7thaccount

Blackberry and it's variants like dewberry are very common in the south and do fine in the high heat and humidity. It's almost impossible to kill. I have 4 different varieties growing wild and in planters at my house.

I also have many apple trees and they do struggle - even the native varieties. I think that's mainly due to fungus, aphids, and the poor soil though.

No idea about avocado.

This is a really common trope of crackpots. They absolutely love comparing themselves to Galileo and saying the scientific community is like the church was during Galileo's time.

Angela Collier has a video that goes over the common tropes and once you see it, you can recognize it quickly. It's the same thing with Erik Weinstein who is trying to sell his persecution, when in reality he's basically a paid propagandist for the billionaire oligarch Peter Thiel. Why Thiel wants Weinstein to discredit our academic institutions is a good question.

No, he's become a grifter. He whines about "big science" trying to silence him when he literally IS big science being at Princeton and then a department chair at Harvard.

A few years ago when that interstellar object flew by he saw his chance to make a bunch of money selling books. Now he just makes wild claims with no evidence that the object was a light sail and contacts the media. He then tried to claim that SETI hasn't actually done anything and got told off by Jill Tatar...the literal inspiration for the movie Contact. Then he went off and dredged the bottom of the ocean and found some little spheres (extremely common) and started claiming they were from interstellar space and fudged the data.

What makes this complicated is that Avi was a pretty respected scientist with a huge number of papers. He knows how to do science properly and how the peer review process works, but doesn't care anymore now that he's getting attention and making money.

Check out

Angela Collier's video on YouTube: harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb

Professor Dave Explains video: Avi Loeb is a fraud now.

Understand was really good IMO.

Edit: the threat of violence is obviously not acceptable in an age of horrifying events like school shootings. I think that goes without saying, but wanted to add to my above comment. As I unfortunately didn't make it super clear.

However, there should be a way to address the risk and prevent acts of terrorism without turning into a police state. A more reasonable response might have been to have the parents come by for a long meeting with the principal, school counselor, and school resource officer to talk about the severity of making such statements - even if she did make it sarcastically as tone/intent is difficult to judge. Then suspend the student for a day or so and have the school resource officer periodically check to ensure she didn't bring any weapons.

To play devil's advocate though, I can't imagine the stress from parents who have children of Mexican descent in such a situation.

Yes. I think some are pointing out that this crazy level of surveillance is at Orwellian levels. Why are kids even messaging each other on these platforms? I know books and paper is old school, but it does the job well. If they have to use some kind of internal system, then a racist joke could've led to a detention and parent/teacher talk. It didn't need to auto-flag law enforcement and traumatize the kid for life. Involuntary commitment at school sounds as unAmerican as it gets.

Absolutely horrifying

This is hilarious. I'm glad they left the typo there.

A comfy tank on wheels!

I think the kind of plastic model kits like building muscle cars and ships has died down, but Warhammer and Gundam are both extremely popular. Battletech and Star Wars are also popular in my area.

There are a lot of Warhammer models and the parent company "Games Workshop" is doing extremely well and expanding despite it all being built in Britain. One neat thing about Warhammer is that there are a LOT of books and video games as well, so the IP is very strong. There is always new lore coming out from the various factions too, so the models have special connections with the fans. I have 3 game stores in my medium-sized city that cater to Warhammer and there is always a game going on. Warning: it is a very expensive hobby.

There is also a lot of popularity with 3D printing. I'd check out thingaverse or other popular 3d model sites to see how many downloads are coming from WW2 and muscle car models to maybe get a feel why hobby shops are struggling.

Modeling never died. It just evolved a bit. If you were ever into the WW2 kits, I'd check out Bolt-Action if you're interested in wargaming with models. It's not as big as 40k, but people do play.

Is that a forum for people with crown Victoria vehicles?

Thank you for trying to resist app-insanity. It really sucks that my doctor's office tries to get me to use one. No, I don't want to download an app for the one time I need it each year. Just make a freaking website. There are some exceptions like a calculator app that is completely offline.

I think because we weren't doing a whole lot of looking until recently. I think a bunch of lithium has been recently discovered in Arkansas.

Management consulting is a big one. It's illegal for companies to all tell each other their prices and costs. What isn't illegal? Apparently each firm hiring McKinsey who will tell you what your competitors costs and prices are because they have "industry knowledge". They'll then share your information too and then everyone can largely figure out how they can set prices above their marginal costs with some nice padding. It's probably still illegal, but it's what these firms do.

Yes, it's most likely they saw some kind of sales meeting, but collusion also happens often. I watched a documentary not long ago about how smart they are about it now. For groceries the major chains just all report each product's price to the same company which then tells them how much they can mark up their products without being undercut. Is it illegal, almost assuredly yes. Is there anybody enforcing this anymore? No.

Thank you for the extra context. Best of luck on your project. I might check it out if I ever need something like Spyder with a different language.

This looks exactly like the Spyder IDE that comes with Anaconda and WinPython. You get. Code editor, repl, variable inspector, and inline charts. Everything you need.

The author also wrote the "kitten" programming language which also has been talked about on here as well back in 2017:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13345832

That must have been a pretty frustrating conversation. It sounds like your kid is doing great!

I understand the gist of the comic, but don't think it truly applies.

Each generation has ups and downs compared to those that came before it. In recent times, short tik toks do seem to be detrimental by leading the brain to focus on receiving constant doses of dopamine instead of focusing on something like a book which requires much more focus.

I'm not saying the sky is falling, but it's different from the introduction of newspapers and radio and TV and even gaming. In the 60s I guess you'd watch a program with your family at night (like Andy Griffith). You weren't raised on monetized YouTube ads and then watching Tiktok all day. I don't think they're adapting at all, but not learning the necessary skills to hold a job. This isn't all Gen Z, but a lot have trouble focusing for extended periods of time, not to mention challenges with communication and socializing.

Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter.

I taught my daughter to read when she was 4 and she was reading ~30 page books in kindergarten. Nothing outrageous, but she was pretty far ahead of her class that were still going over ABCs. This was outside of a few other kids who had parents that also taught them to read that were more or less on the same level as her. I didn't bother trying to teach every last freaking phonics rule, I just taught her the different sounds each letter could make and started doing some 2 or 3 letter words each night where we'd sound out different options if the first attempt didn't work. Eventually we talked about "at" versus "ate" and when it mostly made sense to use short and long sounds. I had to relearn some of this myself while going through it. I had to warn her about weird cases a lot, but she caught on super quick. The whole idea though was to get her into those basic 5 page books and then incrementally up the difficulty rather than memorize a thousand rules up front like some poor student taking latin. Phonics is absolutely essential, but I fear that schools go overboard with it.

This is so frustrating for me. By the time the movie actually starts I'm exhausted and ready to leave. It's also the same commercials over and over. The previews are rarely something I want to see too.

Actually I haven't heard this. Does Arduino have a bunch of controversy now?

There's an app called Skoove that seems to do a lot of that. Not really a game, but you put your tablet on your piano and it shows you which keys to hit at the right time and makes sure you do it right. That's pretty much the same thing almost.

Did you mean Josie and the Pussycats?

They can't go C though, just 0.99999 C or whatever. So almost frozen in time :)

In this case you're talking about some information that the professor doesn't know. We don't know if he would or wouldn't have naturally excelled at that if he had been born in that environment.

I think there is learning ability like what kind of CPU your brain gets. Some people get a super computer that seems to break down at times. Some get an i7, some a Pentium III, and even some a TI-89 chip.

Then there is knowledge, which is what you take the time to learn and is kind of like an external storage drive to continue with the computing analogy. Even if you're not able to learn as fast as someone who is equipped with a better chip, you can outperform them at work if you know a lot more about the subject (you studied hard outside of work) and have taken the time to learn new skills like programming (you added new software programs to continue the analogy).

Then there is wisdom. You have a sort of common sense and ability to see the consequences of certain actions in a way that isn't so common.

Overall Intelligence in my eyes is then the sum total of someone's 1.) learning/processing ability, 2.) knowledge across multiple domains, and 3.) wisdom. Someone with a lot of #1 may be considered by many to be unintelligient if they have little of #2 and #3.

This is just my own stupid view on the subject though. I sometimes think we just haven't invented the vocabulary necessary to discuss this - that or I'm just not educated on the subject.

Milton Friedman and Jack Welch were pioneers of this nonsense.

I do like the sound of "language used in delightful ways". Too late in life I realized I didn't hate poetry at all ...just the Emily Dickinson kind I was exposed to in highschool. I guess I should've known as I loved Shel Silverstein as a kid.

I liked reading "this is how you lose the time war" recently if you want something that is essentially sci-fi themed poetry. If you haven't already read it, maybe that'll be a fun break.