andrewl

Firebird, maybe:

https://firebirdsql.org/manual/fbint-structure.html

I just checked, and the O RLY Cover Generator is still active if you want to make your own:

https://dev.to/rly

A RAND Corporation study from a couple of years ago concluded the upward redistribution of income has cost American workers $50 trillion over the past several decades:

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/how-much-has-inequali...

Here's the Washington Post's story on it:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/05/dave-batema...

I just started looking into Neovim, and I had the same concern about it being terminal-only. But then I saw this on the Neovim site:

"Graphical interfaces are not packaged with Neovim. GUIs are not limited by terminal capabilities and can choose to override the rendering of certain neovim elements (cursor, tabline, popup menu, etc)...See Neovim's wiki[1] for a list of many of the available GUIs."

[1] https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Related-projects#gui

One nice thing about podcasts is I can listen to them while I’m driving, if I'm not in the mood for music. The same goes for when I'm walking. And although you can read on a train, I sometimes find I can't if the train is swaying too much. It's nice to have podcasts available at those times. And if the people on the podcast are speaking slowly, you can speed it up.

When I was in grad school at UT Austin we spent a lot of time studying in the map room. As I recall, the tables were quite large and gave us space to spread out books and printouts. We weren't doing anything map-related. It was just a good space.

I also spent a lot of time in the reading room of the Architecture and Planning Library, which was so beautiful it was sometimes hard to focus on what I was studying:

https://soa.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/media/Battle%20Ha...

For a good idea of what chimpanzee musculature looks like, do a search for "hairless chimpanzee." Here's one:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-36924808

As retrac says, it’s easier to cast for humanoids. And decades ago the special effects technology was nowhere near what we have now, so there were fewer options for more unusual forms and they were expensive.

Novelists had no such restrictions, so Larry Niven could create Pierson’s Puppeteers in 1966:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson%27s_Puppeteers

A larger and much more legible version of the map is at:

https://i.insider.com/55b273a2371d2211008b9793

Strobe Data's site reminds me of Berkshire Hathaway's:

https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/

I think neither business needs to convince anybody of anything. If you need what Strobe is selling and can afford it, they probably made the sale.

SQLite is a big part of our tool chain, and has been very good to us. We’ve been using DB Browser for SQLite[1] for several years. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Rosefinch looks nice, but I’m not seeing a real use case. If I had a bunch of queries I was always running, I’d probably just make them views, available to me in any client, including the command line. (Sometimes the command line is best.)

If I didn’t want to go that far, DB Browser for SQLite lets you save a work session. Whatever tabs of SQL you have open are preserved, and can be run again at will, the same as Rosefinch. You can also rename them from their default names, which are just SQL 1, SQL2, etc.

It does a lot, but stays out of your way.

[1] https://sqlitebrowser.org

Regarding this: Also there’s a bit of implication in this argument that wizards are some sort of genetically differentiated group (likes elves, humans, hobbits, etc) while I have always assumed that wizards are just humans (or others I suppose) who are scholars and who get their advantages (long life, spell casting etc) through training.

Wizards are definitely in a different group than elves or men. They are a class of being called maiar (singular maia). Sauron and the balrogs are also maiar. They’re sort of junior gods (to oversimplify) in Tolkien’s universe. The great gods are the Valar (singular vala), the demiurgic beings of Middle Earth. The vala Aulë was a smith who crafted, among other things, the mountains and other lands of Middle Earth. Sauron and Saruman were both followers of Aulë. And they were both good at making things (Sauron especially). If I remember correctly, Sauron raised the mountains around Mordor.

The most powerful vala was Melkor, later known as Morgoth, who fell into evil. He was defeated and removed from the world at the end of the First Age. The greatest of the maiar whom he seduced into his service was Sauron. Some of the maiar who followed him took the form of monstrous creatures who wielded whips of fire. They were the balrogs. In Moria Legolas recognized the ancient creature as “A balrog of Morgoth.”

You can still be damaged by a drug even if you are not addicted to it.

It's a wonderful podcast. It's nothing like Joe Rogan. Here's the episode list:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player

And note that when you click to an episode to see who the guests are (usually three professors or other experts on the given topic) there's also a reading list.

I guess it's similar to Joe Rogan's show in that it's a recording of people speaking.

Regarding the “an PhD” note, I’m finding other phrasing that makes me think the writers were not native English speakers. It’s a French organization after all, so I would expect a few errors in their English. They're not significant.

I agree that a language homepage should be information dense, and give the new user a clear overview without having to scroll. I think the Common Lisp homepage is an improvement over what I remember from years ago, and while it’s visually appealing it’s not as immediately useful as I’d like.

Besides the examples Zababa offered, I’d say the home pages for Ruby, Julia, and Python are also good:

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/

https://julialang.org/

https://www.python.org/

I do a lot with SQLite, and this looks promising. It’s early days, as their about page (dbhub.io/about) says, and they have no pricing model yet. But I’ll keep an eye on them.

Being at the Institute for Advanced Study is probably worse than being in any of the Ivy League or comparable high-level universities. Among its resident scholars, besides Dyson, were Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. This leads to many people who work there feeling like they don’t measure up, and are impostors.

Richard Feynman noted a problem with the environment:

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

Here’s more from Freeman Dyson:

I’m very proud of not having a Ph.D. I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.

And also, of course, it wastes a tremendous amount of time — especially for women, it’s particularly badly timed.

If they’re doing a Ph.D., they have a conflict between raising a family or finishing the degree, which is just at the worst time — between the ages of 25 to 30 or whatever it is. It ruins the five years of their lives.

And I see the difference in the business world. My daughter happens to be a businesswoman, so I meet a lot of her young friends.

The life there is so much easier for women. They start a company when they’re 20; they go bust when they’re 22. [Laughs] Meanwhile, they have a kid, and nobody condemns them for going bust. If you’re in the business world, that’s what’s expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it’s a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It’s also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.

[The Ph.D. system] was designed for a job in academics. And it works really well if you really want to be an academic, and the system actually works quite well. So for people who have the gift and like to go spend their lives as scholars, it’s fine. But the trouble is that it’s become a kind of a meal ticket — you can’t get a job if you don’t have a Ph.D. So all sorts of people go into it who are quite unsuited to it. [...]

Anyway, so, I’m happy that I’ve raised six kids, and not one of them is a Ph.D.

Here are a couple of relevant quotes from Freeman Dyson (who did not have a PhD):

“Well, I think it actually is very destructive. I'm now retired, but when I was a professor here [Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton], my real job was to be a psychiatric nurse. There were all these young people who came to the institute, and my job was to be there so they could cry on my shoulder and tell me what a hard time they were having. And it was a very tough situation for these young people. They come here. They have one or two years and they're supposed to do something brilliant. They're under terrible pressure — not from us, but from them.

So, actually, I've had three of them who I would say were just casualties who I'm responsible for. One of them killed himself, and two of them ended up in mental institutions. And I should've been able to take care of them, but I didn't. I blame the Ph.D. system for these tragedies. And it really does destroy people. If they weren't under that kind of pressure, they could all have been happy people doing useful stuff. Anyhow, so that's my diatribe. But I really have seen that happen."

On the topic of gun ownership by people some would not expect to be into guns, this New York Times article is quite interesting:

The Black Gun Owner Next Door, by Tiya Miles

I’m an African-American historian and, on most issues, decidedly liberal. Could I rethink my anti-gun stance?

Tiya Miles is a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/opinion/sunday/gun-owners...

Billionaire Nick Hanauer and his team at Civic Ventures are working towards this (as are others, of course):

https://civic-ventures.com/

There are powerful forces fighting against what AnotherGoodName is suggesting. They have money and propaganda and lobbying. It’s a tough fight.

You could try bison fat, although I believe bison are, on average, less fatty than other cattle. The USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) forbids the use of hormones and antibiotics in farm-raised bison:

Q: Can hormones and antibiotics be used in bison raising?

A: Antibiotics and growth hormones are not given to bison.

Source: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/safe-food-handling-and...

Very much so. I just saw this article the other day:

Super Simple: Drinking Enough Water Could Prevent Heart Failure

https://scitechdaily.com/super-simple-drinking-enough-water-...

This is an interesting article. The headline works when you're on the Washington Post site, and you can see the subhead and the image of the SARS-COV-2 virus. But on its own it could mean almost anything. The subhead reads:

Controls on ‘gain of function’ experiments with supercharged pathogens have been undercut despite concerns about lab leaks.

If you don't want to sign up for the free account, you can read the text at:

https://outline.com/FLJHjc

He says he's going to write his own mail server. I use SQLite all the time, and I'm going to try Fossil when I get a bit of time to dig into it. I will definitely give his mail system a look when it's out.

I just started looking, too. There's a lot of information in the Office Chairs subReddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/OfficeChairs/

I can't vouch for how good the information is, but there is a lot of discussion.

You can get a better idea of the size of these "notation knives" in this video from the Victoria and Albert Museum, where a curator is holding them. They also have recordings of some of the songs:

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/a-notation-knife/