lamacase

Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik might fit the bill? It's about the history and modern use of materials like glass, steel, concrete, etc. in everyday objects. Maybe not for very young kids. Wikipedia has a good summary of the content.

While most of it is pretty relaxing it opens with the author getting stabbed on the subway so watch out for that maybe.

Why can't tabs just be a visualization of browser history with the most recently used entries cached and bookmarks can go to hell (aka just be used for a hotbar)

> The project no longer involves collecting new bat samples or working with live viruses. WIV has no role beyond contributing more than 300 whole and partial genome sequences of SARS-related bat coronaviruses from its collection, Daszak says.

From the article there's also supposed to be additional review of further grants to deny anything that might look like gain of function research.

My laymen's take is that monitoring viruses for spillover is still important, maybe more important than ever, and gain of function research has negligible benefits and probably shouldn't happen? On that basis, what's presented in this article seems to be on the right track.

If you say "I don't see the grounds for banning or regulating porn" but you mean "I disagree with the concept of consumer protection regulation altogether", you're wasting people's time.

Just say the more general thing in the first place so people don't have to bother trying to argue the finer points of the specific case.

It could be bad in terms of the outcomes for consumers even if it's produced ethically.

Imagine all junk food and sugary soda was produced with sustainable farming and renewable energy. It could still be the case that it leads to worse health outcomes for the population, which seems like grounds for regulation to me.

I don't really have a position on this, but it seems easy to imagine how someone could.

I don't think that's a fair bar. There are arguments for consciousness in non-human animals that don't depend on a full explanation of consciousness in humans.

But that also doesn't imply we should suspect any particular AI of being conscious just because AI in general could be conscious in principle. We don't expect worms to be conscious just because animals can be.

It does cover every case though. The solution for the orbit of a mass in a 2-body problem is always an ellipse! (Or a parabola/hyperbola for an escape trajectory). You can find the derivation here [1], it's not too complicated.

There is no way for an asteroid and the earth to interact gravitationally to change the asteroid's orbit from what it was coming in. Non-gravitational interactions (like hitting the earth/atmosphere) can do it.

Also, over many interactions and a long time you can have orbital capture in many-body situations, but there is no general equation for this (look up 3 body problem). This is how you get objects accumulating at Lagrange points for example.

TLDR: The equation you're asking for does not exist. Sorry, wrong question!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit

The equation is: if it isn't already in orbit, and it doesn't hit the atmosphere, then it flies past.

For an incoming object to start orbiting earth, it has to decelerate through active propulsion or aerobraking or something like that.

A golf ball is around 4cm, and an arm's length is around 70cm. To be the same apparent size, it would have to maintain that same ratio. The atmosphere is like 50-100km thick (highest weather balloon flight was >50km) so you would have to be seeing it at a further distance than that.

So your asteroid would have to be at least several kilometers across. That approaching dino-killer size. You're definitely misremembering some part of this.

I was in a similar situation a year and a half ago. I quit my job with nothing else lined up, despite advice to the contrary, and found a new one in a few months.

It worked out well for me, and I'd probably do it again without much hesitation if it felt necessary.

That's probably not enough to decide if it's worth it for you, but I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.

But CRC checks wouldn't prevent things like revealing units through fog of war right? The presentation of the game state couldn't be CRCd because each player has a different view of it. And the cheat client doesn't have to modify the actual game state to get that information out.

> Cheating to reveal information locally was still possible, but these few leaks were relatively easy to secure in subsequent patches and revisions.

I don't understand this. Running the whole simulation locally on both ends means that a modified client would have access to the whole game state, and I don't really see how you could patch that out.

Anyone have any idea what they actually did? Try to detect modified clients? Obfuscate the game state to make it harder to interpret?

I dunno, I think a lot of early windows icons were kind of hard to differentiate at a glance. A lot of them are just computers or windows with different smaller icons on them. You can see this even in the examples shown from the collection.

I generally agree that modern attempts to "unify" the design of icons usually go to far, but if you think Windows 98 icons are strictly better than say Windows 11 icons, that seems like rose coloured glasses to me.

The good ones are good, but the bad ones are worse. Although I do understand the appeal, and subjectively I do like them better.

Ok, great idea. Now we just need an extension that auto-bookmarks every newly opened page until I unbookmark it, and a category of "super-bookmarks" to curate the pages I would manually bookmark now.

Re 2. I saw a tweet from a developer who ported Doom to the playdate. He made it so you could turn the crank to fire the chain gun.

I have read the book. He says that engineering degrees are basically the one exception. They're like trade schools. Also, e.g. a social science degree is useful if you're going to be a social science professor/academic, but otherwise none of the skills or knowledge are transferable.

He also says that having any degree is "worth it" to an individual, monetarily. It's just not worth it to society to require everyone to have education they don't use.

If he's saying "everything is worse now that buildings don't look like the Taj Mahal, and clothes don't look like traditional Chinese ceremonial robes", how does this translate into support for Western exceptionalism?

It seems to me like your postive example is a non-sequiter. I don't think Scott is arguing that it's impossible to make architecture that "moves the spirit" using modern design/construction. He's arguing that, for the vast majority of modern buildings, nobody is even trying to move the spirit. Even in cases where historically we would expect them to (major institutions, public art installations, large companies, rich people with large houses).

The question is, why do people with almost unlimited resources choose to build rectangular prisms of largely unadorned glass or concrete?

And your answer is (please correct me if I'm wrong), because modernists think it's better, and people generally agree even though they can't express this agreement in surveys?

What is your basis for believing this? And even if you engage with the literature on aesthetics in architecture, how do you find yourself siding with the modernists instead of the critics of modernism like Christopher Alexander and Nikos Salingaros? This is a serious question, I've been trying for a while to find a defense of modernist architecture that I can actually understand.

The monster math was "1/(planck time value from Wikipedia)"

What would this mean? You could have a rule that just implemented rule 30 for one adjacent row or column of the plane, but that would just give you stripes of 1d rule 30. Is there some obvious way of generalizing the 1d rules to 2d that I'm missing? What properties would you expect to be conserved?

How about a "Rosetta Proof" wiki in the style of "Rosetta Code"? You wouldn't need to settle on one language, and it might help clarify the advantages of one language or another.

By what definition? The "notion" of "justified true belief" WAS the definition of knowledge prior to these complications. Just saying "everything is subjective" is more tedious than making meaningful distinctions, in my subjective opinion

I think you mean pedantic trie-hard

Comments in this thread seem kind of... defensive? Are people really worried that this is going to be extrapolated to "Dolphins are universally and forever smarter than humans" or what?

I'm not sure what to make of the "so what?" comments. Would this discovery only be interestinging if it validated hitchhiker's guide?

I think this is interesting regardless of whether it upends the "intellectual hierarchy" of species.

If anyone is interested in reading about a large telescope project from start to finish, I highly recommend this book: "The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope". The project started in the 1920s, but the Palomar telescope (now called the Hale telescope) is still in active use.

If anyone knows of a comparably comprehensive account of a more modern telescope, I would love to hear about it.

How does the author think Zuckerberg's VR Avatar resembles clippy the paperclip?

What the author stated was:

> I will argue that block comments are unnecessary, and in fact near-impossible to design and implement correctly (for my own pedantic notion of correctness)

You might argue, subjectively or objectively, about the utility of the "notion of correctness" used here, but the author warns at the outset that this is the basis for the rest of the analysis.

I ask again, what preface would the author need to write to satisfy your criticism? I think that it's worthwhile for the author to point out that you cannot create a block comment scheme without having some un-intuitive edge cases, and I'm curious what gave you the impression that the author was claiming an unwarranted degree of objectivity.

"I don't have these problems, therefore they are not real problems"

The author makes almost exactly your point regarding the (non)importance of these issues in practice.

What would the author have to write in order to be able to discuss the consequences of this language design choice, and be spared the barb of your wit.

Submit an expense report to your employer and you'll be reimbursed for the extra bytes.

Yeah, I hate how women are never normally distributed. Only men operate in statistically simple distributions.

From the article:

>Minimalism is a lifestyle that helps people question what things add value to their lives.

The movement involves reflecting on your personal values, so of course it's going to have almost as many expressions as there are people doing it.