cfmcdonald

Culture is not genes. It's not necessarily true that all the children of traditionalist/conservative Catholics will themselves grow up to be traditionalist/conservative Catholics, so even a higher birthrate in that subgroup doesn't guarantee cultural reproduction.

Don't know about Southern CA, but in the places I've lived, people usually play/relax in their back yards, not the front, and so are not easily visible.

The point of confidential mode is for corporate users. When the CEO sends out that confidential mail to the company, it adds a speed bump to users who are about to copy out data that they have been told they should not, so they get a chance to realize they should not do this, and then removes all plausible deniability when they choose to bypass that speed bump.

What's wrong with gate keeping? Gates are useful things. Surely you agree that some writing is better than other writing? It's not all equally good.

Fair complaint. I've been too cheap to upgrade to the paid plan that lets me get rid of the ads.

Was that colleague Neil Peart?

The original original is from Jonathan Swift: "Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead."

It is not false. It says "won't definitely kill you". A cold winter will definitely kill you without heat, but a hot summer won't definitely kill you, it just might kill you.

Perhaps you read it as "definitely won't kill you", which would be false.

Yes, the claim is that living in a warmer climate and using A/C to cool 10-20 degrees in the summer is more energy efficient than living in a cold one and heating by 40-50 degrees in the winter.

Is this whole article premised on this one guy's intuition that speeding must be safe because we aren't all dead?

There are actual studies on this stuff based on the changes in U.S. federal speed limit rules in the 70s and then again in the 90s. They are not conclusive but do suggest that higher speed limits lead to more fatalities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law#Saf...

And Orwell, apparently he is now a right-winger too.

I agree. The wake-up call for me that the streaming promise was hollow was when PBS Video went on line. I imagined it steadily growing to cover the entire back catalog of PBS. What a fabulous public resource that would be. Alas, no, it's a tiny slice of stuff with limited availability windows.

We supplement streaming Netflix with our local library system, which has a fairly deep collection.

That's a reasonable supposition, but having seen the remastered TNG and the documentary about it's creation, I don't think it's true. The models are very detailed and look great in HD. One could surmise that the model creators knew their models might be used in TNG feature films (as indeed some of them were). Or maybe they were just super-dedicated and liked making really detailed models.

That's true of some effects, but in TNG the core spaceship / space station models were shot on film, and then composited with other effects like phaser shots.

In DS9 / Voyager as I understand it, they transitioned from using models to directly generating the whole shot with CGI at NTSC resolution. See https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/CGI#Acceptance

This means that in TNG they just had to recomposite the film with a newly created high-res phaser shot; whereas for DS9/Voyager they would have to recreate the whole shot in high-res CGI.

I can't read the whole article because paywall, but the initial paragraphs seem to miss the point of these laws. The intent is not to indicate that a programming language is an equivalent kind of skill to a foreign language. It's a pragmatic decision about how to fit programming, increasingly an important life skill, into a crowded curriculum. The core requirements (english, math, science, history), aren't going to budge, so it has to be slotted in somewhere if you want anyone other than the super-motivated to take progamming/CS classes.

Maybe the author addresses this pragmatic issue later on?

Your earnest outrage is not really appropriate to the tone of the article. Did you see the part about crow telephathy?

"5 year cancer survival" is unfortunately a very weak metric. Consider this easy way to boost 5 year cancer survival rates - do prostate screening tests for everyone in the country every year. You will undoubtedly detect more cancers and thus increase 5 year survival rates, but this is also undoubtedly a net negative for society.

I recommend the book Lost New York by Nathan Silver, to anyone interested in these lost architectural icons of New York City.

It was originally written in the midst of the NYC preservation debate of late 1960s, which resulted from the destruction of buildings like the Singer building, the old Met Opera House, and especially Penn Station.

I think you're kind of cherry-picking examples here. My gloss of the OP's point was "be skeptical of books by journalists on technically complex subjects in which they have no direct expertise". e.g. it's common for journalists who have never worked in a scientific field to write popular science books.

A book about investigative journalism by investigative journalists is rather different.

This is the inverse of NIMBYism, which is about telling other people what they should do with their property... which is exactly what many of the people on this thread seems to want to do with respect to this woman.

There is no difference? The market is the sum of the decisions of individual actors.

Luckily we don't live in a society where people are forced to allocate their resources to where other people think they are most efficient.

For similar reasons to the "time value of money" concept, books read now are worth more than books read in the future. e.g. reading GEB at 20 and having it change the course of your life to become a Computer Science Ph.D. is very different from reading it on your death bed.

Moreover, 3000 books is still only scratching the surface of all non-fiction ever published in English (let alone other languages), so strong heuristics will still be needed.

These are heuristics. They will of course produce false negatives. Given the huge volume of available books relative to available reading time in a human life, the most important thing is to minimize false positives.

Whether the particular books you refer to are false negatives on these heuristics is of course a matter of opinion. I don't know Woodward and Bernstein's book on constitutional law; their most famous book, All the President's Men, would surely fall under a similar exception to biography/memoir, since it is an account of their own investigation.

This is not a fair argument. Why should you assume that condos is the 'correct' thing for this land and factory is the 'wrong' thing? Isn't that for the market to decide? What if I told you someone was offering to buy the property to replace it with an orphanage, would you say this woman is denying poor, helpless children a place of refuge?

Isn't this woman exercising her property rights in a perfectly fair way within the market economy that we have, in exactly the same way that so many developers have exercised their rights to tear down X and replace it with Y, where many people might have preferred to keep X?

Why do you find it hard to believe that people could become attached to and invested in their town's unusual street numbering system?

People become deeply attached to all kinds of arbitrary things, e.g. the particular shade of red used by their favorite sports team, or the exact shape of the cookies their family has baked for Christmas every year.

I think the clearly wrong statement here is "Workstations were really the first networked computers."

In which case no one with a limited budget (i.e. most people) is going to rely on this for commuting.

At which point, your costs = costs of owning a car for each commuting user in your area + overhead + profit. So unless you are offering subsidized prices, it will be cheaper for everyone to just own their own car for commuting.

In the mid-80s, only maybe 10% of U.S. households had a computer, much less a modem. You also paid by-the-minute long-distance charges for calling anyone (or any computer) outside your town.