GeorgeRichard

Are you suggesting that he was targeted before he became the director of the FBI? That seems unlikely. Once he became an obvious target surely the FBI should have secured his past, present and future communications. But I have no idea what protocols there are for such things, I'm just going off common sense, a notoriously sketchy starting point in the crazy world of the current US administration.

>>decorum and professionalism Yes, the hallmark of the Trump administration.

Surely it can only calculate its current position, calculating its future positions would seem to require a divination machine.

This is great fun--and accurate. My lettuce floated just like the picture I drew when I tested it in the bath.

Yes, the article does seem a little sketchy:

> Even by the standards of 1914, Russia was a backward country. Most of its citizens were serfs, often tied to the land they worked, like serfs in the Middle Ages.

Russian serfdom was abolished in 1861, more than 50 years before the start of the First World War.

> NUCLEAR WEAPONS laboratories don’t often help solve serial-killer cases.

Because mass murder is their specialty...

This is a world that I have no knowledge of so I expect my comment is commensurately naive, but it does remind me of the days when I was an avid race-goer. If I bet on a horse to win that's all I wanted it to do; if the horse and jockey expended all their effort and won, fantastic, if they lost, better luck next time. Slow and steady may win the race in some circumstances but it's not the tactic most punters are hoping for. The analogy would be more complete if the loosing horses were sent to the knacker's yard and their stable hands all dismissed with only the trainers living to try, try, try again.

The rather good YouTube channel "Our Own Devices" has a couple of interesting episodes about these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNhjfk9BTNA&pp=ygUcb3VyIG93b...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWA-M590bhY&pp=ygUcb3VyIG93b...

Fair enough, I must remember to wake up properly and think before I type. I suppose it was the lack of a preposition that threw me. The jibe about the quality of their journalism was gratuitous nonsense and which I regret and apologise for.

What is "piling", it's a term I haven't heard before? I was able to read the first paragraph of the story (paywalled) but no explanation given. I wondered whether it was a typo. If the Economist makes such mistakes in their headlines what does that say about the quality of their journalism?

This is the second time that I have notice a title change in HN where the original article has "The Man..." or "The Woman..." changed in the HN title to "A Man..." or "A Woman...". Why is this done?

I don't know anything about facial recognition software so I'm probably underestimating the difficulty of alerting the system and it's operators to the interesting possibility of giraffes and zebras wandering around the urban environment.

> propelling you to a flood of potentials

I've been looking for this for a long time, the exquisite, electric pleasure of bathing in a flood of potentials...

Your wife loves you very much and/or your nasty food poisoning had very nasty external effects.

Why is it a thought experiment? After all envelopes, cash, experimenters etcetera exist. It could be a real experiment. On the other hand what theory or hypothesis would it be testing?

What’s the problem with Monty Hall? The solution (switch to the other door) is demonstrably true. I believe it’s called a veridical paradox.

> Imagine you are given two identical envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope at will, but before inspecting it, you are given the chance to switch envelopes. Should you switch?

Unless the imaginary “giver” shows you what was in the other imaginary envelope you’ll never know. We don’t even know if this imaginary person is telling the truth. How do you know that “One contains twice as much as the other?”

I have never been offered a choice of cash containing envelopes in my life – maybe because I have never worked in a job where bribes could be usefully employed.

The whole “problem” is about as worthwhile a subject of contemplation as, say, “Do flying pigs taste more like partridge than earth-bound pigs?”

Does anyone know of a paradox that works/exists in the real world? I mean something a bit more substantial than whether some random dude claims to be a liar and you supposedly bother to wonder whether or not he’s telling the truth.

Hackaday has an interesting article about this: https://hackaday.com/2022/05/23/fighting-back-against-dodgy-...

> I probably acquired close to a thousand books on mentalism

I'm surprised/skeptical that so many books on this subject exist.

At the 1940 New York World's Fair Westinghouse displayed a machine, the Nimatron, that played Nim. From May 11, 1940, to October 27, 1940, only a few people were able to beat the machine in that six-week period; if they did, they were presented with a coin that said Nim Champ. It was also one of the first-ever electronic computerized games. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nim&oldid=1056951...

> the first video footage gathered by an uncrewed surface vehicle (USV)

Bolshevism has nothing to do with "an onslaught of random chaos". Maybe you have it confused with a crude understanding of Nihilism.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a short novel by the Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962. The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s and describes a single day in the life of ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich

"A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." The Communist Manifesto

Yure credebility as en xpert is somwat deminished if you cannot spell weight or axle. Yup, yeah.

English: dictionary

French: dictionnaire

HN: dictionnary

You might find this of interest - it seems to be a cottage-industry spectrometer selling for £67: "The i-Phos can see wavelengths from approximately 420 - 980nm and their relative (though not their absolute) intensities." http://chriswesley.org/spectrometer.htm

> he escaped when the zoo was bombed in 1943. His whereabouts were unknown until 1946, when British soldiers found him

Extraordinary that an alligator could survive for over two years in wartime Berlin. Where did it live, what did it eat?

I know nothing about this field, however when I looked up "invasive mechanical ventilation" Wikipedia told me: "Mechanical ventilation is termed "invasive" if it involves any instrument inside the trachea through the mouth, such as an endotracheal tube or the skin, such as a tracheostomy tube. Face or nasal masks are used for non-invasive ventilation in appropriately selected conscious patients. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_ventilation]

The device is pictured here https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ES5Skn-X0AAkn3j?format=jpg, according to another comment, and it has a "Face or nasal mask" and is therefore non-invasive. The gloomy death rate cited in the Lancet article not be relevant to this machine and it might be a genuine lifesaver in the care of COVID-19 patients.