wrp

TFA is based on the dissertation work of Kenneth M. Pollack. If you are into military history, his Arabs at War (2002) contains the historical part of the dissertation and is very informative. His second book, Armies of Sand (2019), contains the theoretical part and I didn't feel that it added much understanding.

Could it be this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty's_Amelia_(1803_ship)

Japan did have an extended immigration debate in the 1980s. Guess what they decided? I'm not saying things don't change, but debate on social issues without knowledge of the past is unhelpful. If only journalists would...oh, never mind.

> rooms with glass front walls that had curtains

I immediately thought of the apartments in Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel We, but maybe it's closer to those in Jacques Tati's movie Playtime. It's spooky when something once intended as dystopian parody now has a real life analog.

My Korean colleagues have been asking me to explain this case to them, and I haven't been able to dig up enough reliable info to give much of an answer. I do think I can give a less inflammatory explanation for the shackling, though.

ICE sweeps mostly pick up undocumented laborers in the fields and factories. The people have nothing to lose by trying to run away, as they as just going to be deported anyway. So it stands to reason they would be restrained upon arrest. Documented workers on the other hand have a great deal to lose by further aggravating their situation. It is extremely unlikely that a documented worker would try to run away. However, I expect that ICE has to use the same procedures on all demographic groups to avoid charges racial discrimination.

Huh, that's a new one to me. If some people are using it that way, I need to be careful about using "classic". In my reading, both Classic and Golden Age have been used to mean the era dominated by Universal Studios.

Classic Horror generally means into the early 1950s. The genre changed a lot after that. So yeah, 70s/80s horror aesthetics were quite different.

Although it's an interesting attempt, the first genre I thought of doesn't seem to fit the analysis. The predominant color scheme of classic horror was green and purple. TFA notes how green can connote the weird, but doesn't recognize the prominent role of purple in classic horror.

Both a Walmart and a Target near me recently moved large portions of their inventories to locked cases. I was told by workers there it was due to the massive shoplifting caused by an increase in homeless/addict population combined with laws preventing store security from effectively blocking shoplifters.

Yes, the myth I was pointing out is based on loose terminology. It needs to be made clear that "backwards compatible" means that UTF-8 based tools can receive but are not constrained to emit valid ASCII. I see a lot of comments implying that UTF-8 can interact with an ASCII ecosystem without causing problems. Even worse, it seems most Linux developers believe there is no longer a need to provide a default ASCII setting if they have UTF-8.

As a student in the 1980s, I had several Soviet maps of parts of Asia because nothing of comparable detail was published in the West. Soviet ethnographic maps were incredible and I think they still surpass anything published later. The USSR in general took cultural geography more seriously.

I need to call out a myth about UTF-8. Tools built to assume UTF-8 are not backwards compatible with ASCII. An encoding INCLUDES but also EXCLUDES. When a tool is set to use UTF-8, it will process an ASCII stream, but it will not filter out non-ASCII.

I still use some tools that assume ASCII input. For many years now, Linux tools have been removing the ability to specify default ASCII, leaving UTF-8 as the only relevant choice. This has caused me extra work, because if the data processing chain goes through these tools, I have to manually inspect the data for non-ASCII noise that has been introduced. I mostly use those older tools on Windows now, because most Windows tools still allow you to set default ASCII.

Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in the 1970s had a real submarine periscope you could use, a manned space capsule you could look into, a DC-3 airplane you could go into, and a variety of whirring/buzzing physical things to interact with. In the late 90s, I escorted a school group there and it was all screens. It had gone from being a destination worth driving across the state for to being an experience less interesting than a decent web site.

Would going with Direct Primary Care help? It is like concierge care in that you pay a monthly retainer to a doctor's office for unlimited access. You then supplement that with insurance with a very high deductible for major issues. DPC seems to be a growing trend among new primary care practices in the USA.

For anyone with direct knowledge, what's up with current military culture regarding secrecy? I knew SF guys from the Vietnam era and they didn't talk with outsiders. In fact, I can't think of any prominent "tell all" books from SOF operators from before the 21st century. Now we have ex-SEALs doing book deals.

Not saying it should be surprising. Just trying to answer the question.

Regardless of how unhappy Beijing may be with things Pyongyang does, North Korea is of such obvious strategic importance to China that they are unlikely to ever waver in their support of the regime or even try to hide it.

Wikipedia: The War Department existed for 158 years, from August 7, 1789, to September 18, 1947, when it split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force under the National Security Act of 1947, joining the Department of the Navy to form the National Military Establishment (NME). In 1949, the NME was renamed the Department of Defense (DOD).

It's personal taste, of course, but Department of Defense sounds mealy-mouthed to me. I actually like the idea of going back to the original name.

It depends on the nature of the non-profit. If membership confers some benefit, then it would be deliberately denying that benefit to the class of people who can only pay by cash or check. That would be scummy.

I read once that the general attitude of the group was that their publications were not meant to be widely read, but just to provide the foundation for better expository work.

I also heard that part of the bad reputation that Bourbaki got was due to their being used in graduate education, despite warnings that they weren't suitable. In the 1950s/60s, there was a lack of good graduate texts. Of course, then Serge Lang came along...

I've seen debates on this issue for decades, and I think I largely disagree with the author's position.

For one thing, native speakers of a language do have something special that non-natives, no matter how educated, do not. That is a general intuition of what sounds right in the language. For a language with as much geographic distribution and variation as English, it is possible to have multiple intuitions in conflict, but it is still at a higher level of sensitivity than non-natives can reach.

This does not mean that native speakers are automatically better teachers. Teaching skill requires training. It is also generally believed among professional educators that non-native speakers are more effective teachers at the lower levels of language competency because they can draw on their own learning experiences when teaching. I believe it is well understood in the teaching profession that native speakers have an edge only when you are concerned with that elusive realm of native-like style.

I find myself very irritated by the argument in TFA, because the author, who I assume has a graduate degree in Linguistics, seems to be oblivious to the difference between Native and Near-Native language competency. The portrayal of employment practices also does not match my experience.

American usage is for "gun safety" and "gun control" to mean different things. In Australia/UK, are they interchangeable?

The description sounds like ball lightning. Were there features you observed that would eliminate that possibility?

You raise a good point. I've assumed that "blue book exam" is used as a generic term for in-class tests that consist of just essays, not necessarily using the physical Blue Books that you buy at the campus bookstore.

Survey question: To what extent did blue book exams go away?

When I started out (and the original Van Halen was still together), blue book exams were the norm in humanities classes. I've had narrow experience with American undergrad classes the past 25 years, so I don't have a feeling for how things have evolved.

Somewhat related, the 1947 movie Magic Town.

People should watch some his NewsHour with Robert MacNeil to see what quality journalism used to be like. I think of the 1976-1995 period as the peak of quality TV news in America.

https://americanarchive.org/special_collections/newshour

I mainly agree with your argument, but I think "inevitable in hindsight" needs reconsideration. Following the incongruity model, humor comes when the punchline forces a change in perspective on the setup. So it is not that the new perspective is inevitable, but that it was such a less likely interpretation of the setup that it didn't occur to the audience.

Considered this way, the question is whether an LLM could be trained to create joke setups that are ambiguous in the right way, with one obvious interpretation and a hidden but possible interpretation that will be forced by the punchline.

There are at least three definitions of creativity in circulation. One, you are the first person in history to have that idea. (rare, but I've seen it) Two, you came up with an idea that was new to you. (most common) Three, you have a new idea that gains social acceptance. (Teresa Amabile argues for this one in Creativity in Context (1996))

I wasn't referring to that last definition, but to the view that intellectual environment is so important for supporting the exploration of ideas that true solitary creativity doesn't happen. For books arguing this view, try Robert Weisberg, Dean Keith Simonton, and Keith Sawyer. Study specifically on creativity in lab research was done by Kevin Dunbar, who also found the social aspect essential.

In research on creativity in the arts and sciences, the importance of a supportive community is seen to be so important that some researchers deny the validity of the idea of the creative genius working in isolation.

Interested in your project. Can you point to any similar books and how you are expanding on them?