puzzledobserver

Several other commenters have brought about the sneaky wordplay involved in saying "identity theft" instead of simply calling it "fraud on the bank", and somehow turning the person into the victim rather than the bank that has been defrauded.

Has anyone tried to argue this point in court? Has this survived / how did this terminology shift survive judicial scrutiny?

I suspect that it isn't the unpredictability, rather it is the acceptable margin of error.

Say you have a 1500 kg car with a 100 hp engine, which starts from a standstill and runs for 5 seconds. How fast will the car be moving at the end of this run? This depends on how much friction the vehicle experiences, and is difficult to accurately predict. Try a similar calculation with a rocket in space, and you can calculate its final speed with a very high degree of certainty.

But now consider the potential impact of a malfunction: if the car engine fails to start, you might be inconvenienced, but you will be fine. On the other hand, if the rocket engine fails to ignite in space, you can't perform necessary orbital maneuvers and you might be in deep trouble.

It's something about environment on Earth being fundamentally hospitable to human life, and environment in space being similarly inhospitable. Because of this, malfunctions and unpredictable system dynamics on Earth are most often just minor inconveniences, while malfunctions in space / underwater / deep underground are disastrous events.

While we hear a lot about isotopes (nuclei with same proton count but different neutron count), we don't hear as much about nuclear isomers (nuclei with the same proton count and same neutron count, but somehow having different configurations).

1. Are nuclear isomers a thing?

2. Corollary: Could it be the case that some nuclei are stable and others are unstable, even though they have the same numbers of protons and neutrons?

How does the PyPy JIT compare to the JIT in the upcoming CPython 3.13?

What does it mean for a corporation to plead guilty?

Does it mean that there is evidence to establish a crime beyond reasonable doubt, but there is insufficient evidence to implicate any employees in particular?

The 2008 Ignobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for a paper that showed that higher-priced placebos are more effective than lower-priced placebos [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners...

The US House and Senate have parliamentarians, who have some power about what bills can be voted on. This was in the news some years ago, when they (if memory serves) blocked some bills from being voted on.

I am unsure of the limits of this power, and how easy it is to change parliamentary rules in the first place.

I just installed Baba is You. It reminds me of Sokoban. I and my friend spent several hours playing Sokoban in college. It was frustratingly difficult.

Are there any gas / hybrid vehicles on the market which achieve 65 mpg? Even the 2024 Prius seems to only achieve 57 mpg.

Might having correlated random variables (in this case, rand and the address of main) unintentionally cause vulnerabilities like the Debian OpenSSL incident [0]?

[0] https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2008/msg00...

My last physics class was on electromagnetism. We used Griffiths' textbook. Some 17 years ago.

I briefly glanced at page 2 of this book, where the author describes the qualitative mechanism by which Maxwell's equations give rise to propagating waves. This is a beautiful picture, and led to an aha moment.

Understanding the effect of humidity on popcorn making sounds like a fascinating research project. Also one that I can honestly imagine a high school student undertaking. I would like to know how you controlled humidity, what your popcorn making apparatus was, what conclusions you drew, can it really make my popcorn better, so many questions.

It seems so sad that we're taking projects that would be real fun---like yours---and comparing them to projects that clearly required massive amounts of infrastructure and external expertise. Now, again, both kinds of projects have their place: one to let students do genuine science, and the other for students to get an exposure to university research labs.

Why again are we turning science fairs into competitions and handing out awards and using them to filter college admissions? How many science fair entries report on failed experiments or admit that they didn't obtain statistically significant results? The whole thing reeks of misplaced incentives.

I am not a linguist, but I don't think that many linguists would agree with your assessment that dialects, leet speak, short form writing, slang, creoles, or vernaculars are necessarily ungrammatical.

From what I understand, the modern understanding is that these point to the failure of grammar as a prescriptive exercise ("This is how thou shalt speak"). Human speech is too complex for simple grammar rules to fully capture its variety. Strict grammar and lexical rules were always fantasies of the grammar teacher anyway.

See, for example, the following article on double negatives and African American Vernacular English: https://daily.jstor.org/black-english-matters/.

I was watching some Youtube videos to wind down last night, when it decided to play a creepy unskippable ad for a horror movie, forcing me to turn down the volume and temporarily switch to another browser tab.

As an immigrant myself, I am completely empathetic to the refugee crisis, and believe that borders are immoral. While I am completely empathetic to the cause, I am very alarmed by the possibility of ads in a VR headset. Sounds like some Black Mirror shit.

The Practical Engineering Youtube channel has a very interesting video on black starts of an electrical grid [0]. Are there any additional challenges in turning a grid off?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOSnQM1Zu4w

Curious: Why might data centers need earthquake warnings, and how might they prepare if given a few minutes or seconds of heads up?

This sounds conceptually difficult: Wouldn't the presence of one-way streets or airport security checkpoints, for example, mean that the travel time from A to B might not be the same as the travel time from B to A?

How can a map then be drawn?

From a cursory glance at the article, they appear to use the word bullshit in the same sense as Frankfurt's essay on bullshit.

Frankfurt's essay goes into a lot of detail about what is and isn't bullshit. If I remember correctly, he differentiates between deception / fraud and bullshit, which he characterizes as lack of concern for the truth. A liar has an untruth they want you to believe, a bullshitter wants you to believe something, they just don't care whether it is an untruth or not.

Now of course, one might complain that Frankfurt hijacked a colloquial word for his idea, but he does spend a lot of time trying to understand the everyday use of the word bullshit.

What would a hypothetical dark energy engine look like?

I don't use shopping carts because my groceries typically fit in a shopping basket.

What I find frustrating about my local grocery store is when they inexplicably rearrange items. One week, bread is stocked in one aisle. Suddenly, on my next trip to the store, the same brand of bread has moved two aisles over.

Part of the reason why I switched to having groceries delivered.

> "In 2013, Vennells hired forensic accounting firm Second Sight, headed up by Ron Warmington, to investigate the Horizon software losses. Warmington discovered the system was flawed and faulty, but Vennells was unhappy with Warmington's report and terminated their contract."

Inexcusable.

The Wikipedia article on Paula Vennells tells me that the Post Office prosecuted 700 subpostmasters between 1999 and 2015 [0]. That works out to about one prosecution every 8 days.

I do not know the baseline rate at which postmasters commit fraud or are prosecuted, but isn't one prosecution every 8 days an awfully high number? Shouldn't the Post Office have conducted some sort of internal investigation as soon as the frequency of prosecutions hit a number this high?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells

If I understand correctly, only one of Einstein's papers was ever subjected to peer review. He didn't like it. [0]

There are some situations where peer review has led to groupthink. The one that comes to mind is the amyloid hypothesis. [1]

[0] https://theconversation.com/hate-the-peer-review-process-ein...

[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabricatio...

Wouldn't a better first question be _why_ we're teaching students C?

One answer might be that although students might spend most of their later professional lives in higher-level languages, they should have some experience in a low-level language.

The ideal such language would not have memory management (i.e., not Java / Python), no memory management help from the type system (so no Rust), and no fancy facilities to build abstractions (so no Rust or C++). This language should, ideally, still be a little more pleasant to work with than assembly (so, no assembly). For historical reasons, we would still like unchecked array accesses and null-terminated strings.

Now C is an answer to this question, but it need not be the only answer. We could instead teach students a fictionalized version of real C. So nice 2-s complement behavior on overflows, buffer overflows segfaults and other bad behavior, but mostly of the predictable kind. We could define undefined behaviors as the instructor sees fit.

As much as we can, we can try to make this fictionalized language agree with the semantics of gcc -O0. We can then study gcc -O0 -S itself as an empirical artifact, and use it to understand x86/x86-64/ARM/MIPS assembly.

Finally, while we're at it, we can use the Bourbaki dangerous bend symbol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbaki_dangerous_bend_symbol) to repeatedly remind students that what they're studying isn't a real language, that real C has sharp edges (including undefined behaviors), and that things like ASAN / Valgrind / ... exist.

I worry that this article is confusing that we'd like students to eventually understand (some understanding of C and an appreciation of the fact that it is an important language which still needs to be handled with care) with the didactic process of reaching that understanding. Wittgenstein's ladder is a thing.

I tend to agree.

I am comfortable with writing functional programs, but I have tried and failed multiple times to grok the Nix documentation. The complexity is not because "functional programming is hard", but because the documentation is terrible.

To get me started with Nix, the documentation needs just a few things:

1. Internal consistency: A large fraction of the documentation is spent talking about how great flakes are, with a (last time I checked) big disclaimer at the top saying that flakes are experimental. Another fraction of the documentation talks about how great declarative installations are, while the third happily uses nix-env which, on the surface, seems no different from [apt / dnf] install.

2. How to use the package manager, for dummies. The last time I tried to install NixOS, I tried to install Z3 and its Java bindings, but got completely lost with the "also install the Java bindings" part. I'd rather just spin up a Docker container with my favorite distribution, and put my trusty magic installations there.

3. How to use Nix the language, for dummies. For people wanting to understand the system better than the dummies from part 2. I remember some magic ellipsis, and remaining confused about what they're about.

4. Really what Nix the language is about, for non-dummies.

The documentation currently conflates the last three points, and is internally inconsistent. It is also not clear where users can turn to for help. And then, I install Silverblue on my machine, and for the most part it is rock solid and easy-to-use. Sure, there are some installation commands that I need to run at the beginning of time, but I can put those in a script, and there's my nearly declarative install.

I didn't know that the speed of sound in the interstellar medium is 100 km/s. That seems surprisingly high, given that there's more atmospheric material here on the surface of Earth, and the speed of sound is only about 330 m/s.

How can sound travel so fast in the interstellar medium?

All papers that it has accepted have been unimpeachable.

All papers that it has accepted have been guilty of academic fraud.

Is this the world's most credible journal, or the most notorious one?

Is ranking by brand necessarily the most useful ranking?

How does the Toyota Prius (with 19 potential trouble areas, per the article) compare with a non-hybrid (say a Mazda 3)?

The first graph indicates that Toyotas are, on the whole, more reliable than Mazdas, and the second graph indicates that hybrid drivetrains (despite having more trouble points) are marginally more reliable than purely gas powered vehicles.

Taken together, this suggests that a recent Prius would be more reliable than a recent Mazda 3, but it would be nice to have a model-wise reliability score, no?

I get the impression that large animal species (whales, elephants, humans, other apes) on the whole live longer than smaller animal species (rabbits, dogs, cats, etc.).

I also get the impression that within each species, large individuals seem to live shorter lives than smaller individuals (dogs, in particular). Up to about 6 feet or so, humans might be an exception, perhaps because being taller is associated with better childhood nutrition? But even among humans, above 6.5 feet or so, I think expected lifespan begins to fall?

Am I mistaken, or otherwise: Isn't this inversion kind of curious?

I also found this paper from 2013 that appears to make a similar claim: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3651517/.

Might it be possible to see an image of the Milky Way itself, diverted back on to us with sufficiently strong gravitational lensing?