curtis

One of the techniques used to eradicate malaria in the past was to spray the interior walls of houses with DDT. After feeding on human hosts who were infected with malaria, the mosquitoes would land on a nearby wall to digest the blood. If the wall was covered with DDT, then it would kill the mosquito before it had a chance to bite another person.[1]

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/07/02/the-mosquito-k... (I think, the article is paywalled.)

Asimov's way of writing was very typewriter-centric, so maybe it's not surprising that he in particular would fail to imagine word processor-like technology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Characteristics

I couldn't really see any of them until I started moving my head back and forth a little bit, then they popped. The effect was really noticeable with the red-black-dark blue images.

I don't know if Kubrick ever traveled through the terminal since he apparently had a serious fear of flying. It seems likely that some of the people involved with the production of 2001 would have, though. And it would have been brand new at the time.

I think the author is using a much narrower definition of "meritocracy" than many people might. There's a difference between thinking that people who occupy some position of responsibility are "the best" and thinking that in general that they instead simply meet some basic bar of competence. The problem is that for many roles, you can't simply hire somebody off the street and expect them to perform acceptably. I can write software for you but I am in no way qualified to be your lawyer.

Figuring out who is the best is hard. But making sure people are capable of doing a job before we hire them (or promote them, or whatever) is at least a tractable problem. I have a big concern that people who are advocating that we "abandon meritocracy" are going to make it really hard to have any standards at all. This might be fine for hiring people to work behind the counter at McDonald's but it's not going to work if you're trying to assemble a team to find a cure for an infectious disease or, I don't know, design the first Global Positioning System, or you know, any number of things that allow us to live in a modern society.

It just occurred to me that the chairs are a very similar color to the chairs in the space station Hilton in 2001 A Space Odyssey:

https://filmandfurniture.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/2001...

I've not seen that claim before but it certainly seems plausible. It does seem less tiring if you're sitting next to an empty seat rather than a person.

This reminded me of the Uluburun shipwreck[1]. This ship was built using "pegged mortise-and-tenon joints"[2]. It's not entirely clear how the Nile ship's construction was different -- as another commenter mentioned, it would have been nice if they'd included a diagram.

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

[2] https://nauticalarch.org/projects/uluburun-late-bronze-age-s...

I've often complained that flying is the most exhausting thing you can do that involves not doing anything at all. Long meetings are number two on the list...

I suspect that a lot of the impediment to JITing Ruby and Python effectively was due to large and important libraries (standard and third-party) being written in C using interfaces that were not JIT-friendly. JavaScript in the browser also depends on C/C++ interfaces to important functionality, but the entire stack for each engine was controlled by a single organization, and was always released as a unit (the web browser). I think this largely eliminated library inertia (or whatever you want to call it) as a problem when replacing a JavaScript engine.

The other advantage JavaScript had was that there were large, well-funded organizations (notably Google and Mozilla) competing on performance. Python and Ruby were always community projects and they had a strong emphasis on maintaining backwards compatibility with a large and diverse ecosystem, and there wasn't a lot of demand for faster implementations.

People were using Ruby and Python (and before that Perl and PHP) on the backend in many cases. I think it's likely that those are the kinds of projects which are using JS on the backend now, while the Java and C# people are continuing to do their backends in Java and C#.

One of JavaScript's big advantages over Ruby and Python was performance, both because the standard runtime is faster (JITing JavaScript turned out to be a lot easier than JITing Ruby and Python) and because its fundamentally asynchronous nature was a better match for webservers.

And although NPM sucks in a number of ways, I've always found it easier to use than Python's dependency management.

I should have thought of it before, but it occurred to me that Hokule'a (the canoe) has been all over Polynesia, so they had to handle sailing east for part of those trips.

This led me to this article about their first trip to Easter Island, sailing from Mangareva:

http://www.samlow.com/sail-nav/giftofthewind.html

They expected the voyage to be difficult because it would be almost directly into the prevailing winds, but it turned out that they were able to sail pretty close to due-east the entire trip and they arrived at Easter Island 10 days early.

This was in 1999 which was not an El Niño year, but rather a La Niña year following the really large 1998 El Niño event.

I had to look "shunting" up -- I'd heard of it before but then forgotten.

The big oceangoing voyaging canoes like Hokule'a are double canoes so they are symmetric, unlike outrigger canoes. There still might be an advantage to shunting depending on what kind of sail the canoe is using. According to Wikipedia, some types of lateen sails (of which the crab claw sail is a variant[1]) suffer from a "bad tack" due to the position of the mast[2], which shunting would address.

I don't think hokule'a is shunted, but I'm not actually clear on that. Hokule'a isn't a perfect replica anyway since it's built of modern materials.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateen (look for "bad tack")

I don't think shunting buys that much. The crab claw sail is still limited in how close it can sail to the wind. It's always going to be easier sailing when the wind is favorable. And it turns out that in some parts of some years, the winds are more favorable for sailing east in the South Pacific. Of course sooner or later the prevailing winds will return, and then it will be easier to get home.

The winds in the South Pacific predominately blow east to west. Since Polynesian voyaging canoes have a very limited ability to sail into the wind, it seemed impossible for them to have colonized Polynesia from west to east. This appeared to be a pretty strong argument for a colonization of Polynesia from South America, since South American voyagers (either intentional or accidental) would be sailing with the predominate winds, not against them.

However, it turns out that during El Niño years the direction of the winds can change so they are blowing from west to east, making it much easier to sail east across the South Pacific.[1]

In 1947 Thor Heyerdahl didn't know about this possibility.

[1] Anomalous Westerlies, El Niño, and the Colonization of Polynesia - https://www.jstor.org/stable/677659?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont... (I can't find the full text of the paper online, but I think this is the one I remember.)

When Nainoa Thompson was learning/re-inventing Polynesian navigation one of the techniques he used was too spend time at a planetarium where he could learn what the skies looked like at different latitudes.[1]

[1] http://archive.hokulea.com/index/founder_and_teachers/will_k...

You can dispense with the backslashes if you put the entire if-expression in parentheses.

Further training might be required, but if there's a shortage of trained HVAC people, an employer might prefer to hire someone that already knows something about the field, and who happens to know a bunch of other stuff as well (because that indicates they're good at learning new stuff).

For the prospective employee, there's some advantage in not being deeply locked-in to one field in particular. Depending on economic circumstances, you might need to switch trades half-way through your career. The idea is that having some basic experience in a number of different skillsets will make a switch easier if you need to do that.

That's the theory anyway. I don't know whether it's really practical though.

I'm inclined to think that there ought to be a four year college degree that teaches a number of different trade skills as part of its core curriculum. A student in such a program might take history and mathematics courses similar to other college students, but would also learn concrete skills like welding, electrical wiring, HVAC, etc. The goal would be to have a graduate that might be able to find work in a variety of different trades, not just one particular one, and also provide graduates with some of the more traditional educational breadth associated with university.

University ought to make you a more rounded person, and a better citizen, and it ought to make you more employable, all three.

> Why is that a problem? Why is it something to fix? Why do we want to achieve perfect 50% ratios on people's motivations and desires?

I personally don't think it's a problem. The disparity in computer science is so big that it does, at least, deserve an explanation, however.

> Not all girls want to code, and not all girls want to take a STEM path, and that should not be see as some failure.

It's also true that not all boys want to code, and not all boys want to take a STEM path.

But what if a larger percentage of boys want to code or take a STEM path? If this were so, it would look like a pipeline problem, and it would look like a pipeline problem that's quite hard to fix. It might actually look like the reality we currently see.

But wait, it used to be that computer science was almost evenly split between men and women, right? Where did all those women go?

This is a reasonable question to ask, but it's not the only reasonable question to ask. Another question to ask would be: 50 years ago, what percentage of the overall population had computer science degrees? And is that percentage larger, smaller, or roughly similar to what it is today? I don't know, but I think it was likely much, much smaller than it is today. It might be the case that there are more female computer science graduates today as a percentage of the total population than there was 50 years ago. But how could that be true, if (as we know) men with computer science degrees now way outnumber women with computer science degrees?

This isn't really a trick question, the answer is pretty easy: Today there are a lot more people with computer science degrees. That increase was disproportionately men, and that's a consequence of a pipeline that is disproportionately men.

So what's the difference between the pipeline 50 years ago and the pipeline today?

> I think a good first pass would come from studying analytics from npm. What are the most used packages? The most stable?

I think it would also make a lot of sense to look at what's in the Python and Ruby standard libraries.

You've identified the problem, but I think you're wrong about the cause. It's not internet centralization that's the problem, it's the mundane fact that JavaScript does not have a large standard library. And JavaScript absolutely should have a large standard library, but it's not clear what organization would have the motivation to implement, support, and promote one. It's not impossible that a community-driven effort could accomplish the same thing, but nobody seems to be working on it.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatin:

> Chromatin is a complex of DNA, RNA, and protein found in eukaryotic cells. Its primary function is packaging very long DNA molecules into a more compact, denser shape, which prevents the strands from becoming tangled and plays important roles in reinforcing the DNA during cell division, preventing DNA damage, and regulating gene expression and DNA replication.

I wonder if it's possible to visualize how Chromatin works from the DNA paper tape?

Seeing the piles of accumulated paper tape does actually illustrate an interesting question: How exactly is 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA folded up in a human cell?

I wonder if the right thing to do is to simply give interviewees a choice between whiteboard interviews and take home tests. I seem to be in a minority, but I personally prefer whiteboard interviews over take home tests, but I can easily understand why many people prefer take home.

I wasn't sure what RubyMotion was. If you are also wondering, here's what Wikipedia [1] has to say:

> RubyMotion is an IDE of the Ruby programming language that runs on iOS, OS X and Android. RubyMotion is an open-sourced commercial product created by Laurent Sansonetti for HipByte and is based on MacRuby for OS X. RubyMotion adapted and extended MacRuby to work on platforms beyond OS X.

> RubyMotion apps execute in an iOS simulator alongside a read-eval-print loop (REPL) for interactive inspection and modification. 3rd-party Objective-C libraries can be included in a RubyMotion project, either manually or by using a package manager such as CocoaPods. Programs are statically compiled into machine code by use of Rake as its build and execution tool.

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

I've been doing something similar, but I've been taking it one step further: Alpine's apk package manager will let you treat a subdirectory as "root" and you can install packages there. Then you can write the root out as a tar file and use that as the file system for a "FROM scratch" Docker build. One deficiency is that every package seems to depend on the Busybox shell, so the only way to get rid of that is to delete it after it's installed.

So far this approach seems to work OK, but it feels unnecessarily hacky, and I wish there was better tool support for this kind of thing.

There is a big difference between late and not finished at all. Those are all examples of successful big projects.

It seems likely that I am not the only person who can't spell Chuck Palahniuk's last name.

Edit: Now that I think about it, it might be more accurate to say that nobody can spell Chuck Palahniuk's last name...