scythe

It is not a natural assumption that someone will digitize the artwork and use it to adjust a couple thousand matrix coefficients in a complex computer program. To most people that seems like copying with extra steps. The brain may in some ways resemble a computer, but what sets it apart is that we have always lived with brains. Everything a human does has already anticipated the presence of other brains, while etched circuits on ultrapure silicon crystals are something new.

None of the private equity chains with the sans-serif fonts, simplified logos and trisyllabic names are doing this, though. It's bad marketing. Patients don't want to walk outside to an MRI machine in the parking lot. It feels sketchy. Never mind that they score just as well on the ACR image quality tests as the in-room machines. Who the hell knows what that is?

In reality, it's the county hospitals and big universities that use them! Places that have in-house physicists who can argue for what really makes sense in practice. A major problem with healthcare as a business is that the customer does not usually understand the product, but they still need to buy it, and there are time constraints.

The sources you've linked discuss mostly the recovery of additional metals on top of what we have already recovered. That's a different and much harder problem. It's worth remembering that historically, the amount of metal obtained was much smaller — the vast majority of the copper that has ever been mined was mined in the last century, even though humans have been using copper for thousands of years. But historically, that copper was mostly used for consumer products, while today it becomes electrical cables, so it's less obvious how much copper we all use. There's surely enough copper in the walls of my apartment for everyone living here to cook in a copper pan, even though we think of copper pans as being too expensive nowadays.

The problem with modern architecture, in my opinion, is its preference for "dramatic effect": long contours, flat surfaces, high contrast. This is visually exhausting. It looks nice in a catalog and from a large distance, but it's uncomfortable to be close to. This doesn't follow from the use of more glass. It's a historical coincidence that the float glass process made windows cheaper around the same time that architects started experimenting with smoothness.

You're equating life skills to professional skills. I was not taught to milk a cow, but my milk comes from someone who was. The topic is whether software engineers in a professional context learned certain things about software.

When nuclear power became a thing in the seventies, there was massive planning around a presumed nuclear-powered future. The largest energy storage facilities in the US were all built around that time. This turned out to be a mirage as the cost of nuclear went up with the safety expectations of the electorate, while petrochemical prices dropped. But this time it's not prices we're predicting, it's temperature, which is much more reliable.

The other thing is that for a nuclear reactor, you need many kilograms of uranium. But for a Pluvicto patient, you need less than a gram of ytterbium.

Ultimately "make better rules" is only half the battle. You still need a process for implementation.

Including a rather unusual battle between the Tang Dynasty and the Abbasid Caliphate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Talas

It's recorded that the Caliph, on hearing of the battle, said "What is this? A crossover episode?"

TextEdit on Mac uses RTF. Perhaps that's why Windows switched.

>[...]

>But remember: I’m not really building applications for other people to use. I’m building them for me.

Giant caveat to the whole argument and it's buried 80% of the way down. Granted, he alludes to that a little earlier, but if other people using your application are a completely irrelevant outcome, you're an unusual case.

I mean, sure, I make tiny one-offs, but those barely even have something you could call a CLI. I push as much complexity into command-line options and config files as possible.

Hindsight is really something. Of course we usually write the denominator as |x'|^3 but once you see it, it makes sense.

>August 8, 2026

I would guess not.

First, limits are harder than derivatives. Historically, humans figured out the derivative in the late 1600s, but the modern rigorous definition of the limit didn't exist until the 1800s. Slow-walking the definition of the derivative doesn't fix the problem of understanding limits.

The limit of a function f at a point x is defined as the value y, if it exists, such that for all d > 0 there exists an e > 0 such that for all x' in [x - e, x + e] we have |y - f(x')| < d. That's an earful. But for essentially all limits in introductory calculus we evaluate using two rules: the limit of a continuous function f at a point x is f(x), and the squeeze theorem. So my suggestion is to elevate these to the status of axioms. Introducing another number system does not help when students will not do anything nontrivial with it anyway.

The second problem is that "introductory" calculus includes too much material and is consequently pushed too late in the curriculum and seen as a weed-out course. Students spend too much time on "preparation" that doesn't prepare them for calculus. Studying logarithms and trigonometry is orthogonal, so basically all of "precalculus" is not actually pre-calculus. To me a four-year high school curriculum could be written up just fine with two years of algebra and geometry (not separated), one year of calculus and then statistics, which provides an ideal application for the theory of derivatives when you learn regression. But the author has included multivariable calculus and fiddly techniques for taking derivatives of ugly functions into "introductory" calculus. I think this is a step in the wrong direction. Laborious algebra calculations can be moved into an optional methods course for engineering students; we should be ensuring the core ideas are as accessible as possible so that doctors don't write papers about the trapezoid rule anymore:

https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/17/2/152/17985/A-M...

Caffeine causes increased locomotor activity. It's possible that the apparent benefits of coffee may occur because it causes drinkers to move around more (exercise). Other drugs also do this, but usually with more side-effects. Reductions in all-cause mortality associated with coffee consumption are broadly distributed across cardiovascular disease, cancer, which qualitatively resemble the benefits of exercise. Increased testosterone is also an effect of regular exercise:

https://journals.bioscientifica.com/ec/article/6/5/306/35211...

Well not nothing. But it predates him and he adopted the movement early in his political career. When I was in high school (2004-8) antivax sentiment was generally associated with liberal Democrats in places like Marin County. This was a favorite retort of conservatives when confronted with their own backwardness on scientific understanding of evolution and climate change. In 2015 Trump began courting the anti-vaccine crowd and the political valence of that flavor of woo-woo nonsense flipped seemingly overnight. It was surreal to see it happen in real time. By 2020 he had lost control of the monster he helped create and the crowd booed him when he said they should get the Covid vaccine.

Most coups are organic. The US involvement in the Iran coup of 1953 was not very much, but the signal of support was meaningful. Ditto Chile in 1973. Ukraine's overthrow was not like those coups. It relied on popular support from the region near the capital. However, this support was not uniform across the country, and support for the protests hovered around 50% and never reached 60%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan#Public_opinion_abou...

>According to a January poll, 45% of Ukrainians supported the protests, and 48% of Ukrainians disapproved of Euromaidan.

>In a March poll, 57% of Ukrainians said they supported the Euromaidan protests.

The polling variation was large. The government was overthrown in February. But the western regions were massively in favor, and surrounded the capital, while the southeast was mostly opposed. Well-functioning states rely on political processes instead of simply overturning the government whenever a majority of citizens opposes it.

Given the polling data and the division of public opinion, I don't support what happened in February 2014. But that doesn't make it a coup -- a coup is a transfer of power that originates specifically within the government, and Ukraine's protests weren't like that. Nor does it justify Russia's invasion. What happened was more like a feudal power struggle. It doesn't help that before new elections could be held, the interim government banned several political parties. Maybe they were "pro-Russian", but democracy means voters deserve a say in a country's geopolitical alignment, so that doesn't seem like a valid reason to ban a political party to me.

>but maybe you can point exactly to the US involvement

Now this sounds like a joke. US politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden and several senators, attended the protests. This makes American support pretty obvious. US media at the time also tended to minimize domestic opposition to the protests, even though this was a significant position within Ukraine.