zeteo

Math is un-democratic.

Phillip figured out how to defeat the Greek phalanx (although it took him a while) and had some very limited success against the Persians. Alexander not only made short work of the Greek revolt on Phillip's death, but also went on to defeat the Thracians in their native mountains, the Scythians in their steppe, the Tyrians in an almost impossible siege, the largest Persian armies ever assembled, and of course the Indians with their elephants - at the end of some logistical lines that would be challenging for even mechanized armies.

Should the generals have been the secret to Alexander's success, he died young enough that they had plenty of chances to show their own mettle. But they got pushed back everywhere instead, not only by the rising powers of Rome and Carthage but also by Alexander's partially defeated enemies: the Indians, Scythians and, most humiliatingly, even by the Thracians. The significance of the "Great" nickname was not that they regarded him as a great moral teacher, or an example to be followed by the average person; rather, when looking at Macedonian kings before and after Alexander III, he stood out by far due to his accomplishments. Had he done nothing but founded the wonder-laden city of Alexandria, which dominated the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries, they would have still considered him "Great".

> Is my kid really going to be a better student because she volunteered at a hospital or played high school softball?

Unfortunately, kids from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds have fewer opportunities to volunteer and to pursue expensive sports. These colleges are, in effect, selecting for what Thorstein Veblen would have called "conspicuous leisure" and "conspicuous consumption", i.e. for an upper middle-class background (or above). A long time ago I applied to one of the top business schools in the US and was told quite directly, during the interview process, that the MBA program was mostly about networking and not so much about academics. It looks like this attitude has now expanded to many four-year colleges as well. In business terms, it's all about "culture fit" these days.

For someone trying it for the first time, I would recommend the Falim chewing gum, available on Amazon, or the mint-flavored toothpaste at mastic.gr. If you feel comfortable trying pure mastic, the best quality that I've found are the large tears from Chios Mastiha Growers Association.

+1 for mastic, completely nontoxic and it's been used for thousands of years. My cavity problems have pretty much disappeared since discovering it several years ago.

Is it visible from Australia as well?

Did the ad suggest to you that the iPad was a replacement for cheap, low quality physical objects? That would not be very good copy for Apple. On the contrary, all the instruments etc. seemed rather nice to me. The piano alone was probably worth thousands of dollars.

Yes, a closer analogy would be "look, this guy had a basketball signed by Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant in 1996, and now it's being blown to smithereens and replaced by a 3D model on his iPad".

If I saw a house, that looked like the one where I grew up, being cheerfully destroyed to build a Walmart parking lot, yes I might get a little distressed. It would certainly not improve my opinion of Walmart.

I felt Kursk was a good example of the superiority of defense over offense in WW2 as the other factors were generally even (no major surprise, both sides had good logistics etc.) Everything you say about Soviet preparations is right, that's how good you could make a defense with WW2 tech if you knew what you were doing!

Just because the defense is stronger doesn't guarantee it will always win. Take two sports teams with different levels of skill, for example. In a single game, the team considered weaker can pull off a surprise win. However, over a span of several games, the stronger team will usually pull ahead.

In war, various factors, like the element of surprise, can allow the offense to temporarily overcome an inherently stronger defense. In 1940, the Germans quickly overran the French by catching them off guard tactically and strategically. The French couldn't adapt their defense quickly enough and suffered too many crucial losses early on.

Next year, the Soviets fared even worse than the French initially; but due to geography they managed to survive two crucial years and, at Kursk in 1943, they showed how a well designed defense could stop cold even the best German tanks. The French themselves had a similar experience in WW1: after initially surviving for two hard years, they gave the German attackers a very bloody nose at Verdun.

There's not a single instance in the article mentioning the EMS Medical Director being consulted in any of the 94 cases gone wrong (much less being held accountable). Multiple cases where the EMTs were pressured by the police, though.

I'm sure there are legitimate cases where sedation is reasonably the best available solution. The problem is - who draws the line? There was a case the other day where a university professor was tackled to the ground, her head hitting the cement, and forcefully handcuffed because she had tapped a police officer on the shoulder asking him to stop what he was doing to a student. She was booked for assaulting a police officer, which is clearly a "combative" thing to do. Do you think the officer who tackled her down and then climbed on top of her should also have the authority to inject her with a sedative at his discretion? Do you think that, in an environment where simply not following directions promptly to the full satisfaction of the arresting officer can result in being tased or even shot, law enforcement also needs to be able to sedate people whenever they find it appropriate?

Agreed about Vietnamese, which brings up another issue: diacritics. A word or phrase that is heavy on uppercase with diacritics ("BÁNH CUỐN") will look quite different in the vertical plane from one with a lot of descenders ("eggnog"). Even for developers who don't worry about Vietnamese, it is quite common in North America to require support for Spanish and/or French, which can also feature a lot of words with diacritics: "¿Ándale, vamos?"

I've found a bit more information about the topic in a publicly available research article [1]:

"A depth of only 25 fathoms is quite enough to give some surface indications: coloration, wave phenomena, perhaps fauna. Is this the explanation of the ghost island? Some lost traveller, perhaps en route from Yap to Guam, seeing and remembering these phenomena, later reifying them as an inhabited land? Or is it possible that a real island once existed here, as the Carolinians say? [...] Any Carolinian navigator worthy of the name can give a whole set of radiating courses under all the navigation stars from every island of the Carolines, not just from Kaafiror. [... N]avigators do learn them, together with the courses from real islands, and they make no distinction among them. It is perhaps not altogether in the realm of fantasy to speculate that the curriculum of the schools of navigation was established in a time when Kaafifor was more than a discolored patch of water."

[1] https://micronesica.org/sites/default/files/the_ghost_island...

That sounds fascinating, but it's not really clear to me how imagining islands beyond the horizon can help with dead reckoning. Maybe there are changes in observable phenomena, such as ocean currents, that are associated with these unseen islands? It does sound like a very complex system based on the beginning of this article; I'm wondering if anyone here has read the books mentioned in it: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20705519

Goldstine also wrote a very interesting book called "The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann" that chronicles some of his experiences and also shows the depth of his research trying to draw inspiration from earlier calculating machines.

"At every stage in the growth of that debt the nation has set up the same cry of anguish and despair. At every stage in the growth of that debt it has been seriously asserted by wise men that bankruptcy and ruin were at hand. Yet still the debt went on growing; and still bankruptcy and ruin were as remote as ever. When the great contest with Louis XIV was finally terminated by the Peace of Utrecht, the nation owed about fifty millions; and that debt was considered, not merely by the rude multitude, not merely by foxhunting squires and coffeehouse orators, but by acute and profound thinkers, as an incumbrance which would permanently cripple the body politic. Nevertheless trade flourished; wealth increased; the nation became richer and richer.

Then came the war of the Austrian Succession; and the debt rose to eighty millions. Pamphleteers, historians and orators pronounced that now, at all events, our case was desperate. Yet the signs of increasing prosperity, signs which could neither be counterfeited nor concealed, ought to have satisfied observant and reflecting men that a debt of eighty millions was less to the England which was governed by Pelham than a debt of fifty millions had been to the England which was governed by Oxford.

Soon war again broke forth; and, under the energetic and prodigal administration of the first William Pitt, the debt rapidly swelled to a hundred and forty millions. As soon as the first intoxication of victory was over, men of theory and men of business almost unanimously pronounced that the fatal day had now really arrived. [...] Not less gloomy was the view which George Grenville, a minister eminently diligent and practical, took of our financial situation. The nation must, he conceived, sink under a debt of a hundred and forty millions, unless a portion of the load were borne by the American colonies.

The attempt to lay a portion of the load on the American colonies produced another war. That war left us with an additional hundred millions of debt, and without the colonies whose help had been represented as indispensable. Again England was given over; and again the strange patient persisted in becoming stronger and more blooming in spite of all the diagnostics and prognostics of State physicians. As she had been visibly more prosperous with a debt of a hundred and forty millions than with a debt of fifty millions, so she, as visibly more prosperous with a debt of two hundred and forty millions than with a debt of a hundred and forty millions.

Soon however the wars which sprang from the French Revolution, and which far exceeded in cost any that the world had ever seen, tasked the powers of public credit to the utmost. When the world was again at rest the funded debt of England amounted to eight hundred millions. [...] It was in truth a gigantic, a fabulous debt; and we can hardly wonder that the cry of despair should have been louder than ever. But again that cry was found to have been as unreasonable as ever. After a few years of exhaustion, England recovered herself. [...] Meanwhile taxation was almost constantly becoming lighter and lighter; yet still the Exchequer was full. It may be now affirmed without fear of contradiction that we find it as easy to pay the interest of eight hundred millions as our ancestors found it, a century ago, to pay the interest of eighty millions. [...]

A long experience justifies us in believing that England may, in the twentieth century, be better able to bear a debt of sixteen hundred millions than she is at the present time to bear her present load. But be this as it may, those who so confidently predicted that she must sink, first under a debt of fifty millions, then under a debt of eighty millions then under a debt of a hundred and forty millions, then under a debt of two hundred and forty millions, and lastly under a debt of eight hundred millions, were beyond all doubt under a twofold mistake. They greatly overrated the pressure of the burden; they greatly underrated the strength by which the burden was to be borne."

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. The History of England, from the Accession of James II — Volume 4 (1848)

Americans will soon be encouraged to switch to electric pancakes.

You don't need to build the bridge to an absurd strength, but it may have been insufficiently marked as a navigational hazard. Something like a few well-lit pillars 500 feet upstream in the water would have given the ship plenty of warning to change course, since a vessel travelling at 5 knots takes about a minute to go 500 feet. The total bridge length is on the order of 10,000 feet, so widening the safe area around the pillars to 500 feet would not be a significant impediment to navigation.

China, Russia and India have successfully tested anti-satellite weapons. Considering that Iran and North Korea have recently been able to acquire some pretty advanced Russian missiles, it might not be that hard for other countries to obtain them.

Isn't it the same with exercise, though?

> Those who you see exercising are likely quite healthy and thus _able_ to exercise to old age (or won a genetic lottery to be able to withstand a lot of exercising).

> What you need to count is how many people try to exercise, and then the % of them dying earlier than those who don't

A swastika?! Not quite, it's more like a cross: ꖅ

Yup that's how they designed it in hexagonal chess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess#Rules

"the knight may move to any nearest cell not on an orthogonal or diagonal line on which it stands"

> "Good faith" doesn't mean being dishonest. Instead, it's about showing a little empathy

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/good+faith

> Everyone needs to operate in good faith. I've observed leaders ask their direct reports for something off-hand, without giving it more than 5 seconds of thought. I've watched direct reports operate as a "human command line", requiring precise syntax before they'll act. Don't be either of these type of people.

Do you think people in either of those situation would agree they acted in bad faith? The leader could say they were trying to avoid bikeshedding on what was clearly a quick and simple task. The direct reports may bring up multiple past interactions where imprecise requests led to a waste of their time and negative feedback. Telling everyone to just "don't be these type of people" is not very likely to be helpful.

It's not really a pyramid, just an ancient volcanic core where people deposited stones on top of it for long periods of time. There is no indication of architecture, engineering or organized work crews being involved in the construction. It may be the world's largest cairn/tumulus but definitely not the oldest pyramid.

Why are all of these examples of successful government tech investment so old? ARPANET, moon landing etc. are all 50+ years old - before most HN readers were even born. How many billions/trillions have been spent since then without achieving anything nearly as spectacular?

Careful with that or it might just eat up your battery trying to contact cellular towers at maximum power with a short retry interval.

The use of language like "oldest pyramid in the world" seems a bit misleading as this structure has been built in several layers around a pre-existing volcanic core. As a feat of engineering it is not directly comparable with the Egyptian or Mesoamerican pyramids. It skipped not only the difficult work of building the core, but also potentially the need for architectural planning and large, organized work crews.