antognini

They are expenses, but amortized over 5 years. So if you spent $2m on employee salaries, you would then deduct $400k from your revenue every year for 5 years.

If your employee expenses remained constant, then by year 5 you would be deducting $2m from your revenue since you'd be accumulating the deductions from the previous four years.

So in steady state it wouldn't necessarily be a big problem. But for a startup which is hiring many new employees and whose revenue is growing it's a huge problem.

The genetic diversity doesn't really translate to diversity in appearance. Much of the genome doesn't code for anything in particular (so called "junk DNA"), so you can have high genetic diversity due to variance in these parts of the genome, but relatively low diversity in the small subset of genes that code for more visible features.

Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity. The vast majority of humans have been through two population bottlenecks which drastically reduced the genetic diversity of the populations. Most African populations have been through at least one of these bottlenecks, and every population group outside of Africa has been through two. The Khoi-San, however, seem to have broken off prior to either of the bottlenecks and so they retained much higher genetic diversity.

The basic theory of spirals is basically that you get spiral structure when the orientation of elliptical orbits shifts with semi-major axis. This leads to what appear to be spiral arms that have higher densities. In these high density regions you get collisions of gas clouds which leads to star formation. The star forming regions produce lots of bright, blue stars, which then make the spiral arms very visible in optical wavelengths.

In this case of the Oort cloud the galactic tides would be what are responsible for inducing the change in orientation of the elliptical orbits as a function of semi-major axis.

Moons close to the rings tend to keep the particles of the ring confined within a narrow band (which is why they are called "shepherd moons").

Biological analogies are always a bit dodgy, but biology hints that this doesn't work very well. Vision is important, particularly for path planning, but the immediate feedback of proprioception and touch is more important for stability. Think of how hard it is to walk normally when your leg has fallen asleep --- your visual cues remain unchanged, but you lose the immediate feedback loop from your leg. You can do it, but your gait is very unnatural and inefficient.

I have a phd in astronomy and I spent some time reading it yesterday. I don't think he'd think much of it. The theory seems to be aimed at explaining the existence of cosmic voids and the structure of the cosmic web. But these are pretty naturally explained by lambda CDM. And if the goal is to explain away dark matter, there are other pieces of evidence for dark matter that wouldn't be explained by this theory. At any rate, as far as I can tell it's not a quantitative theory so it would be hard to tie it to observations.

I think it's still not universal among astronomers that the Hubble tension is real. (Though the tide seems to have shifted in the last two years or so with the median astronomer reluctantly accepting that the Hubble tension is probably real.)

You learned proper American English. "Gotten" is generally discouraged in British English.

It's a British vs. American difference. Americans prefer "gotten": "California has gotten good at building batteries." The British view "gotten" as ungrammatical.

The theory is that the states forfeit certain aspects of their sovereignty, but not their entire sovereignty, by entering into a federation with the other states in the United States. The specific aspects of their sovereignty that they forfeit are those powers explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. As you note, this would include the ability to enter into treaties. But the 10th Amendment (at least in theory) guarantees that they retain their sovereignty in all other areas of governance.

There is still a distinction between US territories and states, because while in practice the territories are self governing, they have no Constitutional right to self governance. The federal government grants them some degree of autonomy as a matter of pragmatism, but the federal government has the power to revoke this autonomy by a simple act of Congress. The same cannot be said of states.

US territories are a rather different situation because they are not sovereign entities in the way that US states are. US territories are essentially land owned and administered by the federal government so the federal government is free to acquire and dispose of them as it wishes. But the states are sovereigns in their own right that have entered into a compact vis-a-vis the federal government and the other states. Because the sovereignty of the federal government emerges from this compact of the collection of individual states, the federal government generally does not have the authority to modify the terms of the compact without the assent of the states.

There is no recognized mechanism for states in the US to secede. Probably the consensus view among constitutional scholars is that accession to the United States is permanent --- that is, there is no way for a state to secede once it joins the union. There is a minority view that a state could secede with the consent of the Federal government or other states, but what would constitute agreement is not spelled out. If there were a serious attempt at secession it would probably require a constitutional amendment, so in practice it would require the consent of 3/4 of the states.

When I was in grad school in astronomy, one of my professors told me "many a promising young researcher has run their career aground on the rocky shores of tides."

The mathematics involved in the theory of tides are formidable. Even in homogeneous, tidally locked systems things can get complicated very quickly.

But tides are nevertheless very important. One two objects pass very close to each other, tidal effects are substantial and can actual destroy one of the objects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_disruption_event

I'm just impressed that the website is still around and they are adding new items. They've been going for more than twenty years at this point!

There is some interesting discussion on the LaTeX stack overflow page about the challenge of detecting and preventing rivers during the typesetting process:

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4507/avoiding-rivers...

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/29049/how-to-define-...

And if you really want to get into it, there is a rather detailed paper by Alex Holkner: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/tex/2006-holkner.pdf

Avoiding rivers becomes a rather non-trivial optimization problem. In Holkner's paper he found that it took ~1 minute just to typeset 1200 words. Some of his experiments took more than six hours to complete.

Even so, the AUM of the underlying hedge fund has been going up. They've stopped publishing the fund's performance, though, so it's a little unclear if the increase is due to good performance or if they've just attracted more investors.

Oh for sure there is a ton that is going on behind the scenes when you substitute `np` --> `jnp`. But as someone who worked on gravitational dynamics a decade ago, it's really incredible that so much work has been done to make running numerical calculations on a GPU so straightforward for the programmer.

Obviously if you want maximum performance you'll probably still have to roll up your sleeves and write CUDA yourself, but there are a lot of situations where you can still get most of the benefit of using a GPU and never have to worry yourself over how to write CUDA.

Once you have the matrix implementation in Step 2 (Implementation 3) it's rather straightforward to extend your N-body simulator to run on a GPU with Jax --- you can just add `import jax.numpy as jnp` and replace all the `np.`s with `jnp`s.

For a few-body system (e.g., the Solar System) this probably won't provide any speedup. But once you get to ~100 bodies you should start to see substantial speedups by running the simulator on a GPU.

For anyone interested in more serious journalism about the Church, I can't recommend The Pillar enough. The guys who run it have a lot of connections and know how the Church works inside and out. They had identified Prevost as being one of the top contenders in the days leading up to the conclave [1].

In their final "gut check" analysis, one of the two editors said his gut was going with Prevost. (Unfortunately behind a paywall, but here for reference [2].)

[1]: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-prevosts-papal-prospect...

[2]: https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/conclave-day-1-head-check-h...

Yes, but the past half century has been a rather unusual time for the Church since it's coming out of one of the more consequential ecumenical councils. It typically takes the Church a few generations to come to an agreement about the meaning of an important council. But in the immediate wake of it there's usually a wider diversity of visions.

Yes, it of course happens, but when it does it is usually a signal that the new pope intends to continue with the vision of his predecessor.

(John Paul II is also something of an anomaly, because John Paul I died barely a month into his papacy and so didn't have time to put in place any real agenda. John Paul II was more commemorating John Paul I the man.)

There's also more baggage associated with choosing the name of a very recent predecessor. Choosing Francis II would alienate certain factions in the Church, choosing Benedict XVII or John Paul III would alienate others. Reaching further back in time is more of a signal of unity.

It's not quite so obvious that all of Francis's appointees were lockstop in line with his vision. Up until the last consistory he tended to appoint cardinals from the "peripheries," places that did not historically have a strong presence in the Church. (For instance he appointed a cardinal from Mongolia and one from the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Australia.) These cardinals are a bit of wildcard.

But given that the conclave was so short that does suggest that there was not much division over direction.

The field of candidates in this conclave was relatively open compared to the past few conclaves, so it is a little surprising that the cardinals were able to come to a consensus by the fourth ballot. That suggests that one of the initial front runners (likely Parolin or Tagle) was able to generate momentum early on and get the 2/3 majority pretty quickly. But we'll see in about 30 minutes if the cardinals have surprised us all with someone completely different!

> If I can use an air conditioning metaphor, it is more efficient to set the house at a temp and keep it there, than to keep turning the AC off, letting the house heat up, and trying to bring it back down from 90.

While I get what you're trying to say, if I can be a bit pedantic this is not more efficient thermodynamically. It is more efficient to let the house heat up and then bring its temperature back down.

Back when I was in grad school I observed at LBT (or maybe more accurately I was on a team that was observing at LBT). The Vatican's observatory down the road was affectionately referred to as the "Pope Scope."

The last three popes have all died during the Octave of Easter or Christmas.

It has been a while since I looked at the papers but I believe it's carbon dating of the human remains buried at the megaliths.

There are around 10,000 megalith structures in the Sahara, most of which were constructed between 3000 and 2000 BC, when desertification was well underway. A large number of these were discovered within the last 20 years using Google Earth. The megaliths come in a wide variety of shapes (there are around 40 categories), but the more sophisticated megaliths have a keyhole shape [1].

Like the better known megaliths in Europe they tend to have astronomical alignments and have been used as funerary monuments. Most of the megaliths point east and have male skeletons, but the few megaliths with female skeletons are oriented towards the west.

(Shameless plug, but for anyone interested in learning more about this sort of thing I have a podcast about the history of astronomy and one of the episodes is about the astronomy of Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa [3].)

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Two-keyhole-structures-i...

[2]: https://songofurania.com/episode/029