Since I had a look at a couple of them, I suppose I might as well provide reviews.
"Introduction to Proofs and the Mathematical Vernacular" -- this is actually pretty good, and I kinda wish I'd had a copy of it at the start of my university mathematical education, if only to teach me what the hell a "Lemma" was, exactly. It's also fun to read.
"21st Century Physics Flexbook" -- very odd. Admittedly intended as a K-12 textbook rather than a university-level textbook, but not much of a way to learn physics even for the kids. Virtually no mathematics whatsoever, let alone calculus. A random grab-bag of topics from "gravitation" (with an attempt to explain relativity which would be more confusing than enlightening) to "nanoscience" and "biomedical imaging". Basic mechanics finally comes in at the end as an afterthought. Not recommended to anyone.
I have a moderate hatred for most entry-level physics textbooks, which manage to pad about 100 pages' worth of information into a thousand-page tome full of glossy photographs in order to justify the $100+ price tag. So if there are any good free texts that would be great.
The first four are good general advice. The fifth and sixth are good ideas some of the time, the seventh is a bit platitudinous but possibly good advice some of the time, and the eighth is more like "a guide to writing like Kurt Vonnegut".
That's great, but I wonder how heavy the nuclear reactor would need to be that provides the 2 MW to power this thing. Is this something we could practically loft into orbit with present-day rockets? (Ignoring the not-entirely-unreasonable-in-this-particular-case environmental objections to flying nuclear reactors through our atmosphere on failure-prone chemical rockets...)
I suppose, on the upside, that once you had this thing in space it could stay there -- a nuclear reactor plus plasma rocket which could just shuffle back and forth between Earth orbit and Mars/Jupiter/wherever, refuelling at every Earth stop.
It obviously can't do very much to a truck, but I wonder what it would do to a human. Nothing very good, obviously, but how long would you need to keep it focused on someone before they dropped down, brain cooked? (I can't help but notice that the beam is approximately head-sized).
I wonder if a reflective helmet would be a decent countermeasure (or, dare I say it, a tinfoil hat?)
Oh, certainly. I've never found a case where there's genuine ambiguity, it's just that there's a certain part of my brain which takes delight in pointing out all the potential flaws in everything I read. It's much harder to concentrate on the test when half my brain is busy visualizing what four hundred Captain Picards would look like marching down my street.
The best thing about posting bills online for six months is that it doesn't matter that legislators don't read them. Instead you'd have an army of partisan bloggers etc trying to point out the flaws, ensuring that all the bill's flaws would get brought to the surface eventually, and at least some of those should get amended away.
Is there some kind of competition I don't know about to mention the words "straw man" in as many threads as possible? It seems to pop up in just about every thread, along with the words "correlation does not equal causation".
Those sorts of questions always bothered me in IQ tests too. I was also always bothered by questions like:
"What comes next in this sequence? 1,4,9,16,25,"
Sure, the answer might be 36, but then again maybe we're looking at some subtler sequence of numbers than that. Maybe it's "the number of bald men who walked past my house every hour since 5am". Maybe the next number is 345 due to the annual Patrick Stewart Lookalike Parade. Who knows?
Probably. Hell, we could all just start using Euros (or whatever) for cash, and then exchange our Euros for plastic-only US dollars at changing booths (which would suddenly become a lot more common).
This, of course, doesn't make life any easier for anyone, except the jerks who already use cards for everything (aka the jerks I always get stuck behind in line while I wait for their little receipt to print and get signed).
Straw man. Who the hell uses their todo list like that? Who are those "proponents" who suggest playing this sort of silly "estimate the task and match it to a time slot" game? I've never met one.
You've never seen a Gantt chart? You're lucky, then.
This is the "makers' schedule" vs "managers' schedule" again. Donald Trump doesn't need a "To do" list because he (presumably) works on a manager's schedule -- if he decides he needs to do something he'll tell his assistant to set up a meeting with the relevant person, then he'll meet with the relevant person at the appropriate time and the thing will get done. Also, he doesn't need to worry about the minor errands which most of us need to fill our to do lists with either, since he can just bark "make me a dental appointment!" at somebody and it gets done.
To do lists are only relevant to those who actually need to sit down and do things on their own. Did Einstein have a To Do list? I don't know, but if he didn't then it was for very different reasons to Donald Trump.
I agree. How about six months? All the major issues have been festering for years, what's an extra six months of delay?
Remember, the government can't build a new road without three years of planning, community consultation, environmental impact statements, mandatory waiting periods, careful negotiation with all stakeholders, and whatever other bureaucracy might crop up along the way. But when the government wants to pass a bill to spend a trillion bucks or fundamentally change the nature of the economy, they seem to think that about twelve hours is the ideal length of time to spend debating it.
What bugs me about all this is that the 'terrorists' so far have shown surprisingly little sophistication in the attacks they have made, mostly because they didn't have to.
That bugs you? I'm pretty grateful for it, personally.
The jihadists' greatest strength is also their greatest weakness: they're not very rational. If they were rational then they'd figure out that there are more efficient ways to kill random civilians than anything they've explored so far. On the other hand, if they were rational then they'd figure out that killing random civilians to please an invisible sky wizard is a pretty fucking stupid way to spend your life anyway.
What about surgically implanted bombs in fat people? (Like in that movie I won't name just to avoid spoiling it for the small number of people who haven't seen it.) Does anyone have a good idea of whether that's a severe risk? Can anyone have a sizeable bomb surgically implanted and live long enough with it inside them to recover from the surgery enough to walk around normally?
"Introduction to Proofs and the Mathematical Vernacular" -- this is actually pretty good, and I kinda wish I'd had a copy of it at the start of my university mathematical education, if only to teach me what the hell a "Lemma" was, exactly. It's also fun to read.
"21st Century Physics Flexbook" -- very odd. Admittedly intended as a K-12 textbook rather than a university-level textbook, but not much of a way to learn physics even for the kids. Virtually no mathematics whatsoever, let alone calculus. A random grab-bag of topics from "gravitation" (with an attempt to explain relativity which would be more confusing than enlightening) to "nanoscience" and "biomedical imaging". Basic mechanics finally comes in at the end as an afterthought. Not recommended to anyone.