aethertap

Alternative history, if perfect surveillance existed in 1950:

The first private conversation that Martin Luther King, Jr. had about the injustice of his time was captured and automatically analyzed, and as a result he was identified as a disturber of the peace and arrested for unrelated violations long before his message ever reached an audience.

Rosa Parks was detained for disorderly conduct long before she made her stand, and as a result her stand never happened.

There was never a zeitgeist of change in the oppressed community, because there were never any stories of people resisting. They were all prevented from acting in any significant way, or from getting together to share their stories and find support.

The issue of racial discrimination never made it to court because all of the people who could have brought it there were stopped before they could get started.

Perfect surveillance can stop any threat to the status quo while it's in its infancy, long before it amounts to anything. It can probably do it without introducing any new, draconian laws by simply looking through recent history for "questionable" actions and harassing people over them.

The argument that it's okay now basically amounts to saying that there is no longer any injustice and that today's system is a perfect example of virtue and fair play, and that anyone who disagrees is a malcontent who really does deserve to be silenced.

Sometimes the majority is wrong, and it takes brave people willing to break the rules in order to point it out and change things. I'd say that democracy does depend on privacy for this reason.

Here's another part that I think contributes to the "... inequality persists in part because individuals are not averse enough to inequality,” based on my own perception of the situation in my part of the country.

I think people are generally less willing to share what they have when they feel insecure about their future. There is a LOT of uncertainty in front of most people at this time, and in that case the reflex is to squirrel away as much as possible for a rainy day. When you feel secure in your future, it's easy to be generous, and it takes less stuff to fee like you have a surplus. When you're worried about what the future holds, taking care of yourself and your loved ones takes precedence.

I'd look at this as an interesting data point that probably gives some kind of estimate of the combined effects of different levels of uncertainty about the future and the social views of income inequality in different places, but I don't think it's nearly as clear-cut as it seems to be in the article.

Slightly off-topic, but I have a friend who does training for active shooter response (he goes around to schools and large businesses and teaches people what seems to work best for saving lives in these situations). When I see things like "they huddle under their desks in the dark" I cringe. His training is very different, and focused on evacuating the students and disrupting the shooter. First, barricade the doors, then seek immediate escape and RUN. If that's not possible, everyone picks up whatever they can throw and gets ready to pelt the shooter with it if the door is breached. While this is happening, people escape around the edges and others attempt to subdue the shooter (taking advantage of the fact that it's very hard to shoot accurately when you're being pelted with hard, heavy objects).

He has researched a number of these events, and he has some chilling stories. In one case, the shooter walked up and down the rows of desks where people were cowering in the dark and executed each person. I think he said there were only a couple of survivors, and even those were critically injured. In the same shooter incident (sorry I can't recall where he said this one happened), another classroom used the disrupt and escape method, and almost all of them survived.

Bringing it back to topic, I wonder how the psychological effect would change if the students and teachers were trained with active responses that have been shown to greatly improve their odds of survival, instead of being told to wait passively in the dark and hope they get skipped. Would the fear be reduced? I honestly don't know how it would be for kids, but in my own case I feel better when I'm prepared to act instead of having to wait around for something to happen to me.

I have the full 20-ish volume print edition, which is fun to peruse sometimes if you have the shelf space for it. I got mine used for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 on ebay, so you might check there.

For anyone else in my position, who thought that AC won because it was inherently more efficient for transmission, the Wikipedia page [1] has a nice overview of HVDC. There's also this PDF from Siemens[2] with some data. Interesting points: the voltage being discussed is in the hundreds of thousands of volts (800,000 for the line in the PDF), and the transmission losses are apparently 30-50% lower for HVDC.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

2. https://www.siemens.com/press/pool/de/events/2012/energy/201...

That sounds fascinating to me - is there any way you could elaborate a bit on the specifics of a typical class structure (how many/how long, were exercises limited to the subject at hand or more integrated with other topics, etc)? I'm trying to raise my own teaching game and that sounds like something I should try.

I was going to write exactly this, but you beat me to it. My whole family (me, spouse, two kids aged 5 and 8) train four days a week and we all love it. I get bored easily with other exercise, but so far have never had that problem with Jiu Jitsu.

Having never played or heard of the game before this, I am hesitant to edit the page. However, I played the game for a few hours with a large group of kids from 5-15 years old, and we found that if you allow bugs to be squashed if they're adjacent to a fortress, it leads to a kind of contagion where nobody places any new bugs after the first contact is established, and all chains of bugs are just squashed all the way back to the home base. Restricting the squash operation to only situations where a friendly bug is adjacent to an enemy bug solved the problem and led to much more interesting play. I put a note on the talk page for the wikipedia draft, but perhaps someone who has played the game before can comment on this?

You may be right at this time, but the suggested fix feels a lot like plagiarizing the work of Wikipedia editors. It takes significant work to gather sources and turn them into an informative article. I believe that work should be recognized, even if it was published on a free access platform like Wikipedia. Is there some middle ground between using their work without acknowledging it and suffering a stain on credibility because of guilt by association?

We like Set, too. We also play a similar game called Qwirkle (played by laying tiles in interlocking groups). Qwirkle is played in turns, so some of that pressure of not being fast enough is eliminated.

I play a game with the creative name "make 10" with my kids sometimes that was inspired by Set, except that you have to pick groups of cards that add to 10 (or other numbers, if they're too good at it). My daughter has to find groups of three cards and can use addition and subtraction, and my son just uses addition on groups of two cards. We use regular playing cards with only A-9 included.

I can second this, with a minor caveat. My daughter (third grade) loves these books, and we get a lot of good problem-solving into the curriculum as a result. The caveat, in my opinion, is that they don't provide enough cyclic review in their default configuration.

Each chapter includes 80-100 problems, divided in to usually between 4-8 sections. The problems are great, but once a section is complete they're weak on later refreshes. I've been working around this by doing even-numbered problems the first time through a section, then half of the odds a few days later when we're a couple of sections downstream, then selecting randomly from all of the unfinished problems in the entire curriculum for just a couple of extra "old stuff" problems each day throughout the year. We also supplement with a number of other great resources, if you're looking to implement a more problem- and exploration-oriented math curriculum:

1. Kitchen Table Math is great for selecting concepts to lead number talks with (for building number sense - this is the first part of our day)

2. Saxon has excellent spaced-repetition exercises for shoring up the calculation side of things, and giving the student some easy wins for confidence building (we typically use Saxon's material as a warmup before Beast Academy)

3. Thinking Mathematically (the one by J. Mason and L. Burton) has a unique and useful mental process for attacking hard problems when you're not handed a nice formula to plug things into. Once a week, we work through a hard problem using the method in this book.

4. I haven't worked it in yet, but Arthur Benjamin's "Secrets of Mental Math" has a lot of stuff in it that will solidly connect arithmetic and algebraic thinking later.

One thing that I think is frequently overlooked is that a person with a year's worth of food stored up also has enough to feed the whole neighborhood for a week if necessary, which might make a really big difference for a lot of people. Having the goods gives you a lot of flexibility and might take some of the pressure off of emergency relief services. I try to keep far more of the basic things on hand (first aid, food, and water purification stuff) than I think I'll need just because I know most people don't, and I live in a place with a moderate risk of catastrophic earthquakes and tornadoes.

I've been learning how to sketch recently (not for courtrooms, just for fun), but something I noticed in the process might be relevant.

When you're sketching, you have to make choices about what's important and what to leave out. That means you have to study the scene pretty closely and pick what to represent. If courtroom sketching works like that, then I could see how having a skilled observer picking out important things to represent could be beneficial. If a particular moment is especially memorable, the sketch might capture and emphasize the drama in a way that a photo wouldn't. A sketch is kind of like the executive summary of a scene, removing noise and focusing in on what seemed important at the time.

Well, it seems there are two of us on the Internet. I do almost everything except browsing the web straight from the terminal.

> people knew about it from sheer novelty

This is a really good point. The essence of the question probably boils down to how many people like us there are out there, who want an alternative badly enough to work on it (and in it) while it's small and sparse. The only real feature I can think of that might seriously set it apart from today's net for everyone else is privacy protection, which could be built in from the ground up.

Deglazing is pretty hard on the seasoning of the pan (basically polymerized fats from cooking), which means your stuff will probably stick next time you cook with it.

I actually use exactly the method above for caramelizing onions, and I use either an enamelled cast iron pan or a tri-ply stainless/aluminum pan. Both work well, but I think the results seem a little better with the cast iron. That may just be because I can go straight into making onion soup in the same pot, so every bit of the sticky onion stuff makes it into the soup.

Yeah, that's a good point. One of the things that I think could help would be to make the basic technology stack somehow different from html/css/js, so that different (not necessarily more or less) things are possible in the new medium. I don't know what that should look like, because my own preference is strongly toward text-oriented content which is well-served by the current stack, but having a different kind of toys in the playground might be enough to entice people to contribute all by itself.

> Otherwise I don't see it as more than a toy.

I was a kid so I could well be wrong, but my memory of the early net was that most 'regular' people kind of saw it as a toy. It wasn't until the start of the .com boom that it really became something different. Being seen as a toy might actually be good in this case.

I agree with the sentiment, but with a slightly different angle. I think one of the things that made the early Internet interesting was that it was populated almost exclusively by enthusiasts (geeks, artists, etc) with little commercial motivation. Stuff was quirky and interesting. Today's Internet is a fantastic platform for commerce. I'd be very sad to see it go, but I also think there's a need for the weird old quirky net we had before marketing took over. What I'd like to see is the emergence of a new enthusiast network that's inherently difficult and inconvenient to commercialize alongside the existing net. One is good for getting eyes on content and marketing stuff, which is important, and the other is good for just putting up whatever you find interesting simply because you want to. When I want to buy something I'll use what we have now, but the other net would be more interesting to just browse around and share stuff on.

I think IPFS [1] or something similar might have the potential to resurrect the geek net. IPFS with a distributed mesh network infrastructure seems like it would be slow, inconvenient for commerce, and probably attractive only to the kind of people that made the early net interesting, especially with the current net as competition.

1. https://ipfs.io

I haven't yet reached the level of Rust mastery where I'm confident in this answer, but as far as I can tell it's very hard to make that kind of mistake. I'd be very interested to hear what others have to say on it though.

Actually the type system catches that particular mistake:

    error[E0308]: mismatched types
     --> src/main.rs:5:6
      |
    5 |   if x = 1 {
      |      ^^^^^ expected bool, found ()  
      |
      = note: expected type `bool`
      = note:    found type `()`
    
    error: aborting due to previous error
    
    error: Could not compile `playground`.
    
    To learn more, run the command again with --verbose.

It's not nearly as complex as that, but I can comment on a GUI program I've been developing for the last few months using the GTK bindings for rust [1]. I'm comparing rust today with C++/Qt as it was about 8 years ago, so bear that in mind in what follows. Before this project, the last big GUI I worked on was about 100k lines of C++, with a very intricate GUI involving both standard 2d components and quite a bit of animated OpenGL stuff. The program I'm working on now in rust is much smaller (about 20 different windows and dialogs, with various normal features along the lines of entry completion and search, and is about 5000 lines of code), but I think it's big enough that I have a feel for what it would be like to develop a big app in this environment.

After the initial bumps and scratches getting used to rust, I've found the experience to be better overall than I remember it being back in the day with C++ and Qt. I actually ended up implementing my own tiny version of signals and slots as I remembered them from Qt to handle interactions between the user and the stuff on the back end (mostly sqlite at this point). That in combination with a certain relaxed attitude about using Rc<RefCell<_>> for GUI stuff has put me in a place where I'm pretty confident that any normal GUI operation is pretty straightforward with rust.

The amount of boilerplate code seems pretty similar between the two. I think that a GUI framework specifically designed for rust might actually be a big win over other options here, but so far there isn't one that I know of that meets my needs. As it is, using the GTK components from rust is easier than using them from C (in my opinion), and comparable with my memory of using Qt in C++.

I've also found that the type system and the error handling are great compared to what I used before. They help not only in catching problems, but also in ensuring that the design is complete before I get too far into it. The code I'm writing now is much more reliable in terms of handling errors and covering corner cases than what I did back then in c++/qt. There is a price for this upfront in terms of aligning your mental model with what rust wants, especially if you're coming from the same background I was. Once that is done I don't think it's any more difficult to get stuff done here than it was there, and the results seem to be quite a bit more robust.

It wasn't all good times though - the initial unlearning/relearning curve was pretty rough for me. I've been programming professionally in various languages for about 15 years, and rust has taken longer for me to get comfortable with than any other language. That's including a wide variety of languages from various paradigms including constraint/logic programming (prolog and ciao), functional (lisp, ocaml, haskell, etc.), imperative (python,ruby,c/c++,javascript) and other more obscure ones. Something about the familiar features of algebraic data types, pattern matching, and type inference combined with the strict memory model caused a lot of mental interference that took me a long time to sort out.

The build system is actually one of the biggest reasons I stuck with rust through the pain of getting started. I really love cargo, to the point now that I can't stand the thought of going back to makefiles, cmake, or any other C++ build system I've tried. Cargo seems to just work, which means I spend less time fighting with obscure linker and compiler flags and more time getting things done. I'd put up with a lot from the language just to keep the build system, to be honest.

Overall developing a GUI app in rust has been a decent experience. If you're already comfortable with the language, I'd recommend spending the time to learn the GTK bindings. Once you internalize their basic operating scheme, the time required to get GUI stuff done with rust is comparable to other languages and toolkits, but you get the peculiar combination of benefits that come from using rust itself.

1. http://gtk-rs.org

That's a great idea. My son (also four) really needs to see the consequences of candy eating. I'm pretty convinced that he would try to live exclusively on candy if we would buy it for him.

My daughter was a thumb sucker, but she stopped when I showed her a few pictures of what could happen to her teeth if she kept it up. I was actually very surprised at how much impact it had. She was three at the time, and I wasn't sure if she was old enough to make that connection. One of the things I've slowly learned from them is that kids have a lot more ability to reason through consequences than most people give them credit for; the trick is to present it in the right way.

I like the direction of this. I've been thinking lately about trying to inspire kids to greatness, similar to the way ancient Romans made their ancestors greatest achievements highly visible in their homes [1] to inspire and challenge their children. Your question about failing made me think about that - maybe there is room for a question like "What did you do to [change the world/help others/achieve your goal/etc] today?" The desire to have a good answer at the end of the day might be enough to inspire some big-picture thinking.

1. Something I read somewhere, reference long gone now unfortunately.

Something I do with my kids every night after bedtime stories: we each think back over the day and tell each other what the best part of our day was. I started doing that in a bid to get them in the habit of noticing good things through the day and it seems to be working. Also, they love it - more than stories or songs. We can miss stories and songs some nights if we're out late, but they won't go to bed until we talk about our day.

I'd bet it's inversely proportional to the number of things we have available to worry about. Kids and older people don't typically have (as) much to worry about as middle age people who are raising kids, caring for elders, paying debts, and trying to hold down jobs.

I don't know if it is the same thing you're talking about, but I thought it was interesting that they could assume that the horses would know that a blanket causes both relief from cold weather and overheating in warm weather, and also that they should think of the blanket based on how they were feeling. I thought those assumptions were almost as interesting as the part about symbols because of what they seem to imply about the horses' ability to reason through cause and effect.

Having a discussion like this serves numerous purposes for a skilled teacher. By having a genuine discussion, the teacher can:

* get an immediate assessment of students' understanding

* provoke deep processing by the students who participate

* Draw out students who are otherwise passive and disengaged

* Learn what subtopics are particularly interesting to the class, and adapt the schedule accordingly

* Allow students to experience the process of active learning rather than having everything handed to them

* Other things...

It's not an either/or situation, it's a tactic. A good teacher will use open-ended discussion for all of those things and more, but it isn't the only thing going on in a typical class. Ultimately, the teacher is still there imparting knowledge. The discussion is just one of the ways that's done, and a high quality discussion can be extremely valuable.

I did something very similar to this for an artificial life class back in college. My nets took significantly longer to learn how to race for some reason, but in the end it worked out. What I did was start off as simple as possible, just using a circular track so that it's easy to test bounds on the inputs (position greater than inner diameter and less than outer). My nets would get their sensor inputs at each time step, and would output a steering angle and speed. The speed would basically just be directly added to their current position after pointing them in the chosen direction. The fitness function amounted to seeing which racers got around the track the fastest.

You can get some pretty interesting behavior if you start with a barebones model of the world like that. At one point my racers started teleporting around parts of the track by taking advantage of the fact that I wasn't doing continuous collision detection - they would detect a turn and then output a speed and direction that would cause them to instantly appear on the other side of the corner without navigating the curve on the way. It was interesting to watch them balance the ability to teleport against the range of their sensors.

This sort of thing really lends itself to incremental tinkering, especially with javascript as powerful as it is today for prototyping. That gives a lot of intermediate feedback that will give you chances for finding new strange things to investigate. Adding features like tricky track generation is a decision you can make along the way if it seems interesting.

Dungeon World looks awesome, I'm definitely going to give that a shot. Thanks!

Great, thanks for the references! There is a whole genre of tabletop RPGs that I had no idea existed out there. Dread seems like it might be a good fit. The story is still taking shape, but it's basically about a hard-case who finds redemption by helping a young family find safety in a collapsing world. Maybe similar in feel to "The Road" but with a more positive outcome.

> There are techniques for writing for role-playing games that are a hybrid of planning/winging.

That sounds very interesting. Do you have any links you could share with more details? I've been trying to come up with a way to get some friends involved to play out some of the scenes in a book I'm working on and those techniques might really help. The only thing I've seen that sounds related is a game called "Downfall" [1]. I think it's a little too structured to use for this purpose, but I liked the concept.

1. https://lessthanthreegames.com/downfall/