belviewreview

My first computer was a Z80. It was an Amstrad 8256, also known as the Joyce. It was sold as a word processor, but it came with a copy of cp/m you could load in. I bought it because it was about as powerful as the Apple computer of the time, but at half the price. That was a great little computer.

If string theorists are now unemployable, and they have to rebrand themselves as doing ML, then it seems to me that string theory is disappearing on its own, even if there are still some with tenure who continue to publicly promote it, but will eventually die off. So maybe when a child who was born this year becomes old enough in the future to develop an interest in physics, they won't even hear about it, except as a footnote.

I am speculating that agriculture lead to human beings evolving to do the sort of labor that it requires, especially grains.

When global climate change first came to broad attention about three decades ago, the conservatives predicted it was absolutely certain that renewable energy would always remain so extremely expensive that no one would every adopt it unless the government forced them to.

Is it your view that this set of ideas is mistaken? If so, kindly present some arguments.

Or perhaps you know they are correct but don't want to admit it, so you are trying to divert people's attention from the ideas to the question of the NYT'S intentions.

Is it your position that, since the Islamist government of Iran is the enemy of Israel, we can be certain it is good in both its foreign and domestic policies?

Here is my question to string theorists: suppose some physicists came up with an alternative theory of everything and were able to use it to make unique empirical predictions. Would you accept it as true and abandon string theory?

I think the larger problem is that as citizens we have to have views about many different topics that are very far outside our direct experience, so we have to figure out who to trust among various claimed experts that we also don't know personally. Doing this is something that the human mind is not naturally designed for, and so not surprisingly people often get it wrong.

I seem to recall from an article I read about this technology a few years ago that it's efficient partly because when the gas is compressed, they are able to store the heat that is produced, and then later use the stored heat for expanding the gas.

Mathematicians can do mathematics without a knowledge of foundations because the human brain and organism are highly organized, but in a different manner than a formal conceptual system. That human thinking and understanding is, on the whole, not a matter of logically manipulating formalized ideas is generally accepted in philosophy today, as in the later Wittgenstein.

I like how it looks, and I like it better than other fonts. I suppose that means the type-nazis will call for me being burned at the stake.

About a decade ago, I became a fan of the remarkable Japanese child prodigy drummer Kanade Sato. That lead to me to learn the surprising fact that Japan has 4 writing systems: kanji, hiragana, katakana, and romanji.

Here's the video that got me interested in Sato www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYpFL08m5fQ&list=RDXYpFL08m5fQ&start_radio=1

So you claim to know for certain that it virtually never happens that someone winds up homeless for financial reasons, like their rent got raised or they lost their job and couldn't find one that paid enough for the prevailing rents.

Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain how you determined this. Did you for instance survey homeless people in a number of US cities? Or perhaps you used some other method.

The thing about focused work, at least a lot of it, is that before you start making any progress you first have to remember a whole lot of specifics, like facts, goals, constraints, and so on, and how they all fit together to form the situation you are dealing with and what you are trying to do. And that takes uninterrupted time. If you are interrupted, it all evaporates from your mind and you have to remember them all over again.

It also takes mental energy, which everyone has only so much of each day. If you are interrupted, then all the mental energy you had spent is wasted, and you have less left for the rest of the day.

One more thought. I think the people who don't understand why interrupting is bad are people who they themselves don't know how to think in a sustained, focused manner on a difficult problem. And as a consequence of smartphones, such people are considerably more common than they used to be.

Conservatives have three explanations for why people are poor:

  1) they are all stupid and lazy because they have absorbed liberal values

  2) they are smart enough to get ahead but can't because liberal governmental policies have ruined the economy.

  3) they are mentally inferior due to belonging to the wrong race.

One of the reasons that Iran's regime has failed to prepare for global climate is that fundamental Islam rejects modern science because it instead supports supernaturalism in many areas.

If you have any criticisms of the specific claims made in the article, please present them.

I liked the ideas at the link. About 15 years ago I came up with something similar, though not as sophisticated. I needed to lose a lot of weight. However I didn't want to follow a standard calorie-counting diet because I had been reading that many studies find they don't work over the long term, at least for most people, and besides I have no will-power when it comes to food.

So I came up with the idea of eating all I want, but just make it mostly food that is filling but reasonably low in calories. So this is what I did, and I lost 50 lb, and have kept it off ever since. I call it the low will-power diet. I don't know that it would would work for everyone, but I bet it would work with a lot of people who find standard calorie-counting diets don't. Also, it seems to me the Mediterranean diet is a version of this.

She did that because she is hoping he will invade and throw Maduro out of power. I dislike Trump greatly, but given the situation of her country, I can understand why she would want that.

Casey Handmer on the energy transition

https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fcaseyhandmer.word...

That's a very interesting video. It persuaded me that Al Ghazali was much more pro-science than I had thought.

For a couple of centuries, the Arab world took the science that the Greeks had developed and advanced it considerably further. But then the Muslim theologian al Ghazali persuaded everyone that science was contrary to true religion, and so it was abandoned. The result was when modern science was born and then lead to the industrial revolution and enormous economic and military power, the Middle East never modernized.

Thank you.

Anyone got a link? Archive.ph has stopped publishing NYT articles.

Ok, that's interesting information.

You may be right, but if you are, it should be big news on the internet, but I can't find any mention of it it.

You know, I am thinking it would be nice if archive.ph had a list of all the sites that block it.