thisrod

21 ms·

151.
by thisrod 7y ago
The difference is that we now have a once-a-century fire every Friday.
152.
by thisrod 7y ago
To give a sense of the scale of this, I've spent the last few days coughing because of the smoke from a wildfire that's burning 500 miles upwind of me. And summer has only just started.
153.
by thisrod 7y ago
Where is it being talked about?
154.
by thisrod 7y ago
It's referring to the manifesto of the protesters. There's the usual boilerplate about releasing arrested demonstrators, arresting the cops who bashed them up, and sacking the government. There are two big demands. The first is wi
155.
by thisrod 7y ago
It depends what you mean by "traditional" and "fuzziness". In ray optics, shadows from point sources are black and white. (If half of the sun is obscured, the surface it illuminates is half as bright, but that's
156.
by thisrod 7y ago
Back in the days of photographic film, Kodak and Fuji were said to have lots of blind workers in their darkrooms.
157.
by thisrod 7y ago
Game of Mates gave a detailed explanation of how this process happened in Australia. https://gameofmates.com/
158.
by thisrod 7y ago
It's clear that the game being considered is the prisoner's dilemma, which is famous for not being zero-sum.
159.
by thisrod 7y ago
Here's my favorite recent example: https://www.pollbludger.net/2017/11/15/sex-marriage-survey-6... One thing I like is that it's so simple. There's a scatter plot of Australian electorates. O
160.
by thisrod 7y ago
I'm not sure about that. There is genuine value created by avoiding the need for a significant fraction of the world's airline pilots to use scarce and expensive simulators all at the same time, and Boeing's claim that they
161.
by thisrod 7y ago
Thanks. Your post is the first time I've read a physically plausible explanation of this.
162.
by thisrod 7y ago
"You'll have a chance at landing the dream job of the richest person on Earth"? (Bill Gates, member of the technical staff at Bell Labs in the late 1940s.)
163.
by thisrod 7y ago
Or you could be at an elite private high school, rightly upset about aspects of it, but aware that something which strikes a 14 year old as a pointless abuse of power might actually be the grit for which penicillin and the structure of DNA
164.
by thisrod 7y ago
Americans are scared to start another labor party, because the last one lost the second biggest war in American history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
165.
by thisrod 7y ago
Great! A book length biography of Wheeler is long overdue.
166.
by thisrod 7y ago
I was going to ask if the French have anything as ridiculous as Australian senate ballot papers. I wouldn't expect volunteers to deal with those. Then I remembered that the senate count at Australian polling booths is a rough approxim
167.
by thisrod 7y ago
When I've been involved in such things, the phrase "Dear Mister Coroner" has come up regularly.
168.
by thisrod 7y ago
Academia works the other way. The default is that you're fired, when your PhD scholarship/postdoc/research grant runs out. To keep your job, you have to get rehired every few years. Some people have tenure, but some people
169.
by thisrod 7y ago
"At the time of the accident, van Zanten was KLM's chief flight instructor, with 11,700 flight hours, of which 1,545 hours were on the 747." - Wikipedia. Meritocratic thinking was a major cause of the worst air accident ever
170.
by thisrod 8y ago
The problem I see with these rules is that you're only going to read new books. I use a heuristic that the best book about a given topic was most likely written half as long ago as people have been thinking about that topic. People wr
171.
by thisrod 8y ago
There's an old saying in physics: "Knowledge advances one funeral at a time."
172.
by thisrod 8y ago
I doubt that there's enough data to plot. For early modern South East Asia, only a couple of records per century survive for the total populations of the main cities, and those are pretty dodgy. There might not be any quantitative rec
173.
by thisrod 8y ago
> Disable the autopilot / M.C.A.S. via switch. The version of the article that I read says: "The pilot of Flight 610 appears to have [pressed that switch] repeatedly to bring the nose up, but the MCAS reactivated each time, as
174.
by thisrod 8y ago
The thing is, you can't go to most of the sites where history happened. They don't exist anymore. Want to see where the French Revolution happened? Sorry, Haussmann blew it up and built today's Paris on the rubble. Venice?
175.
by thisrod 8y ago
> Without the Arab and Muslim scholarship much of Greek/Roman wisdom would be lost. I've just been on a holiday in Venice and Florence, which made me question that standard wisdom, as I learnt more about Venice and Constantinop
176.
by thisrod 8y ago
Smalltalk has been around since the 1970s, though. Given the things the community is interested in, schools, video, sound, and so on, it's odd that accessibility never came up.
177.
by thisrod 8y ago
Roughly, that was done around 1990, and called Plan 9. The cost of fork in Unix was was one of the problems that Plan 9 tried to fix. No one used it, so the developers backported as much as they could to Unix, and released it as Go. By my
178.
by thisrod 8y ago
Once upon a time, a university friend of mine spent his summers working for the Australian public service. His response to the rumours about Eschalon, before the Australian spooks confirmed them [1], was: "They're capable of doin
179.
by thisrod 8y ago
This is a trade off. It's always easy to write unreadable stuff, hard to write stuff that's easy to read, and very hard to write stuff that's easy to read yet long enough to say something worth hearing.
180.
by thisrod 8y ago
> the profession was high on precision engineering based off modern finite element models Two years ago, I organised a party for the 50th anniversary of one of Australia's first geodesic domes, which was designed and built by some u

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