Not a surprise to see pi in there really, since we're averaging over "surfaces" of circles/spheres. In general (spoiler), it does generalize to arbitrary dimensions. We get a rational factor for odd dimensions, and 1/pi * rational for even.
The title instantly identifies it as belonging to the genre of vacuous contrarian hot-takes. Without having read it in its entirety either, I would guess that if does make a good point, it relies on confusing the dangers of bad info, excessive application, or selective focus on areas for improvement, for detriments of the enterprise of self-improvement itself.
This requires owning both repositories. The user puts a measure of "trust" in the owner whose repository he had starred already, so this seems more like a violation of that trust rather than an "exploit".
I've noticed a lot of hair-splitting in these comments over whether this was a failure of peer review, whether to call the papers, considered as specimens of scholarship in their appropriate fields, "fraudulent" rather than "bad", or whether the number of hours they actually logged at the dog park is a relevant concern. All of this is quite besides the point. The researchers passed a version of the Turing Test among the reviewers of their papers. All that we need from that point is an acknowledgement of the absurdity and falseness of the papers themselves. This may not be easily forthcoming, though. One of the reviewers of Social Text took the position, in the wake of Sokal's hoax, that his paper constituted good scholarship, despite the stated intentions of its author. Also confer with Poe's Law. However, when we admit this as a possible response, we are in the territory of radical relativism, with no way to adjudicate between the claims of these scholars and their critics, and for that matter, those of religious fanatics, mentally ill delusional people, confidence scammers, or indeed anybody at all. This is a position which seems, at least, to be somewhat at odds with the fundamental scholarly enterprise. At its heart, one has to cross the pons arsinorum of admitting that, yes, the papers are indeed absurd nonsense. At this point, it seems impossible to convince some people to take this step.
If the critics's objections could be distilled into something with a semblance of validity and germaneness, then it would be that the researchers's methods were too unfocused. But had they taken a narrower approach, the response could just have been to rationalize and ignore. Fight fire with fire (being generality, in this case).
Someone mentioned tonsils below, but in the past, we also had bloodletting, trepanation, and various other unnecessary excisions. Foreskin may one day join the list (who knows, though). This all raises the question of why medicine is practiced the way it is, with so much appeal to authority and memorization, rather than something more intrinsically scientific. Why do bad practices persist for so long?
You're implying that there's some ulterior-motive Embrace, Extend, Extinguish plan underlying this? Is there anything, however, in what they announced they will do that will have a negative effect, though?
The original IPFS whitepaper mentions Filecoin, so that is one possible incentive, but there are many other ways to incentivize people to keep files available. Constituting a superset of the current incentives for hosting files, at the very least.
Could you explain why you think that Cloudflare's recent effort constitutes an attack on IPFS? That is, wouldn't the pinning of a large number of files, hosted on a fast CDN, be a good thing?
This is not exactly true. Amazon has removed books from its publishing platform based on their content, and even makes pseudo-literary judgements by forbidding "placeholder" or "dummy" text.
I'm not sure what point to take from this, other than to be reminded of the imprecision and conceptual vagueness of the terminology he uses ("order", "balance", etc.)
When was the last time you replaced an iPhone because a metal bracket snapped or something like that? Hard to really keep them accountable on this because of the large lead times involved in assessing the long term durability of their products, so they can just claim whatever they want about it with impunity.
By "The Romantic Generation", I was thinking more of Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Mendelssohn, all of whom were nearly exact contemporaries (b.1809-1811), and who consciously broke with with the past (including Beethoven), by largely eschewing Sonata Form. Interesting that a century after Reicha, Busoni picked up on some of the same approaches to composition that Reicha had taken once Romanticism had reached an impasse, becoming the de rigueur approach for the succeeding century.
Loved the documentaries. How about Episode 5 'Paris'?
Glossed over that part when I first read the comment! It was Haydn who essentially created "The Classical Style", which is perhaps the most perfect mode of musical discourse that humanity has yet encountered. His importance is under-stated in the statement that he is "the Shakespeare of Music". That is all quite apart from the innumerable volumes of individual masterpieces that he created!
See sections 6-9 here for demonstration: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.0595.pdf