thisrod

22 ms·

241.
by thisrod 9y ago
The fact that Google is refusing to deny it is, in my view, pretty strong circumstantial evidence.
242.
by thisrod 9y ago
Pilot waves are not a theory. No experiment can exclude them, unless it falsifies the entire quantum theory of mechanics. One reason to dislike pilot waves is that people, speaking as scientists, take them too seriously. This is not to s
243.
by thisrod 9y ago
I'm currently reading Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce by Anthony Reid. It's well written history, and the topic has some interesting aspects. The view of Europe from 20 thousand kilometres is quite insightful. The big pa
244.
How a single computer failure stopped Melbourne's trains(citymetric.com)
3 points by thisrod 9y ago|0 comments
245.
by thisrod 9y ago
> In May 2015, an on-call engineer failed ... At the time, Uber had recently reached a valuation of $50 billion. I find that astonishing. Outside Silicon Valley, I think that it would be quite unusual to leave $50 billion of plant runni
246.
by thisrod 9y ago
> Where are the massive capital expenditures we saw in the 19th and 20th centuries? Those expenditures are still around: they built the roads, runways and skyscrapers that we all use today. Why do developing countries spend a lot more on
247.
by thisrod 9y ago
I think that the author needs to learn about association lists. The constructor (define point '((x 1) (y 2) (z 3))) is as clear as any other language. Granted, (assoc 'x point) is a bit more verbose than point.x, but you could e
248.
by thisrod 9y ago
> First, participants spent almost 40 minutes out of every 100-minute class period using the internet for nonacademic purposes I think that I'd be one of them; in the absence of a laptop, I'd spend that time daydreaming. How m
249.
by thisrod 9y ago
I've been using AWK for decades, but the NFC avatars are new to me. Has anyone started a business where you send in some photos, or sit for a sculptor, then they 3D print a set of NFC caricatures for you? I imagine it would be fairly
250.
by thisrod 9y ago
The title is misleading. There isn't a mass dump of Medicare records, there's just some crook in DHS who will email you a single record in return for $30, presumably in bitcoin. No doubt there are a dozen crooks who will print t
251.
by thisrod 9y ago
Facebook's killer app was being the phone directory. Once upon a time, there were paper mail and landline phones, with a directory where you could look up pretty well anyone's address and phone number. That was really useful; it
252.
by thisrod 9y ago
I'm unconvinced by the paragraph beginning, "However, the above result leads to a striking contradiction with the covariance principle, which is a fundamental prerequisite of the special theory of relativity." It is pretty we
253.
by thisrod 9y ago
The problem is that it will cost 100 billion dollars (!), and it really isn't clear that it's worth that much. That's where the French seem to have some magical advantage.
254.
by thisrod 9y ago
There is another question here. How the hell did the French build 300km of high speed track, going through central Paris , for only 10 billion dollars? If Australia could do that, the cost benefit analysis on Melbourne, Sydney and Brisba
255.
by thisrod 9y ago
> Like all elite groups with legally enshrined privileges, this group has created a set of myths to justify its existence, and a scapegoat to blame for society's ills. Suppose that you're right. Then why are these things more
256.
by thisrod 9y ago
I doubt that they addressed the general problem with this type of recreational drug experiment: the hypothesis that different brains and psychology cause different behaviour is very plausible a priori, the reverse not so much. It would be g
257.
by thisrod 9y ago
The title is a bit misleading. The army and Bell Labs could have built a cellular phone in the 1940s, but they had no way to keep it connected to the telephone network as it moved between cells. That required computerized telephone switch
258.
by thisrod 9y ago
Yes. This only matters for half an hour, once a year, when there isn't enough wind or sunlight to generate electricity. It's OK for a washer to just say no if you try to switch it on in that half hour, and maybe that makes more s
259.
by thisrod 9y ago
What, because all the good ones were written before scientists could afford books with pictures? :-p Check this out: https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Complex-Functions-Introduction...
260.
by thisrod 9y ago
This list ducks the most important question: "Is it possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without everyone on Earth mastering every technical detail of modern industry?" The answer is, of course, yes.
261.
by thisrod 9y ago
Looks great. I have a bunch of ad-hoc Matlab functions for quantum optics, which I should port to one of these more polished libraries.
262.
by thisrod 9y ago
You mean to say that, whenever I load a CSV file into LibreOffice, anything that looks like code gets executed? Excuse me one moment while I patch that program with rm -rf. Thank goodness that A. W. and K. got this right 35 years ago, inte
263.
by thisrod 9y ago
> The Chinese are still bent on dominance and interested in various conquests. What evidence do you have for that, as opposed to this alternative hypothesis: 1. The Chinese have a bit of a thing about uninvited guests. C.f. world histor
264.
by thisrod 9y ago
So the Koreans might have to do the same things to the little girls in their pop videos, using Photoshop, as the Italians did to the little boys in their Renaissance art, using paint. Before those underpants were painted on, the bare bums o
265.
by thisrod 9y ago
I think that everyone should read The Idea Factory , for a reason similar to the reason that everyone should learn Lisp. Bell Labs no longer exists, and you will never get to work there; but you can learn how research and supervision coul
266.
by thisrod 9y ago
> who is the most famous maintainer you can think of? The pope.
267.
by thisrod 9y ago
> The real issue There's real a higher-order issue, too. Why did anyone want GNU to incorporate an MP3 player in the first place? There is no law of physics that requires songs to be encoded as MP3.
268.
by thisrod 9y ago
Here's a reform to the copyright law that just occurred to me. If you buy a copy of a published work, then you're allowed to copy and distribute it as you see fit, provided that you pay the creator the same royalty that they were
269.
by thisrod 9y ago
Does anyone know what fractions of American equity currently belong to active and index investors? That seems like an important question, but the article doesn't address it.
270.
by thisrod 10y ago
There is potentially a really simple answer to the question, "What happened in England in the 17th Century and changed everything?" Isaac Newton. I'm surprised that historians don't consider that possibility, at least to

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