aatharuv

Many universities (but not MIT) are on a quarter system. I honestly don't know which one is more prevalent.

What dorms don't have kitchens? Certainly when I went to MIT, most (if not all) dorms at least had kitchenette's, 20 years back. Shared, of course, which is the main problem.

The real question is what percentage goes to pay administrative staff, and how that's increased to other parts of college costs.

I dropped by the Fremont Fry's the past weekend to see if the "inventory issues" I'd seen in September had gotten any better. They were worse.

From 2004 till about a year ago, I'd never seen any inventory problems at any of the Bay Area Fry's. Starting around June (I think), I'd noticed inventory issues at their Fremont and San Jose locations.

By September, it was very noticeable -- I couldn't even find a basic plug converter in preparation for an international trip a few months back, finding Target had better selection. When I asked if the store was closing, they said something about some inventory changes, presumably the move to the consignment model the article spoke about.

A few commenters mention that Fry's seemed to be adding more kids toys sections giving that as a potential reason for Fry's demise. Many retailers started stocking more kids toys as Toys-R-Us fell victim to vulture capital. I suspect Fry's was trying to cash in on the sudden market like many other retailers.

Well, it's certainly a reason for geek parents to give as an excuse to drop in to Fry's. Or was at this point.

On at least one occasion, the CC says a person is speaking in city speak, but the language is a Semitic language, probably Amhara.

I'd never heard of Tsunami Democratic. Now I've heard of it thanks to the Spanish State.

That's not the PPP multiple -- that's the PPP exchange rate.

From the chart you stated. Total, National currency units/US dollar, 2000 – 2018

I.e, in PPP terms 18 Rupees is one US Dollar.

In real terms, about 70 Rupees is one US dollar, given a PPP multiplier of slightly under 4 at current nominal exchange rates.

More like $30-$40 billion not $200 billion. The current PPP multiplier is somewhere between 3 and 4.

PPP is most useful when looking at domestically manufactured items and services. When looking at anything that needs to be imported, normal exchange rates are a much better tool. In fact due to import duties in India, many international goods are more expensive in India that in most of the west.

The "Neonazi" country you refer to simultaneously had a head of state and a head of government who were Jewish until a couple of months back.

Andrew Yang has thought of this (like seemingly everything else). He's calling for amongst other things matching federal grants for helping repurposes dead malls (and the 300 malls he says will likely close over the next 4 years) for other purposes.

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/american-mall-act/

People assume that people going to a college have a minimum level of competence, where $$$ is not one of the elements factoring into that competence.

In David Weber's Honor Harrington series, the original settlers of one of the planets (Grayson) found the soil was too polluted with heavy metals that they needed to create purified soil of their own for growing food. So amongst other things they buried people in their gardens, though by the time of the stories, they had transitioned away from being food gardens.

UV reflective film on the windows seems to be helping one room in my house which was consistently 10 degrees fahrenheit warmer than the others. Alternately, but a little uglier, taping white kitchen paper towels to the window solved the problem as a temporary solution.

Just by staying there, the Amazon is a natural resource. The lungs of the planet.

"We just need to figure some way for the Brazilians to make money off of it."

If Jair Bolsonaro is sufficiently Trump or Kim like, he could call it tribute.

Huh. On the freeway (CA-84) in the SF Bay Area, I keep on seeing an ad for some seminar on H1-B to EB-5 (with Bobby Jindal headlining as a speaker). I wonder if it's related, other than (presumably) being a conduit to invest in Louisiana.

(Lots of people on H1-B's especially from India want a faster path to get a green card rather than be stuck in limbo for decades..

There are lots of people without green cards or citizenship who actually can live in houses they buy.

-- People on H1B visas -- People here as students. Okay, they'd have to have rich parents, but some times it makes economic sense -- Other people here for the long term but not necessarily having green cards (people here as refugees, for example).

I wonder what the violation of privacy law was for the apps taken down by Kuwait (and Saudi Arabia)...

Mercury doesn't keep the same side to the sun all the time. So you'd need to either bury everything deep enough (obviously not possible for solar cells), or keep them such that they're always on the terminator. The latter has been explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's work, 2312.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2312_(novel)

Interestingly enough, Sanskrit is an official language of India, both at the national level, and in at least one state (Uttarkhand).

They called their currency a dollar. If they had called them "freedom rounds", they would have been fine.

Or if they had been owned by Disney for that matter...

Harassing people into giving out their personal details by claiming they're from immigration, at least according to some articles on the subject.

Theft would be more accurate.

Pidgins and Creoles are on a continuum -- once pidgin's get native speakers and a stable grammar, they're creoles. But Yeah, I didn't mention that.

India's definition of what is and what is not a language is highly politicized and highly idiosyncratic.

Hindi and Urdu, by any reasonable linguistic definition are not separate languages. The official standards for both Hindi and Urdu, are both based on the form of the huge dialect continuum that spans North India and Pakistan, as spoken in Delhi. The only difference is that Urdu uses Persian and Arabic as inspiration/source for high vocabulary, whereas Hindi uses Sanskrit as a source for high vocabulary. And they use different scripts. But on the street level, the language is identical, not merely mutually intelligible.

Many of the languages traditionally clubbed by the Indian government as Hindi are much farther away from standard Hindi than Urdu.

Mumbai Hindi is not a creole by any definition of linguistics. It is actually a dialect of Hindustani with Marathi and other languages mixed in.

A Creole specifically occurs when two languages (usually unrelated) suddenly mix together, usually with a _greatly_ simplified (but consistent) grammar from the parent languages. It's not just the result of heavy borrowing.

I don't believe that's happened for Mumbai Hindi.

What language do you speak that's a creole?

The website hasn't been updated for at least 2 years though.

(Under America, it still lists Barack Obama as the President.

Cool.

For an older implementation of programming using a natural language, there's Lingua::Romana::Perligata http://users.monash.edu/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html

Unfortunately for probably most people here, the natural language in question is Latin.

Is there any chance that the half-life of Xenon-124 is lower than previously thought?

The thing to note is that India is enroute to negative population growth.

India's TFR is still > 2.1 (2.33), but is fast approaching replacement fertility. Large parts of India (especially in the South), are already below TFR, so while populations will continue to grow for decades (India has a pyramidal population structure), they will eventually start falling.