thisrod 6y ago
It happens in Australia and New Zealand, which don't have wild pigs.
89.
by thisrod 6y ago
> Apparently some measures were taken to prevent the virus from spreading along that route. Police road blocks. Geography no doubt helps: there are only so many bridges across the Murray River, passes through the Australian Alps, and ro
90.
by thisrod 6y ago
The goal is to keep the virus rare enough for normal public health measures to contain, and continue indefinitely with some 2m apart and working from home type restrictions. One effect of the virus has been a rise in geographic realism amon

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