That's taking entirely the worst interpretation of what I said. I assume Thomas is sensitive about his appearance, took the worst interpretation possible and flagged all my posts. Which seems at least as shitty as noticing.
It's not like I'm making fun of the lady for having a big nose. She's simply completely ignorant in life experience, and even possible life experience to do justice to the source material.
I think it's also a damn shame my comments are seen as "toxic." I realize America is collapsing into a foment of witch hunts, statue topplings and city burnings, but if you really consider my writing on HN to be .... even "spicy" -the end can't be far off. God help you all.
Best of luck to both of you, Happy New Year, and apologies for rustling your jimmies.
Also "I've tortured the meaning of this to make Ray look like less of an idiot." I'm pretty sure gunshot detectors, which arguably date from WW-1, don't qualify as "Public and private spaces are routinely monitored by machine intelligence to prevent interpersonal violence.”
Seriously man, do you just follow me around and flag my comments? It means a weedy little narrow minded woman with no life experience of violence is probably incapable of writing about it, cabish?
Edit add: image googling you after your flagging of the comment, well, just lol. Must be tough.
That's a great point (also cool article bro), but as a participant in "bro culture" (power lifting, BJJ, kick boxing, etc etc you name it; hell I used to be a goddamned auto mechanic, and the larval me had to chop wood to heat the house) -this lady didn't do her field research. She's regurgitating stale stereotypes about working class masculinity from the vantage point of a privileged self-regarding nitwit from Portland.
At her present state of enlightenment she's about as capable of writing about violence or even bro culture in any useful way as I am about giving birth or the emotions experienced on a daily basis by resentful intersectional feminists.
This is a ridiculous PR puff piece by her publisher, and even a vague perusal of the translation indicates it's an atrocity, which is exactly what you'd expect from a "young adult writer" of her physiognomy and smug disposition.
"Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of Beowulf starts off like an exploding beer keg: “Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!”3 Generations of scholars have limped along, translating Hwaet! as “Listen!” or “Yes!” or “Lo!” or “Hail!” (Why not “Belay that!” or “Tut! Tut! I say!”?) Headley has had the wicked idea that what we’ve needed all along is Beowulf: The Frat-Boy Chronicles. If she had continued in this cheeky vein, Headley might have altered Beowulf Studies forever."
and lol
"Headley apparently knows little Old English, and it shows. In preparation, she read all the translations by women she could find."
Stunning and brave.
Do yourself a favor and put in the couple of hours it requires to just read it in the original language. Or if you can't be arsed to do the trivial work required, as apparently the author of this "translation," read Rebsamen.
Which, if you read old english, you know is an unconscionable travesty. No doubt not as bad as the desecration by a nitwit young adult writer discussed above, but pretty bad.
I'd rather write python than matlab any day (I made this choice, literally in '98): it's a statement about reading. Matlab is closer to a a math notation and python is a clunky programming language. I'd never in a million years write new code in Matlab, but I prefer it for didactics.
It's a regression as far as code readability goes for fairly straightforward reasons: almost everything in Matlab is a matrix. Matrices are not first class citizens in Python, and it matters. I use Python a hell of a lot more than Matlab, but for examining how an algorithm works (say, for implementing in another language or modifying it to do tricks), Matlab wins. Go look at these PRML collections in Python and Matlab and see if you disagree:
I'm happy to pay more for, say, beans which aren't soaked in glyphosate. It's really bonkers how Monsanto has succeeded in putting this shit everywhere.
Because even a reasonable set of first steps towards creating artificial mechanical life forms made out of arbitrary atoms do not exist and probably never will. Drexler wrote a stupid science fiction book. Good marketing for chemists for a while I guess. Remember the congressional hearings back in 2005 on how nanotech was going to be 15% of US GDP by 2015? I do!
It's not a problem if you assume, as most affirmative action does, that 2+ sigma talent (baseline physics professor) and motivation is evenly distributed across populations. It probably isn't; virtually nothing else is in any biological population above the evolutionary level of a paramecium, and so you get numskulls like this in your physics department:
I didn't downvote, but maybe because it is an insipid and disgusting question?
FWIIW in high altitude aviation where digestive gas could cause debilitating pain or even life threatening injury, the solution is to eat food that doesn't make you fart; usually steak and eggs. I'm sure the astronaut nutritionist types have this issue under control. People forget how many zillions of dollars went into the early space program to figure stuff like this out.
I usually like Collision articles, and agree with the title, but this is a terrible measure for physics.
Horgan's book is a better resource for this sort of thing[0]. Obviously there are many problems with the sociology and incentive systems for physics departments; affirmative action, papers with 1000 "coauthors," infrastructure fees for grants involving giving a grad student a pencil, political witch hunts, difficulties in family formation, herding behavior in subjects, byzantine political games, overcrowded winner take all credit. Frankly you'd have to be kind of a combination masochist moron to want to do it these days outside of the rare person whose career is assured post PhD; masochistic morons probably don't make good scientists.
But nobody talks about the fact that an awful lot of "physics" these days is unfalsifiable piffle. Phenomenology, network theory, cosmology, noodle theory, "quantum computing," black hole physics, neural net fiddlers, nanotechnologists, cosmologists, numskulls babbling about "muh multiverse" and "muh simulation hypothesis" -the world let alone the average physics department has entirely too many of these. Nobody in the physics department can make fun of these cranks for entirely political reasons. And at this point the lunatics outnumber the actual scientists, who, you know, can make predictions that can be checked, rather than generating piffle suited for press releases and late night bong sessions.
Of course the capital costs of this are absurd (that's basically what you're saying here), but if it results in tomatoes and strawberries which don't taste like paste, it's worth it to me. Dutch greenhouse farms are considerably more realistic [0], but who knows, this may have some niches in extremely urban areas.
I charge by the hour, so my "free time" is billable too. Focuses the mind knowing whatever you're doing when you're not working is billable hours (hence no vidya). I still mostly make my own food, coffee and wash my own clothes. Hell Paul Krugman washes his own clothes in his sink, while he's travelling, and I'm pretty sure he bills more than I do (I actually do use laundry service when I travel for work).
Anyway, maybe that's why I don't see a lot of those things on the list as desirable; if I have to spend two hours managing the graphic designer to make a chart/plot/figure, I may as well fiddle around in xfig or whatever to get it done myself.