curtis

My parents grew up in the southwestern corner of the Ozark Mountains and I've been to Branson, Missouri a number of times, so I have at least a passing familiarity with the Bald Knobbers. Nevertheless, I had not made the connection between Balds in the geographic sense and the Bald Knobbers. The southwestern Ozarks are actually a heavily eroded plateau, and I'm not aware of any hilltops that look like the Appalachian Balds, but then I have only actually seen a tiny portion of the Ozarks.

I don't think Musk needs to delete his account, but he certainly needs to surrender direct access to it. Somebody with absolute veto power should be vetting everything that goes out over it.

Nuclear waste is also mostly fuel for hybrid fusion-fission reactors. From Wikipedia[1]:

> Hybrid nuclear fusion–fission (hybrid nuclear power) is a proposed means of generating power by use of a combination of nuclear fusion and fission processes. The basic idea is to use high-energy fast neutrons from a fusion reactor to trigger fission in otherwise nonfissile fuels like U-238 or Th-232. Each neutron can trigger several fission events, multiplying the energy released by each fusion reaction hundreds of times. This would not only make fusion designs more economical in power terms, but also be able to burn fuels that were not suitable for use in conventional fission plants, even their nuclear waste.

As an extra advantage, such a reactor would be subcritical (similar to a Accelerator-driven subcritical reactor [2]) so it would never be at risk of a melt-down.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that such a reactor would still be a proliferation risk like fission breeder reactors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion%E2%80%93fission...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerator-driven_subcritical...

As a general rule you shouldn't rewrite everything from scratch. This does not mean that you shouldn't, on occasion, rewrite some parts of your system. Rewrites are expensive. On the other hand some code you think is bad really is bad, and it will be a net win to rewrite it.

To make a call like this, you really do need a pretty good understanding of your codebase, your business, your testing exposure, the capabilities of your team, and probably some other stuff as well. In reality, your understanding is never going to be as good as you really need it. This doesn't mean you should never rewrite any portion of your codebase, it just means that you really need to reduce the scope a lot to reduce the risk to a manageable amount.

I think the "by law" is mistaken, but there is at least a U.S. government opinion on the subject. From https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html:

>White – A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.

Fuel made from recycled plastic will displace fuel made directly from petroleum. So it will make the first problem (disposing of used plastic) better while not making the second problem (carbon dioxide emissions) any worse.

Obviously this isn't useful if we manage to eliminate fossil fuels altogether, but we're a long way from that.

Because of Venus's think atmosphere, landing a probe or rover is really easy. The downside, also because of Venus's thick atmosphere, is that the surface is really, really hot. That limits the lifetime of hardware on the surface.

I think it ought to be possible to design a probe that's more like a submersible than a rover. Technically it would be an airship rather than a submarine, but given Venus's thick atmosphere it could be quite heavy and robust. This vehicle could bounce between the surface (for science) and the upper atmosphere (for recharging). In the upper atmosphere the probe could make more coolant from the atmosphere using solar power, and then it could make another dive to the surface.

The basic linked list algorithms are simple enough that a software engineer -- certainly one with a CS degree -- ought to be able to implement them from first principles. And the point of the interview question isn't specifically whether the interviewee can implement a simple linked list algorithm from first principles, it's whether the interviewee can implement anything from first principles.

I'm on Android, so maybe the implementation is a little different. It's a default setting for me, I didn't turn it on.

It will auto-uppercase stand alone "i", but, yeah, as far as I know it doesn't do general auto-correct. I've never been a fan of auto-correct, so I regard that as a feature. I recognize that that's a minority position, though.

Actually, the uppercase support is one thing that I dislike about MessagEase. For swipes you just swipe one way and then back to where you started, which is easy and natural. For taps (your most frequent characters) you have to draw a circle. I've found this to be error prone, and the fact that it's different for the two sets of characters tends to trip me up. If you text as much as a teenager, you could probably get this into muscle memory, but I can never quite get there.

I use MessagEase[1] on my phone. I don't think I'm any faster than I would be with the conventional keyboard, but it seems like my accuracy is a lot better. It wasn't that hard to learn the basics, but I still have trouble with less frequent letters and symbols. Part of that is just that I don't text a whole lot so I don't get enough frequent practice outside of the most common characters.

Edgewrite and Graffiti both have the advantage of leveraging off of your existing writing knowledge, but I have to say after using Graffiti that it sure seemed like it would be a lot faster to just abandon writing as the metaphor altogether.

Actually, I guess that's what MessagEase originally was, since Wikipedia tells me that it was originally released for in 2002 for the Palm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MessagEase

> Personally I want to know about the murderer. I don't want this hidden from the public.

I want to understand what the murderer's motivation was, to the extent that we can. On the other hand, I'd be happy to know that without knowing their name. I don't know if that's practical, but keeping the name out of most news reporting might measurably reduce the murderer's notoriety. I don't know if that would reduce mass shootings in the future, but it seems unlikely that it would hurt.

This article barely mentions lead, which seems like a big oversight. See Kevin Drum's "An Updated Lead-Crime Roundup for 2018": https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-le....

> Our initial thoughts that a bark shield would be too fragile for use in battle were turned on their head by our experimental work which showed that the shield could stand up to heavy impacts, including protecting from arrows. A bark shield, although not as strong as a solid wood or metal shield, is much lighter, allowing for speed and movement.

I'd like to know more about this. I find it hard to believe that a bark shield could provide significant protection against iron weapons, which is not to say that I don't believe it, but I would certainly like to understand how.

We are definitely building upwards in Seattle, as anyone who has been through South Lake Union lately can attest.

I haven't watched The Big Bang Theory regularly in a long time but I always enjoy it when I catch it in re-runs. A lot of people claim to hate it because it makes fun of "nerd stereotypes". I never found it insulting, though. Exaggerated, sure, but it's a sitcom, it's supposed to be exaggerated. A lot of the fun of the show is the characters "taking the piss out of each other" [1]. Not everyone will like that kind of humor but it's pretty common in sitcoms and a lot of people seem to enjoy it.

It seems to be common for people who dislike BBT to complain that it ridicules nerds as a class. I don't think that's right at all. Does anyone think that "Scrubs"[2] ridiculed doctors and other healthcare professionals as a general class?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taking_the_piss

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrubs_(TV_series)

I'm no fan of The Stranger, but this was a very good article and I think it's worth people's time to read it.

If you're wondering who Bret Weinstein is, this is a short snippet from his Wikipedia[1] page:

> Weinstein again experienced controversy when he became the focus of a campus protest at Evergreen State College, where he was teaching biology. His involvement began when he wrote a letter to Evergreen faculty in March of 2017. His letter objected to a change in the College's decades-old tradition of observing a "Day of Absence" during which students and faculty of a minority race would stay home from campus to highlight their contributions to the College.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Weinstein

This video shows how the Owen Gun works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5kW4sKd-sQ

I think the Owen Gun is not just interesting because it was a successful indigenous Australian design, but also because it was so clearly designed for reliability. The Sten Gun in comparison was designed to be extremely cheap to manufacture and did not have a reputation for reliability.

Noise in general is a problem, but in particular it seems to me that emergency vehicle sirens have gotten much louder over the last few years. Also, the flashing lights on police cars seem like they're a lot brighter. Am I just imagining this?

It depends on what you're trying to launch. It's kind of looking like the next big thing in the launch market is going to be a lot of small satellites in low orbit. This is a market that Stratolaunch might perform well in. It's not the right approach for manned space exploration and probably not for unmanned deep-space either, however.

I'd personally like to see Stratolaunch succeed, but without a dedicated rocket designed to exploit its scale, that's going to be hard. I think Rocket Lab's Electron rocket (a small rocket and a relatively small payload fraction on top of that) would likely benefit greatly from air-launch. On the other hand launching one from the Stratolaunch would be complete overkill, unless you stuck 5 or 6 of them on a rotary launcher or something. An aircraft like Virgin Galactic's White Knight Two would be a much better match for Electron.

There's three advantages you get from air launch. One is that your first stage rocket engines can use nozzles that are optimized for vacuum or close to vacuum resulting in better performance through the entire first stage burn. (The RS-68 used on the Delta-IV, for example, has a sea-level ISP of 365s and a vacuum ISP of 420s, which is a pretty substantial difference.[1])

The second is that a launch aircraft at 30,000 or 40,000 feet is providing not just forward velocity but has also allowed the first stage to avoid some gravity loss (to accelerate at 1G at launch you need 2Gs of thrust). It's also allowed the first stage to side-step a major portion of the aerodynamic resistance.

Finally, an air-launched system is not as strongly constrained to specific launch windows. When targeting a specific orbit, you don't have to wait for a specific launch window at the primary launch site (the airfield), you can simply wait until one is relatively nearby and fly to it. This might be a big operational advantage even when it's not a big performance advantage since you can launch your aircraft when you have decent weather over the airfield and the fly to a more ideal spot to launch the rocket. If the radius of the loaded launch airplane is wide enough, this could be a very big advantage.

Even if you add all of these effects up, it's still a pretty small fraction of the 9,000 m/s of delta-v or so that you need to reach orbit. But keep in mind that rockets only deliver a few percent of their launch mass to orbit. A relatively small reduction in the delta-v needed to reach orbit might result in big gains in payload into orbit. In extreme cases, maybe it could double it.

The biggest disadvantage of air launch is that you are seriously constrained in the maximum size of the rocket. The Stratolaunch aircraft can carry about 230 metric tons of payload, whereas a Falcon Heavy weighs in at something like 1,400 metric tons[2].

[1] http://www.astronautix.com/r/rs-68.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy

Battery swapping and offline charging has not been successful in the automotive realm, but it might be a pretty reasonable alternative for aircraft. Even cheap aircraft are so expensive that the overhead of having two sets of batteries wouldn't make that much difference on the overall price, and you could probably rely on a shared pool of batteries anyway, since a lot of light aircraft aren't flown that much.

If battery swapping works then that also opens up some interesting possibilities like aluminum-air batteries that have much greater energy densities than lithium-ion batteries but which aren't rechargeable.

Interestingly the Romans sometimes wrote on cards that were essentially wooden shavings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindolanda_tablets.

Commenters on Reddit note that it is already April 1st in New Zealand...

If you're looking for more details, check out On the Size and Flight Diversity of Giant Pterosaurs, the Use of Birds as Pterosaur Analogues and Comments on Pterosaur Flightlessness: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I am a terrible procrastinator, and for me procrastination seems to be very much like writer's block. The problem isn't doing something so much as it is starting something. In the case of writer's block, I try to start by free-writing. I start writing with the intention that it's going to be crap and I'm going to throw it away. In fact, I might even start with complete gibberish.

Along with general procrastination and writer's block I also suffer from the closely related coder's block. I address this the same way: instead of free-writing I start "free-coding", where I write code with the intention that it's going to be crap, and I might even start writing gibberish, before I move on to writing code that compiles and maybe runs, but does nothing useful. The goal is just to get started.

In the case of both free writing and free coding, once I start I pretty quickly move on to writing stuff that's decent even if it's not great. That's something I can work with, and once I get in that mode I have much greater resistance to distractions.

To circle back to procrastination, I might use a similar approach. Say I need to clean up my work area, and I just don't want to (even though I also do want to). I need to reduce the scope of the problem to something absurdly simple, or maybe even just absurd. So I decide I'm just going to move all the loose items on my desk to another table so I can dust the desk. But I'm not even going to dust the desk, I'm just going to move the stuff off of it. For the immediate moment that's all I've got to care about it. Just moving stuff around.

But once the desk is cleared, dusting it and wiping it down is easy. It's so easy in that moment that that's all I care about. Then once that's done, I move the stuff back. But as I'm moving the stuff back it's easy to address each item one-by-one. Old papers can go in the trash or recycling, the books can go back to their regular place on the book shelf, the stapler can go back in the desk drawer where it regularly resides, etc. Then I realize now would be a good time to wipe the dust off my monitor, sort through the nearby stack of mail, etc.

Now mind you, I still procrastinate way more than I should, but these techniques work for me and I procrastinate a lot less than I used to.

Fair enough, but I'll observe that in my experience deadlines and deploys are often strongly correlated. Management generally doesn't care when code is done, they care when it's done and deployed. I suppose my experience is skewed by the fact that I've spent a lot of my career in startups where sales (or even the CEO) want the code deployed ASAP because they want to demo it.

I guess it depends on why you're doing the deploy. If the whole point of doing the deploy is to pick up new code changes, then the people responsible for doing those code changes run the risk of having to work over the weekend to make sure they're ready. This can be a big problem at (for example) startups where the same engineers are responsible for writing new code and doing deploys. But it can happen at organizations of all sizes.

If all you're doing is rolling out a new version of Postgres and it's supposed to just work, then a Monday deploy makes perfect sense. However, as a software engineer, the primary reason I've been involved in deployments is because we've written new code and we need to release it. In an ideal world, the code would be completed and rigorously tested by no later than Friday at 5pm. In the not-so-ideal world we actually live in, this isn't always true, which is why I prefer to target deploys for Wednesdays.

A corollary to "Don't deploy on Friday": "Don't deploy on Monday."

Unless you really want to work over the weekend.

The biggest problem I saw with the High-Speed Rail plan wasn't the outrageous cost, but rather that it was a plan to spend 60+ billion dollars to solve the wrong problem. The state should have been working on some plan to give high-speed access from the SF Bay, where property is really expensive, into the Central Valley where it's really cheap.

Not many people need to travel the 400 miles between LA and SF at 220 miles an hour. On the other hand, if you can travel 60 miles or so from San Francisco (or the mid-peninsula or even San Jose) at 120 miles an hour, that's a big deal, because that opens up a bunch of low-cost real estate for local workers.