Decker, a hypercard style app, seems to give quick gratification. Looks like an easy and fun way to get started with programming. Was just posted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49060856
Satellites have many chlorinated and florinated chemicals, so being vaporized means introducing large volumes to the upper atmosphere where they can catalyze the destruction of ozone molecules. I'd be interested how the volume compares to other sources of atmospheric halogens. They could hardly match the quantity of refrigerant gases released, but being deposited directly in the upper atmosphere may make them more potent.
And an unexpected transient load or heat flux can easily exceed material limits, or materials can have flaws. The ability to qualify the materials, components and processes for aerospace use is an achievement in itself.
For a screening procedure recommended as a mass conducted preventative measure in otherwise healthy people, harms must be regulated to a better standard than "doesn't happen often". The study that I read of was about serious issue occuring something like one in 120 procedures. It was done at Kaiser. Next time you're enjoying a sausage, take a moment to look at the sausage skins. If I understand correctly, our intestinal walls are quite thin, and even the colon vulnerable.
There are legitimate questions if physical constants are constant everywhere in the universe, and also whether they are constant over time. Just because we conceive something "should" be a certain way doesn't make it true. The zero and negative numbers were also weird yet valid. How is the structure of mathematics different from fundamental constants, which we also cannot prove are invariant.
After first experiences with linux shell scripting, sed, awk, and C in 1990s, I found perl a welcome refuge. Way more featureful than DOS .bat files or BASIC! Its capabilities (perl + cpan) have always well exceeded my need for CS goodness. People do complain about the syntax, oddly, without mentioning the numerous ways perl was designed to make common tasks easy to do. The "use strict" pragma, and early adoption of testing culture are two examples where perl led the programming community. With the continued maturing of the language and ecosystem, I can only smile at the naysayers and wish them happiness whatever the language.
Mainstream science has poo-poohed for years any notion that Oriental medicine practices for facilitating lymph flow have any utility. Nice to hear they're back on the allopathic table.
This thought-provoking essay does not consider one crucial aspect of software: the cost of a user developing a facility with a given software product. Historically monopolistic software producers can force these costs to be borne because the user has no alternative to upgrading to the latest version of, for example, Windows, or gmail, or the latest version of the github GUI. A signficant portion of the open source / free software movement is software providing stable interfaces (including for the user) so that resources otherwise spent on compulsory retraining to use the latest version of something proprietary, can be invested in configuring existing resources to better suit the user's problem domain. For example, programs like mutt or vim, or my latest discovery, talon.
Good morning. An expanding plethora of buttons, tabs, menus requires geometrical memory that may have nothing directly to do with the function in question. The first GUIs were designed that functions be "discoverable," however the size of haystacks in which these discoverable functions hide has grown exponentially, adding cognitive overhead, and increasing the length of apprenticeship needed to master the application.
A slick-looking GUI is a kind of ad for the app. As author of an accessible, terminal-based DAW app, I contrast remembering an incantation like 'add-track' or 'list-buses' with hunting around. These incantations can have shorter abbreviations, such 'lb' for list buses, and 'help bus' or 'h bus' to be sufficiently discoverable, easier for both implementer and user. And then to have hotkeys to bump plugin parameters +/- 1/10/100 etc. Probably I'm pissing into the wind to think the majority of users will ever choose this -- and GUIs do provide amazing facilities for many purposes -- but we do have a huge array of choices on linux, including this plethora of music creation and production apps. That is a big success, IMO.