themeiguoren

By having a base map of the gravity of the ocean floor. Picture a contour map, but for values of g.

Same as if you were navigating based on a physical contour map of the ocean floor, except that getting an accurate depth like that in deep waters isn’t possible, and in shallow waters requires sonar.

I wouldn't say that rotating the phone is against the point! I found it an interesting subversion of the idea that a phone is only ever used in landscape / portrait mode.

Climber’s right doesn’t make sense to me as distinguished from looker’s right, since both perform the named activity facing the slope.

Only if you stick your fridge in your doorframe and vent it outside. Otherwise it’s just a resistive heater. :)

For the first link I think it’s pretty bad as-is, but would be much better if you distinguished the new “more” items in some way. Eg different colored text (and make the “more” button match that formatting). That way you don’t need to re-scan every single option to find what’s changed, and keeps the visual shape of the sections of existing text there. I am also baffled by the menu hiding. But I think the other two examples are pretty nice.

This is my own ignorance, but what determines the power carrying capacity of a wire besides melting from the resistance? Could you transmit a lot more wattage through that same line when superconducting?

Who want to calculate a fraction in their head? My method for this:

* Pick the lower integer square root (5)

* The distance from 25 to 33 is over half the distance from 25 to 36.

* Eyeball that that little over half on a mental picture of sqrt(x) between 0 and 1. Guesstimate 0.7.

* 5.7 is the guess. You can multiply that out on your head and similarly iterate on the error if you want closer.

As a controls engineer, this is still the best one-stop shop I’ve found for making PIDs a lot more usable & robust. There’s a few things I’d add but this covers the major bases.

If you’ve ever been at sea and tried to use seawater to cook pasta, you’ll realize that it’s too much salt. 1:1 seawater to fresh water turns out perfect (and saves your fresh water).

Fiduciary duty is more what you call guidelines than rules. It’s there to a) prevent blatant fraud; misguided/rash/anti-shareholder-sentiment decisions are not prosecutable, and b) give a board a reason to oust someone. The former requires a paper trail along the lines of “I’m liking my own pockets at the expense of other shareholders”, and as you said the latter is not a danger for them.

To break down why this picker is bad, here are several UX snags I immediately ran into.

1) It was not obvious how to set minutes, and I spent several seconds trying to get the hour hand to go in between hours.

2) When I let go and it snapped to minutes, it was not obvious to me how to go back and change the hour I had just input incorrectly. Then after I input minutes I expected it to jump back to hours but it didn’t. This is especially bad if your first interaction is a single touch rather than a press and hold, as it will jump with a wrong input and no obvious way to go back before you can even process how the interface works.

3) I have to look at different areas at the same time to select a time. My finger is trying to scroll a circle (where btw my finger covers the number), but I have to look above to see what the input is.

4) The above was even trickier in the minutes inputs, since there were not markings for sub-5 minutes.

5) It was not obvious that the top bar was clickable as an input area to select am/pm, especially since clicking the top bar would not otherwise allow you to input the time.

6) It’s not obvious with the switch to minutes / seconds that the units have switched. Need some representation of this on the clock face itself.

Some major ticks on all inputs and minor ticks that pop up on the minutes input would help a lot with 1, 4, and 6. Could be subtle markings, but would help quite a bit imo. But really this didn’t need to be anything other than a simple text input.

I’m responsible for the death of tens of thousands of animals. Granted due to the size of pigs and cows it’s likely only a single digit number of mammals, but it was also only done for the trivial purpose of my own culinary pleasure. Imagine the number of animals need to balance out the moral calculus of not my food preferences, but life of a human. The excruciatingly high standard to which we hold medical animal research is indefensible to all but the strictest vegans, and in the context of our omnivorous culture an absolute travesty.

I find it almost satirical that a guide on an imminent nuclear disaster is a 13-page pdf of dense text. If the producers of this guide are serious about their mission, this needs to be condensed into a flowchart with short statements and plenty of pictures that can be absorbed quickly. More detailed info can be tacked on the end, but some bolded statements in the middle of a wall of words is not how you communicate in an emergency.

An ICBM will take ~20-30 minutes from launch to hit the US. By the time you are notified, you will have 5-15 minutes to prepare. This goes down to minutes to seconds for dirty bombs/ground detonations or short range missiles (to which the US is not immune thanks to submarines).

Written up as a blog post: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...

Has anyone fact-checked this story? Did the author actually do a bogus study, or did he save time and money by photoshopping some fake news articles and write a fun story about not believing things at face value?

Does it have to be a cost sink? Charge $20 every time you have to field a support call and you fund your call center while also killing the expected value of scammers trying to spoof their way in. And that’d be a pretty easy sell for a public assistance fund for situations like the librarian deals with.

Draw parallels to other domains where those axioms come into conflict, to try and get some references on how to weigh them. Eventually you just live with the fact that some people have different moral axioms and weightings. It’s a big part of what it means to know someone well, and does not at all preclude having a strong relationship with someone.

Mechanical Turk proves the business model, you just need to gamify the experience for people.

People have no idea what a base rate is. And they don’t realize that the world for young people who didn’t go to college is even sketchier - those numbers just don’t get held up as a spear to attack institutions with.

Controls engineer here. The author’s control theory knowledge is correct - a RHP zero indicates that corrective action will begin in the wrong direction (which the article compares well with countersteering on a bike). The technical term is a “non minimum phase system”. It’s possible this will lead to instability, but in general the long term stability of a system is determined by the location of its poles (which is more applicable to the author’s ice cream example). Poles in the RHP will cause a system to blow up.

My gripe with the article is that the author tries to wow you with some obscure technical points about a system which is unmodeled and he does not understand, to wave his hands at a vague conclusion. If he had made the same point using common English phrases that encapsulate the idea (“positive feedback loop”, “we have to let it get worse before it gets better”, etc), then it would be a lot clearer how wispy his argument is.

I like focusing on the failure rate instead - going from 14% to 12% is a pretty big jump.

This is great as long as you aren’t fighting your local environment. So much green has no place in desert cities where water tables are plummeting. (Looking at you, Vegas and Phoenix)

Agreed. If the issue is that recycling plastic is uneconomical and so it gets shipped out to places that pollute it, the solution is for the recycling centers to stop shipping it out. Or just accept metal-only recycling. This is something to fix at the municipality level.

Weight is also a proxy for how much energy it took to make a product. If you only use your metal or glass straw / jar / etc that weighs 5x what a plastic one does a single time, you aren’t saving anything. Yes the metal one can be recycled, but do you think the recycle rate on those is high enough amongst the general pubic for them to come out ahead environmentally?

The anthropic principle is my favorite mind-hole to spelunk down.

What were the expectations and what are they measuring that exceeds that? I haven’t seen any comparison of the metrics. From my memory, the JWST was roughly a 10x upgrade relative to Hubble in each of spectral resolution, angular resolution, and platform stability. How are those numbers looking now?

This is how I visualize numbers. 5 and 10 are the primary blocks. 7 is a 5 with a 2 on top that could either slide off or take 3 from another number. Great to see it being taught.

Stick you fingers in the space between your ear and your head, and you can feel the muscles moving there. That should really help with building a mind-muscle connection since it’s hard to get feedback otherwise.

I’m glad you’re feeling better, but it’s worth pointing out to everyone else that food sensitivity tests are total bullshit.

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/igg-food-intolerance-tests-...

Autoformatters are hell for 2d arrays of data where the columns have meaning and you want them to be aligned (time series, matrix math). It’s my only real gripe.