343 karma · joined September 12, 2013
The main reason for how people in the West of Europe seem to perceive Italian driving has traditionally been Rome: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/31986...
My personal experience travelling in both Sicily and Rome was that people don't pay attention to lanes and don't care about traffic lights at all, and they're not afraid to drive quickly around tight corners and down narrow streets – this is not unique and is similar to how some areas of the UK drive, for example rural Essex and rural Wales have a lot of this.
Italy may have an unfair reputation as being a dangerous place to drive, but it does have that reputation in Western European countries.
I have only ever seen Americans and Canadians talking about the necessity to speed to keep up with the flow of traffic (and they have a higher rate of fatal RTAs per 100,000 than most Western European countries – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... – Canada is close to Italy, a country that is well known in Western Europe for terrifying traffic, while America is closer to South American countries)
While driving too slow is as dangerous as driving too fast, it's not as dangerous as the Solomon curve suggests, according to the article you linked:
> Reporting on these results in 1971, academics West and Dunn confirmed the findings of Solomon and Cirillo,[11] but found that crashes involving turning vehicles accounted for 44 percent of all crashes observed in the study and that excluding these crashes from the analysis greatly attenuated the factors that created the U-shape of the Solomon curve.
The topic of this conversation also seems to oddly mirror the course of the story from the original article. Minor acts of breaking a just law, justified on an individual basis, lead to a society in which regularly breaking that law is accepted – and indeed enforced – by the state.
That is probably why people are downvoting your parent comment.
For the record I don't have the ability or the desire to have the ability to downvote.
I think since so much quantum physics depends on maths, which in turn depends on highly specialised terminology or at least symbols, you are right that a Thing Explainer might have serious difficulty with quantum physics. A broad overview probably wouldn't have a serious advantage over the various lay explanations and thought experiments that are floating around at the moment. But as a non-physics student with an imperfect understanding of linear algebra, I would love to be proven wrong!
The page itself is really cool, and I love the effect. I wonder if I would be able to use screenshots from it for personal projects? I assume not.
As the most minor point that could possibly be made – never seen · before, seems like it could be quite useful.
> "The Alabama Granny Murder-For-Hire Plot" > "Attack Of The Kate Upton Clones" > "The Internet Is Just Broken"
...oh wait, that last one... It's not an issue with the internet, Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster style intriguing/bizarre stories have always been popular. Hyperbole brings people in, and it's not just about clicks – people will read stupid stories in The Sun or The Mirror depending on their political leanings, and feel entertained. Because they're fun, silly stories. I'd hate to write one myself but that's a personality trait I have, and not necessarily a positive one.
Also:
> Advertisers have wised up a little bit. There are now party tricks like branded content—wherein advertisers pay for stories that are sort of about their product, but are also about, say, travel or sports—and advertisers sometimes take into account unique visitors within specific demographics, based on age, race, and location.
> Tony Haile, the CEO of Chartbeat—the kings of metrics on the Web—tried to warn us about this last year.
I'm inclined to think this is a Daily Beast writer and Chartbeat being a bit cheeky! Hiding in plain sight. Not that I would begrudge them at all. It was a fun read. Although I disagree with the central premise behind writing it, most of the actual ideas seemed fine. Time on site is hardly a new concept though, and engagement in general has been somewhere on the priority list for (for example) Google for quite a while now.
- I thought that was an issue of tone.
I don't think it was dismissed because it doesn't bust the 'Katanas Are Just Better' trope, but because it actively perpetuates it.
> Also is the article even wrong?
- I think so, but I'm far from an expert. The quote says that the Katana's sharpness and strength were unique among swords, when in reality the picture seems to be far from clear-cut. Strength in particular involves some degree of flexibility, which Katanas did not tend to have (I think). The quote also says that a katana derived its strength and sharpness from the folding process - I think the article you link doesn't say anything about that. It says that it has a very sharp edge, and further that a curved edge is better than a straight edge for slashing.
FWIW I really enjoyed the original article, there seem to be some interesting parallels between how polearms in Europe and these chain weapons and thrown weapons in Japan developed from ordinary tools, and in such different directions (in some cases). I also think that tone might be a good reason to downvote a comment, I just thought the topic that the comment was hinting at could be quite interesting.
http://www.thearma.org/essays/hype.htm#.Vchr7RNViko
The Japanese blacksmiths' method of repeatedly heating and folding the steel was actually a way of countering the poor quality of the raw material they had, according to some other sources I've read but cannot find right now.
I assume that you didn't include this information because you know a lot about the topic and thought it was all common knowledge, but I'm not sure that it is.
It's more meaningful, and it shows that you're not trying to be deceptive. I've not tested it myself, as it is relatively new and I've not had opportunity or time yet.
edit: link to <details> docs https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...
Extremity also breeds community, so you get definitions influenced by the kinds of people who listen to them. Would you want a ton of people expecting gabber turning up to a generic hardcore night? It's a very different feel. Similarly you wouldn't want people who were expecting Depressive Suicidal Black Metal (DSBM) turning up to a second wave black metal gig.
Personally I like sub-genres, I think they're useful for people.
Also, Stryper were formed that year, which is an automatic black mark for me (no offence to Stryper fans intended, it's definitely a matter of personal taste...). And why is Bon Jovi in a list of heavy metal?
From the list of albums released, I see a lot of cheese and a few classic albums, with some degree of overlap. It's not very impressive to me personally. Electric Wizard and Nile won't even form for another decade, Immolation won't start putting out their most important work until '96, Emperor until '91-ish. Actually, I find 1991 or 1993 way more convincing personally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_in_heavy_metal_music https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_in_heavy_metal_music
I still reject the idea that metal has peaked yet.
Are you maybe a NWOBHM/Speed metal fan? I could definitely agree with that style peaking in the early-mid '80s.
Where do you think I would be able to read the essay when it's complete? Will there be a great deal of mathematics in there? (I have a poor/loose grasp of anything past high school mathematics, barring algorithms).
Higher house prices? (Chinese bears fleeing to overseas property like American bears flee to gold)
Lower house prices? (Chinese investors attempting to recoup their losses/keep enough cash on hand to pay their debts and other obligations)
Neither/something else? (perhaps Chinese real estate investment has a negligible effect on house prices)
This is a significant question for me because house prices in the UK are far too high for my partner and I to have much chance of ever buying a property, at present, even with a very healthy deposit.
I can't personally imagine this solution would be any less confusing, given that the new preferred apostrophe character according to this source is specifically a right single quote character.
In terms of philosophers alone, I suppose only Cicero or Seneca would spring to mind, and Seneca in particular followed closely in Epicurus' footsteps (I think, it's been a long long time, please correct if wrong).
These are just people who I am aware are widely read today, I can say nothing for their barbarity or otherwise. I don't know anything about Plotinus, for example, and I don't even know which Marcus you refer to, so I am hardly a very reliable source.
He's not being humble, there's just more to this than you might think.
For some context for the following, League of Legends is split between top, mid, jungle and bottom lanes (where there are two people).
So say you stumble into a fight situation that's 2v3 against you in the bottom lane, do you fight or try to run? Well, maybe you should run. But if you look at the map and you're close to your jungler, you can rely on them turning the fight. What about your summoner spells (utility spells with long cooldowns), are they up while your opponents' are down? What champions are you two playing, do you have a lot of Crowd Control, are you easy to kill, are you reliant on your Ultimate (a powerful skill, usually helping to define a character, usually on a long cooldown)? Is that Ultimate up?
What about neutral monsters, which grant bonuses? Is their own jungler likely to be up top getting red buff? Does it look like other enemy team members are also coming down to get Dragon (which used to give gold, but now gives team-wide buffs)?
What about how you've been doing so far in the game? Are you 'fed' (well-equipped/high-level) or not? Are they 'fed'? If they are, have they been spending on the right equipment to take you out?
All of this and much more goes into one, very simple, fight or flight decision that doesn't occur in FPS games. Decision-making is probably the biggest, most important skill for League of Legends, and that's why Faker talks about his decision-making strength in this way. That said, he's ignoring skills such as last-hitting and landing skillshots, probably because they come naturally to him. That's why he's able to say "regardless of which champion I play". A less mechanically-skilled player would have to stick to easier champions, such as Annie, but they could still do very very well with the right decision-making skills.
Essentially, there is a relatively low skill ceiling for mechanical skills (a combination of "don't stand in the fire" from WoW, being able to land your skillshots, and being able to quickly do basic arithmetic) and a very high ceiling for decision-making ability. In FPS games, the reverse is true.
> For me this looks more like someone running around aimlessly, bashing some spells and getting lucky. Please explain.
You are basically correct. This is a moderately skilled player with a character built around pure damage and avoiding damage trampling less skilled players who haven't accounted for the fact that he can dodge their abilities and damage, and have probably built their equipment wrong. In general a match at higher skill levels wouldn't have lasted so long and there wouldn't be so many kills.
He could have died here, though, he's not just bashing some spells. When he goes up in the air, he's able to dodge attacks. When he turns golden, he's invincible due to an item he has, but he can't move. He's helped by the fact that they waste their spells during times when he's invincible, which is pretty lucky (but you can count on it in the lower leagues). It's the fact that his enemies are running around aimlessly and bashing their spells that lets him survive, actually.
I can imagine different reactions, of course!
Why would bus drivers specifically be hostile to them out of interest, it seems like it'd be no skin off their nose?
It seems to be a problem with just a couple of adverts I was unfortunate to come across - they took up the bulk of the screen from the bottom, were fixed position, and they didn't have 'close' options. One was a public health campaign, don't remember the other one. Most of the adverts don't have this problem because no matter how large they are, they have some kind of close button.
I won't uninstall AdBlock, because I could quite easily imagine coming across the same sort of ad in future, but I'm keeping it paused at least for now.
Combined with the gutters, it reduces the percentage of the screen that's actually content to something like ~25% and is not removable. I want to support authors and creators using whatever method they think is best, but if your content is rendered illegible I'm afraid I will avoid that.
My personal standards can only stretch so far before I'll just take what I want, and I imagine many consumers are similar. Please reconsider your ad format.
I think the answer to that would have been no as of 2005 (http://cfpm.org/jom-emit/2005/vol9/edmonds_b.html), but I haven't been following since then so there could have been advances made.
I have a hopefully close friend who is much smarter than me whose field of study is memetics, so I am certainly not going to chuck out the theory for personal reasons as well as a natural cautiousness around ideas I don't really understand.
I think it's important that they bring up Dennett specifically, who has strong opinions about consciousness and intentionality that appear on a surface reading like they might conflict with his take on memetic theory (http://www.consciousentities.com/alternatives.htm#memes).
https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-oborne/why-i-...
In those careers where there is in fact an intermediate state, it can feel as though it is very narrow and difficult to stay in.
While the parent getting more pay may not really be important to a child, their long-term job security could prove to be essential.
I think once you understand those, the rest is really quite simple. Media queries, clever nonsense with things like ":target" or ":not([class]) > div > img", it's all ultra-simple because there are no logic bugs you can introduce once you know the syntax – the only logic you need to think about is in the positioning of elements on the page.
As a backend web developer, you will find it all very simple. A bit of bloody-minded Googling will solve the majority of your problems, and the CSS answers on StackOverflow are more helpful & polite than they are in many other areas.
For HTML, some features I have found useful include definition lists, dfn, nav, header, section and article elements. It may also be useful to check out Schema.org.
So I guess my recommendation is to get the box model and positioning down pat for CSS, and get semantic elements down for HTML5.
If you like genuinely clever and awesome tricks, check out Lea Verou (http://lea.verou.me/).
*"seen" as in "made myself"
I've just finished Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World by Justin Marozzi. A fantastic, thrilling, unnerving read. Tamerlane's ingenuity and political nous appears to have been incredible. Learning about Temur's life may change how you read all other history books. His mere existence changes the context and relative importance of much of Western European history.
I'm also enjoying and recommend Bloodhoof by Gerthur Kristny (trans. Rory McTurk), The Zoo Father by Pascale Petit, and Black Cat Bone by John Burnside. The Zoo Father and Black Cat Bone are among the most powerful collections of poetry I've read that were published within the last three decades, and Bloodhoof is also very good.