blix

I'm just trying to answer your question, but I don't think you're exactly clear on what you want to know. It's ok, no need to get defensive about it.

Whether or not 'one end of the wire gets heavier' depends on what your doing. If you are using the wire to power an LED from a battery, then no, because electrons are removed from one end and placed into the other at equal rates. Charge and mass within the wire are both globally and locally conserved.

If you do something where charge/mass isn't conserved such as removing electrons from one side (i.e. by rubbing a fork on a carpet) or by using an electric field to 'tilt' the electrons to one side, you can create a (very small) mass imbalance. This activities are not usually considered to be useful electrical current.

In order to get a sustained current, you need to put electrons in one end and take them out from the other in equal numbers. Thus mass doesn't change.

However, if you're talking about static electricty, you can actually create a mass imbalance by taking a few electrons away from one side or putting some electrons on the other. It's a very, very, very small change in mass.

One of Maxwell's other equations links the E-field to charge density. You can't talk about the time derivative of the E-field without also talking about the time derivative of charge density.

It's true that interactions between charged particles invoke photons, but you can have charged particles (and their associated E-fields) travelling at constant velocity in a vaccum and still define an associated current density without considering photons. I'm not sure your interpretation produces a useful intuition for this situation.

One of the underlying ideas of the paper is that, in conventional metals where conduction band electrons are much more wave than particle, you can still measure when they 'enter' and 'exit' the material through perturbations in the field, that is bursts of photons that occur when electron waves interact with an obstacle.

It's so you can doomscroll for hours without realizing how much content you have consumed. It's pointless to know how much is left because the feed is infinite. You can't ever get to the bottom that a scroll bar would imply as new content is loaded.

It is an enabler of information overload, not a solution or respite.

I've tried programming by moving physical objects, but I've found it's generally easier if you use a digital computer.

I do most of my programming in a binary world.

> formed a government together at end of WWII

I am not convinced this ever happened in any meaningful sense. As you note, it turned into armed conflict almost immediately. This was a British-induced transient state that was unable to sustain itself in the region.

> The “settlers” were the British and they left.

The Myanmar state/people are also colonizers/conquerors. You don't need to come across an ocean to see territory that you dont control and decide to try to take control by force. Facebook and ethno-nationalism are simply new tools in a long-running conflict.

The conflict in Myanmar isn't a civil war any more than the conflict of the USA between settlers and natives was a civil war.

The Myanmar (Bamar), Karen, Shan, etc populations were all there before the British drew the borders of 'Burma.' The conflict goes back way farther than WWII. The main difference now is that the Myanmar are winning.

Really? Abortion is a wedge issue in the USA because of Big Diaper?

I can't say I have ever heard this particular conspiracy theory before.

I needed to improve perfomance of some numerical computations in an existing Python script. The only choices felt like C and Fortran.

I tried Rust at first but went back to C when I realized I was spending more time appeasing Rust than solving the actual problem, which wasn't really complicated enough to gain significant benefit from Rust's features.

The cynic in me wants to argue that all post-SNES 2D Zelda games are in fact remakes of LttP :) I mean that as a good thing.

I haven't had a chance to really play Tunic yet, but I just get the feeling that calling it a Zelda clone is unfairly reductive to both. If Tunic and Okami are both Zelda clones, but not clones of each other, something needs reevaulation.

There is a little more to the series at this point than the 30 years old Link to the Past.

Computers aren't really new. Addition and writing have been around for a long time. There's nothing that a computer can do that can't theoretically be accomplished by a team of people with abaci and carrier pigeons.

The entire value proposition of modern computation is about scale and cost. It's the same things, but with much higher quantity and intensity. Something that can be tolerably safe at 1 unit/day may be very dangerous at 1000 units/day. I would be surprised if pre-teen porn consumption has only risen by 1000x in the past 30 years.

All new science starts with unsupported hypotheses. Going from "unsupported hypothesis" to "consensus established fact" often takes 10+ years. COVID and it's aftereffects are so new that the vast majority of claims are still somewhere in the hypothesis phase. Pretty much every idea about long COVID is still in this phase, and as sibling/cousin comments note it is an area of active research.

Science isn't static. It's contantly in evolution as people try to find justifaction for unsupported claims. Dismissing unsupported claims prima facie is fundementally incomaptible with the scientific method.

Click the link in that same article for "increased intestinal permeability."

These terms are often used interchangably. This particular wikipedia stub is trying to draw a bright line where none exists.

I feel this is distinction without a difference. All belief systems are approaches to knowledge and information at the end of the day.

The institutional science belief system really has a lot in common with religion. In fact the instutions we now trust to train scientists and dispense scientific information largely grew out of instutions with a major focus to train clergy and dispense religious information.

Empiricism is not really in that same subcategory, but it also rests on some set of ultimately unverifiable assumptions. In fact, I'd argue that one of the central assumptions of classical empiricism, that all systems are locally deterministic, is demonstrably false. The early quantum pioneers had a hard time coming to grips with this and there are still several competing interpretations of QM. This huge shift still hasn't fully percolated to many other fields of science, which often still assume local determinism and pretend QM doesn't exist.

> There's no belief system called science

There are two belief systems called science.

The less common one is the one you outline immediately after denying its existence: it's about asking questions and trying to establish evidence-based models to make predictions and testing/validating the assumptions in those models. It's probably more accurate to call this belief system empiricism.

The more common one is a deferral to expert authority, where experts are designated by certain established scientific institutions. Because many lack the time/will/ability to independently verify claims made by authoritative figures, this deferral requires substantial trust in these institutions to come up with good answers.

This second belief system is what most people mean when they label themselves or others as pro- or anti-science. Paradoxically, even though the authoritative institutions ostensibly produce information empirically, expressing skepticism and asking questions is often perceived as a lack of faith, and therefore anti-science.

The difference between

    function(void *pointer) { 
      data_type *argument = pointer;
      ...
    }

and

    function(data_type *argument) { 
      ...
    }

is really small. If this hurdle is enough to 'eliminate all possibility of cooperation,' there was no possiblity in the first place.

Calling C's type system 'limited' is asking it to be something that it's not. A skateboard isn't limited because it doesn't have a steering wheel and airbag; if it did it wouldn't be a skateboard.

C's type system is different enough in scope and goals from many other type systems that it leads to confusion to lump them together. That's really what this article is about. The author has miscalibrated expectations.

Were the worked who wanted to continue striking allowed to, or not? Was the response of the Republican-dominated Senate predictable or was it a surprise? If I give fine china to a toddler who drops and breaks it, which party is really at fault?

You could easily rephrase your comment as "Biden took away their only option for self-directed action and then passed the buck to an organization known for doing nothing."

Sometimes complexity doesn't actually add anything useful :) Focusing on the DC play-by-play is good for convincing yourself the other team is at fault, and not much else.

Illinois is known for extremely gerrymandered pro-democrat districts, that also seem designed to minimize minority impact within the party. They've cleaned up some of the shapes so it's less obvious recently.

> Having used Linux-compatible hardware for a while now though, neither of these are an issue.

I have a laptop with that is specifically designed to support out-of-the box and the first thing I had to do with the stock PopOS was disable sleep and hibernate because it reliably crashed the system. Even "Linux-compatible" hardware is extremely hit-or-miss.

> have you ever managed to "change your mindset"? did it materially change your circumstances?

Not GP, but yes and yes. Personal growth is indeed possible!

It's surprising to me to see this opinion (echoed in scarby2's sibling comment), because outside of the laptop ritual, the other things register as approximately zero friction to me.

In some sense air travel is an exercise in friction and waiting. Standing in line definitely rubs me the wrong way, but others might weight their inconveniences very differently. Perhaps keeping your shoes on should be a separate upcharge from a shorter wait :P

If it were an option selected when purchasing a ticket, I suspect it would be on the order of first/business class in terms of popularity. Maybe the price point needs some work, but certainly ~a lot~ more than $15/yr for the first tier of priority).

Clear and Pre-Check both have signficant friction to sign-up. If line cutting was offered with little friction (i.e. without security considerations), I think it would be quite popular.

I don't think Pre-Check would be as popular if you had to wait in the same line as everybody else, even if you got to keep your shoes on.

Literal line cutting is just a special case of separate lines with different processing priority.

TSA Pre-Check's artifically low, non-market price for line cutting is the reason Clear isn't selling for $100+ per flight, with several layers of price discrimination.

"I pay money to cut people in line, but someone else paid more money to cut me in line!"

> "some people's votes are weighted more than others", which is an inherently undemocratic principle.

Has there ever been, in the history of human civilization, any self-styled democracy that did not weigh the votes of some people more the votes of others? Whether by sex, gender, race, wealth, education, criminal status, party membership, age, or status as an elected official, I'm pretty sure every single democratic state has continuously subscribed to some non-uniform distribution of vote weights.

With modern technology, it maybe possible to create a truly direct and equal system where newborns have the ability to ratify trade deals, but this might not be desirable.