panglott

It doesn't sound like a complaint so much as an elegy.

I still regularly use an original iPad nearly every day. It can't update past iOS 5, and it's been pointless to try to install new software on it for years. At this point, it's mostly a Kindle and PDF reader that is still much more usable than our Kindle Fire.

That's no complaint! It's sad because these were great machines that are just becoming obsolete. Its the upside of such attention to hardware quality: they become obsolete before they break, instead of the reverse.

I use an early-2011 Macbook Pro too, which is far more battle-scarred (the battery swelled and cracked the touchpad before I replaced it, and I lost a few screws when installing an SSD), but it still feels like a great everyday machine.

Yep, my early-2011 Macbook Pro is still a daily-use machine that works great, the SSD upgrade really helps. The main thing I wish I could do on it is play Civ VI.

They're still available on the secondary market, and I still use mine almost every day.

Possibly even a single partner was defrauding the business.

If the other partners were not aware this was occurring until now, that might be a more benevolent explanation of why the agency has gone dark.

They linked to the Kickstarter, which says the campaign raised about $35k.

I cycle in a mid-cized American city that has had a "Bicycle Friendly America" Silver ranking for several years now, and the Google Maps bicycle directions have been extremely iffy since they were introduced. I just checked how Google Maps routes my normal cycle route home, and it's very close to good, but in fact is quite bad.

It routes me onto a dangerous arterial road rather than the pleasant multiuse park path that is directly adjacent to the arterial road (and which is my normal cycling route). The Google Maps recommendation here is quite bad and possibly dangerous. The alternate route goes on another heavily-trafficked road rather than the quiet surburban street a block away that is a designated cycle route marked with bicycle signs and sharrows (which was my previous cycling route).

Data for the US is still extremely sparse. Many US towns don't have addresses. But it is improving rapidly; mid-sized towns have been getting building outlines for a while. OSM Europe is far, far ahead of the US in what is mapped.

But OSM has some advantages over the others. You can do Simple Indoor Tagging of your building, say for accessibility reasons, and you can even modify it later.

Intercity rail in the US was destroyed by an Iron Triangle. At present the passenger rail infrastructure is pitiful, since it hasn't had significant investment since about the 1950s. For example, back in 1999 Amtrak tried to resume passenger service between Louisville and Indianapolis by running freight and passenger cars on the same train. But since the track was so old, the trains were limited to 30 mph. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_Cardinal

Try to imagine what the market is like for intercity transportation that is more expensive than driving or taking a Greyhound and yet more than twice as slow, and doesn't connect you to an effective intracity transportation network once you arrive. There weren't many passengers.

Rail transportation is very important in the US, but it's all for freight, which takes up a similar proportion of rail as passenger does in other countries.

Amtrak does run some profitable passenger rail lines in the US, including some places you wouldn't expect, like the Oklahoma City-Dallas line IIRC. There is an interstate connecting those cities, and the population density isn't exactly really high there so IDK.

Having sex or being sexy are not things that you should shame other people for. Sex is normal, and it's not right to punish women for not being virginal.

Some ancient cultures trained children as engravers, who, after a lifetime of peering at tiny details, probably developed eye disorders and inability to see normally. This wouldn't be permitted today.

Right, that's the problem he's identifying. Search for "peppa pig bacon" take you right to that parody video, which is widely pirated...and given the weird, machine-generated examples he cites earlier, how much of that ended in a compilation a human child might see? It's not even that there is inappropriate content on YouTube: it's that these channels are trying to trick children into watching stuff that is so bizarre.

Yea, as nightmare fuel some of that is fantastic. But the larger problem is YouTube autoplaying and automatically recommending it to a naive audience. And the larger processes that incentivize people to make this stuff for children.

Yes. Peppa Pig looks OK. The problem is if YouTube recommends or continues on to a video where a machine splices Peppa Pig with parody videos and gross-out videos and genuinely weird and disturbing stuff.

The problem isn't merely that that this stuff exists, but that it YouTube is recommending and autoplaying it.

Yes. Reading a story to a child is an inherently moderated experience. If the child gets scared, you can stop reading. You can also filter out inappropriate content in real time—some of the Andrew Lang fairy tale collections for example have racist language and anti-Semitic content.

Reading is active while watching video is passive. You have to work your way through a text, instead of mindlessly letting a weird video play on to see what's next. Reading requires more motivation and interest in the material.

Lastly, the main issue the author identifies is how cheaply-produced and algorithmically-generated video content will necessarily generate weird and disturbing content in a way that doesn't occur with authored books. The author is most disturbed by videos that are not human-led, or where machines are splicing together human-led content with parodies and gross-out videos.

YouTube has tons of great videos that are awesome for watching with children. My 8-year-old loves the PBS Digital Studios series like Eons and It's Okay to Be Smart, and Crash Course.

Even I like some of the better nursery rhyme videos in foreign languages, for my target language. I hadn't understood that even the good channels repackage their materials into different compilations for the ad views. But for us YouTube is something that is on the TV in the living room and we can all see and agree on the videos we watch. Still it's hard to filter out the filthy language, weirdness, and pointless cruelty.

The problem the author identified exists in other parts of the kid Internet. With Web-based games, sites are aggregating weird and disturbing games with the OK or just junky ones, and kids are sharing these sites with each other.

The web app only supports NYC, DC, Chicago, LA, and SF? No NOLA or other mid-sized US cities?

EDIT: Also, funny to see the Brooklyn Bridge is priced at one dollar sign out of four. It'd be useful to see free attractions, although I suppose parks and libraries rarely get reviewed.

If the referendum has no legal weight, then going to such lengths to quash it instead magnifies its importance, since the Spanish government clearly views it as being more dangerous than it is.

Why do you think that the BBC is pushing its own agenda here, rather than accurately quoting the concerns and views of the person that they are profiling?

The key point for me was when Spain announced that they were going to remove Catalonia's autonomy and dissolve its parliament. What did they expect Catalonia to do?

This seems like an iconic example of what NOT to do when faced with an independence referendum. Compare the situation in Scotland or Canada, where AIUI the central government grudgingly permitted the referendum, campaigned on the issue locally, and offered symbolic concessions to local autonomy while focusing heavily on the pragmatic risks and costs of independence. In Catalonia by contrast we have plenty of images of the police violently disrupting the referendum and independence protesters, then pledging to end local autonomy altogether.

"more common" may just mean "more common in US English". There are good reasons for the term to have a different meaning in the US and other English-speaking countries with parliamentary systems.

As an American, though it is absolutely true that I think of "the government" as including the courts, because the government of the US is established by the Constitution, which establishes all three branches. There's not even good reason to talk about a "governing party" most of the time, except for rare times such as now when the Republicans control all three branches of government.

US news media using the word "government" are of course going to use the word "government" in the American English sense. Reporters or copyeditors may not even realize there is a distinction to be made.

This is a game that is of interest mostly as a historical artifact, anyway, rather than a a game that people should be playing for its own sake.

Writing involves a couple of different metaphors; the main one is the correspondence of a written symbol with an oralsound. Another one is that a linear sequence of glyphs matches a linear sequence of sounds. Obviously there are mechanical problems with fitting a long sequence of letters on a limited space. Boustephedron maintains the linear sequence of the letters by going back and forth. People quickly learned that it's much easier to read if you instead cut each line into segments and start each segment on one side of a page, but this breaks the visual metaphor of a continuous line of written symbols matching a continuous line of sounds.

Inventing writing is really, really, really hard. Just as, given that we learned to read so long ago, it's hard to remember how hard it is to learn to read. Boustephedron is like training wheels for writing.

Even in the adgricultural midwest reforestation is notable. One factoid I recall is this: At the beginning of the 19th century, Indiana was about 85% forest and 15% barrens (prairies). By the 20th century it had become 20% forest and 80% open land and farmland. Now it is ore like 25% forest and 75% open land and farmland.

European deforestation was most extreme during the late middle ages and early modern period. When people were using wood for fuel in a growing economy, before switching to coal, major European nations were running out of trees. Coppicing was adopted out of a desperate need for basic resources.

I think the problem with this view is that academic linguistics has a limited amount of useful information to tell people who are trying to learn a language. Absolutely people learning a language need informed linguistic advice. And our understanding of language learning is much less rudimentary than it used to be. But linguistics is a multidisciplinary, multiparadigmatic field in which there is serious disagreement over some very basic questions. Dost of the good language apps definitely include that.

But a lot of language learning is about keeping up motivation and finding ways to access and practice the target language more often, to bring down the barriers to using and communicating in the language. Good software tools can help there, because we can't all afford personal tutors at $30/hour.

Learning a language (or any skill) will always take a lot of personal work and commitment. But this is a problem where we need better tools and solutions, even as our tools and solutions have been improving rapidly. More people trying to innovate in this space will only improve them further.

Look, 100 years ago we only had dry books with conjugation tables for mostly classical and European languages. Most of the world's languages were barely described, we barely had adequate tools to describe them, and most policy was bent on eradicating them. Move forward to the mid-20th century, and we learning tools like the FSI courses and Pimsleur courses, which are at least getting decent audio out there. Then the Internet occurred, which has completely transformed our ability to access authentic spoken and written material in major target languages. Online dictionaries and apps are better than ever. You can look up a page in Wikipedia and see the target language version, which reveals so much more than a dictionary can. Machine translation helps you see how words are strung together. Now we have Duolingo and things like Anki and Tofugu.com, which of course do not take you all the way, but are still a huge improvement over the tools we had before. Even better is coming.

One of my favorite essays about this is Brad DeLong's "our Economic Appetites" http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/01/we-are-live-at-the-wee...

Surely the Yamato people are indigenous to southern Honshu. And surely the Ainu are indigenous to Hokkaido. Certainly the Ainu are not not indigenous to Japan.

"Indigenous" is frequently used in a context where a people's rights to their ancestral lands are threatened. It is an assertion of their claim to places where they are threatened. In the case of the Ainu, much of Japanese colonization and colonialism was justified with the ideology that the Ainu were "dying race" or "disappearing". This was acompanied by the usual policies of social oppression and linguicide—taking them away from their parents to Japanese-only schools and beating or shaming them if they dared to speak the language of their parents.

How does one play paper tetris? Most of the links I'm turning up use cut-out tretraminos or origami boxes. Is it like Blokus Duo?

Interesting. There were a lot of Cold War-era abstract strategy games produced in the Slavic countries that just seem to be invisible these days, and many of them are quite interesting. Here's a draft English Wikipedia page for this game, if you can improve it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Klopodavka