>How come we memorized chemical formulas but didn’t talk about that [exciting stuff about developmental biology]
You can argue that about any subject. People want to take physics and learn stuff about black holes but instead the intro courses are about balls rolling down inclined planes and other such "boring" things. But you have to know the basics before you can understand the "cool" stuff!
Also there are things that are just bad translations even for the era -- the KJV mentions unicorns 9 times, often in weird comparisons like "the strength of a unicorn" -- whatever the Hebrew original meant (many scholars think it was referring to wild cattle known as aurochs), it certainly didn't mean a unicorn out of Western mythology.
I've tried them all - vim, emacs, vscode, etc. They all fail in this regard not because of themselves but because significant whitespace is a terrible idea which nearly every programming language avoids.
This sort of thing - selling dubious "medical kits" to consumers is unfortunately getting common in the US - I was recently visiting my elderly parents who still watch live cable tv and there was an ad that played over and over selling a kit containing antibiotics and other drugs along with a booklet to match symptoms to drugs that was supposed to replace going to a doctor. I can't imagine the dire consequences of people using this in practice.
It's also a bit weird how it makes ahistorical meetings for "drama" -- e.g. Russell and Frege never met in real life -- why show that they did (they do mention this never happened in their notes, but why write such a scene at all?)
Most developed societies. When you live by subsistence agriculture, having lots of kids is a benefit as they are free labor. When a culture urbanizes and industrializes, they are less of a benefit.
It really isn't. I've never played formalized sports in my life and had no problem getting into multiple universities (yes, a few decades ago but I doubt if society has become more sports driven; on the contrary people often say that due to the tech boom we now live in an era where if anything, unsporty nerds have too much power)
Interesting that the professor assigned "Homo Ludens" rather than "The Waning of the Middle Ages" (or "Autumn of the Middle Ages" in some translations) which is a more famous work by Huizinga.
I had no idea who he was before reading an obituary when he died a couple of months ago but I've read "The Cheese and the Worms" and "The Night Battles" after that and I plan to read all his works -- he really presents a version of history that hasn't been much covered by others.
Yes I do live in America - and nothing I've said has anything to do with zero sum economics - only that examples of people succeeding has no bearing on how likely it is in general. The "American Dream" implies that economic mobility is 1) likely in America and 2) more likely there than in other places. This can be and has been measured and the results are not in general optimistic e.g. https://news.yale.edu/2025/02/20/tracking-decline-social-mob...
Have you never tried to paste python code from the internet into an editor? At least half the time the indentation is screwed up and I have to go in and figure out manually where to put the spaces in. Indentation gets screwed up by pasting in other languages too, but with those I can generally tell the editor to reindent and it can because the information is included in the source code.
The fact that some people like the author still succeed in becoming wealthy from humble beginnings is besides the point. It's like those actors who talk about how they waited tables and went to hundreds of auditions before they got the role that made them a movie star. Yes, it worked for them, but how many more didn't make it? Did they really work less at it, or were they less lucky?
It reminds me of the "The Salvation of Doug" and its rebuttal "The Demise of Bill" that are often used to illustrate the differences in philosophy between genetics and biochemistry even when they are used to analyze the same system.
And Gutenberg still was shooting for the high-end of the market -- he had his printed Bibles touched up by artists (Illuminated capitals, some color added here and there), meaning his Bibles weren't much cheaper than hand-copied because he believed that nobody wanted just cheap, functional books.
Perhaps. I suspect it may have more to do with the idea that many non-vegans think (whether or not it is true) that vegans believe themselves superior. It isn't unlike how learning that someone is an atheist angers many religious people -- they think the atheists think that they are superior (whether or not they really do).
>If you don't know the names of your representatives you can't vote for them. Seems pretty straight forward to me.
The names are printed on the ballot, along with party affiliation. No memorization needed. In a primary there may be a bit of research needed, but even then you get a sample ballot beforehand so you can research the alternatives, but when the final election happens you generally only have two choices in the US per position and you simply vote for your party of choice.
Maybe in Western culture, but a lot of cultures (Middle Eastern and Indian for example) really like goat meat and even raise them specifically for that.
Maybe not as polarizing as those, but by "animal welfare" he doesn't mean volunteering at the local animal shelter, he's a vegan. That's pretty polarizing to a lot of people who see veganism as an attack on their whole existence because they like meat.
You certainly don't need to "denounce your citizenship" to move to another country and work there - I strongly recommend that everybody live at least for a few years in another country for school or a job. Even if you end up settling back in your home country as I did, the experience is incredibly valuable as it teaches you how arbitrary so many of the customs you grew up with are.
The Japanese are also into fighting insects, although mostly with beetles. Pokemon is more understandable with this in mind as the idea of people collecting creatures to fight with other people's creatures is an extension of this.
What we call "globalization" is the really the second version of globalization. In the late Victorian period goods from all around the world were available in the West, and even to a degree the other way around (a trick of colonization was to process the raw materials from the colony in the home country and sell the finished products back to the colony). What killed the first version of globalization were the world wars.
When people write things like this I wonder if they just haven't used AI coding agents. You don't simply write a prompt and walk away and have a complete program written when you get back. You still have to put a fair amount of effort in description often many times, not unlike the sort of work you'd have to put in if you were supervising a group of junior developers as a systems analyst. It's still work, just at a higher level. And until (and if ever) we get AGI humans will still have to do this.
In the US because of the merger of the AFL and CIO into the current AFL-CIO, "unions" in the US mean both the industrial "worker's rights" style unions like the CIO had, as well as the "guild" style unions of the AFL for plumbers, carpenters, etc. that are mostly about limiting the number of people in the field to make sure salaries don't crash due to oversupply.
And even if you "had AC" it typically wasn't central AC. Even when I was growing up in the 1970s our only AC was a window unit in my parents' bedroom. On hot summer nights we would go and sleep on their floor.
Levittown-style homes for returning WWII veterans were poor quality -- "little boxes all made of ticky-tack" as the song goes, but even high quality homes of the midcentury were still tiny -- the average size of a US house in 1960 was 1,289 sq ft -- basically apartment sized. And typically only had one bathroom
They should have some rivers in Montana -- probably most people's primary association of fly fishing is with Norman Maclean's autobiographical novella "A River Runs Through It" and Robert Redford's 1992 film of it.
Even if something is relative, you can compare it to what other people believe. If most people who know person X think X has "good taste" (that is, that their tastes more or less agree, or at least that they aspire to having similar taste like how more people admire those who like classical music than listen to it themselves) then it is reasonable to say that person X has "good taste".
Even speakers of more common languages like English used Latin for science. Newton wrote the Principia in Latin and William Harvey wrote De Motu Cordis (the book that showed that the heart was a pump that circulated blood) in Latin, for example.
That's what people say - that they can tell if something has been 'shopped. And maybe they can with particularly clumsy manipulation. But the fact is just with as with people claiming something is AI, they often claim that something is Photoshopped which is later shown to be true.
One thing that people might not realize is that the waffle design is meant to remind you of the waffle design of Union Station's ceiling (which in turn was inspired by waffle ceilings in Roman architecture like in the Pantheon) - so it is both brutalist and classical at the same time!