tor825gl

The locus of points where magnetic north aligns with true north is a (one dimensional) curve. On one side of the curve magnetic north is too far to the east, on the other side too far to the west.

Same for the locus of points where grid north matches true north.

The two curves meet in some finite number of isolated points, at each of these all three directions are the same.

Paper money was well established at this point.

When the pound replaced the Spanish silver dollar as the default global currency, it did so with a nascent international banking system where banknotes issued by a certain bank in a certain location could be exchanged by other banks in other locations.

Payments were thus often settled in metal rather than being transacted with it.

One of the major uses for the telegraph was the first funds transfers that could happen quicker than moving paper (or bullion) from one location to another. London banks would telegraph correspondent banks in India, Australia, etc.

This essentially doubled the capital intensity of international trade since the goods had to move in one direction but the money could be sent instantaneously in the other.

My understanding was that the latency was much higher due to manual repeating at stations along the way.

Eg. when the London-Mumbai telegraph was new it took around 45 minutes in one direction.

This is a fiction.

Yes. Arguably the new Netflix mini series and extended episode formats are better for decent shows. To be fair, they are much worse for garbage shows. But 20x25 minute episodes is still an option, so what's the problem.

Arguably there are lots of films which could have done with being 4-5 hours long, and were compressed to match conventions and hardware limits for 'movies'.

Lots of novelizations fall into this category. Most decently dense and serious novels cannot be done justice to in 2 hours. The new TV formats have enabled substantial stories to be told well.

The Godfather parts I and II is just one story cut in half in a convenient place. Why not cut it into 4 50 minute eps and an 80 minute finale? (Edit: this substantially underestimates the running time of the first two Godfather movies!)

People are going to pause your thing to go to the toilet anyway. You might as well indicate to them when's a good time to do so.

Obviously there are also quite a few movies where 90 minutes is plenty. Both formats seem needed.

Have you got older recently?

> he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance

Sorry, I remember differently. That "modelling them as having intention is a useful contrivance" is exactly the central argument of the book.

People misread the title by assuming that he was arguing that they actually did have intention.

A counterpart to TFA which somewhat chimes with your position:https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo...

It's an article about how some of the best people do work that engages with public view and discussion either very trivially or not at all (or both).

Hard to describe more clearly but it has been a huge influence on me.

> Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point?

Yes, the second word of the title.

The Periodic Table is also very special, and like the books you mentioned, the surprising part is that it says something additional about his experiences to each of the other books.

I also thought it was very good.

Did a very good job of answering the question: why do (did) bright, ethical, motivated people want to work for a company like this?

I would say, there are exactly two reasons to read a book: because you enjoy it, and because you want to know what it says.

If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model.

He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.

Why doesn't anaconda disprove this?

It's not correct that there is a legal duty to redact names of people who might be accused of wrongdoing, but where the allegations haven't been proved.

The only two reasons that redactions are allowed are a) to protect the privacy of victims and b) to protect the integrity on ongoing investigations.

This wasn't a fuck-up though was it?

Knowing they would die in the attack, the terrorists just didn't care if their identities were known.

It's actually quite easy to open the pdf and see that there are several different elements per page to the document, eg the main text, an image, the footer, the title.

Randomly removing these by trial and error will usually quite easily allow you to find the watermark and nix it, with the advantage that even a sophisticated recipient will not be able to find out from the pdf file what the watermark was.

There are two types of jobs, the ones which require you to know that a day is about 8.5x10^5 seconds, and those which don't.

The problem with this is that destinations are a fixed distance away, whereas their time distance is not fixed. In most journeys people want to reach a specific place rather than drive for a given amount of time.

If you car was fueled by a fixed pipe which it travelled along, consuming all the fuel in the sections of the pipe that it moved past but no more, what would the cross section of the pipe be?

If they sold 500 million microcontrollers and your workplaces never bought any, then your experience doesn't tell us anything about why the people that did buy them, bought them.

Thanks for this!

Another pattern might be that, whereas oral culture matched the 'sufficient unto the day' ethos of hunter gatherers, writing reflected the new agricultural process of carefully building up and storing for the future. Rather than a neutral technological innovation, it embodied the psychological shift.

I don't think the Beatles song really tells us much about 'cottagecore' or rural life in the 1800s.

Retirees in the 1960s were not aspiring to a rural way of life, or giving up plumbing or electricity. They were just buying a small house suitable for two older people to live in together.

This was a middle class goal with very little overlap to today's 'cottagecore' other than the word 'cottage'.

You are making the same two errors again.

You are focusing on the 0.01% of humanity which isn't part of mainstream modernity rather than the 99.99% which is. And you're discussing cases of extreme differential in technological knowledge and worldview (Amazon jungle, Papua New Guinea), rather than the vastly more common smaller gaps and asymmetries.

If a majority of adaptations happened with force, how do you explain the ones that didn't? Don't they suggest that even without any force there would have been convergence, just more slowly?

European settlers committed genocide against the native peoples of North America. I'm not denying that. But that happened in a context of a 400 year process of cultural exchanges and mergers in both directions. Arguably North Americans could not have ignored the written word or manufactured textiles in perpetuity, just as their societies adapted and mutated to accept the horse and steel tools.

But you've selected one particular group. The thousands of groups and individuals who merged their way of life with that of farming/toolmaking/industrialised/modern human society do not have a name, they are just part of the human mainstream.

Of course some of these adaptations happened by force or coercion. But many didn't. So many groups have wanted to participate in technological progress, even at the cost of giving up their previous way of life, that in fact extreme degrees of control and/or hostility have often been needed just to keep parallel societies uncontacted.

This wisdom is preserved for us in the story of Esau and Jacob. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a farmer. When hunting went badly, Esau's desperation for protein, which Jacob could guarantee a supply of by cultivating lentils, was such that he gave up his whole birthright in exchange for the food.

The era in which humans chose whether to continue with a hunter gatherer life or join the new farming communities also seems to have influenced the stories of Adam and Eve ("cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it will yield for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread") and Cain and Abel.

Some have also suggested that archaic prohibitions against eating the food of fairies were a taboo designed to warn off young people from leaving farming or herding groups and joining hunter gatherer communities. They would be 'enchanted' by the easy going lifestyle but then end up hungry and sick.

The need to spend hours every day working a field, in a season when food was plentiful, in order to prepare for another season 6 or 9 months away, must have been a huge cultural crossroads, possibly a bigger break from our close animal ancestors than tool making, and its influence is still with us. Rules around not eating animals who are needed to supply milk and to reproduce the herd similarly cast a long shadow.