srl

"Few paintings have lasted the test of time as the great wave of Kanagawa. It took Kanagawa 40 years before he drew the wave he is most known for."

The painting is by Hokusai. Kanagawa is a place.

The American allergy to welfare and social safety has caused _global_ fertility to collapse?

"Police bad" doesn't account for differences in performance between SF police and others. "DA bad" at least tries to do this (although as you note, is in some tension with the facts).

Your statement about Dugin is false---I (in the U.S., to be clear) was able to buy a copy of one book on BooksAMillion, and it looks like most/all of them are still available.

Of course, it is true that his books are unavailable on Amazon and Amazon-owned sites. I wish I knew what caused this, or how to find out.

It seems likely that this is the cartoon, but I can't figure out what the original source is: https://www.jokejive.com/images/jokejive/23/23a74af0b0d51ee4...

You and I have very different experiences. At the places where I've been a student and worked, it was possible and permitted to enter the vast majority of buildings (I think all academic buildings, but I'm hedging with "vast majority"), during working hours (something like 8am to 6pm), without any identification or permission. Importantly, this always includes libraries.

I know people who, when considering faculty job offers from universities, use "are libraries open to the public" as a proxy for other valuable properties of the university. It seems like a pretty good heuristic to me.

I've been asked for ID exactly once on a university campus---I needed security to let me into my office building in the middle of the night because I'd forgotten my wallet in there, and they needed to record my name for some record. The officer didn't seem interested in _checking_ the ID so much as copying down the name.

I don't understand the relevance of this. The claim is about what "half of Russia thinks". Why would propaganda in Africa have a strong effect on the thought of those in Russia?

This is a bit of a non-sequitur (not to mention silly), but I'm curious about the details. Do you have any links to this story of Rabi refusing to let Bader study part-time?

The problem, of course, it that the timing doesn't make sense at all. You say this happened in the early 50's. That can't be the early 1850's, since Bader wasn't born yet. But by the 1950s, Feynman was already long gone from high school. Indeed, he'd already devised path integrals, and so he certainly knew about the principle of least action!

Perhaps you meant 30's?

I'm baffled. Is there some broader context that makes this make sense? From what I can tell, this fellow (the one sending the email) is being paid money to develop priorities for updating the FreeBSD handbook. His response is to send an email to the /announcement/ mailing list, with a list of all the relevant bug reports he could find, asking others to do his job for him?

A reasonable survey to send around might be "how often do you use the FreeBSD docs?" "How often do you notice errors in section 1? Section 2? Section 3?" That's not what this is. It's "here's a specific error, and I'm gonna run a /poll/ to figure out what the priority on fixing it is".

Even ignoring the "that's why we hired /you/" component---this must be a singularly ineffective way to gain reliable information. Very few people are going to reply (because each of the ~100 questions is rather technical!). The responses are therefore going to be self-selected to... I don't know, whoever has the time and will to waste on this.

This should have a (2005) --- I was very surprised to see that the competition deadline was 17 years in the past!

In any case, here's the follow-up with the winners: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=42

Please don't post this low-effort nonsense. If you cared about the object-level question, you can check easily enough: https://www.whois.com/whois/orwell.ru. (Spoiler: no, not using namecheap.)

Really, this is a transparent attempt to bring that topic into unrelated threads. Let the namecheap-bashing stay in the namecheap-bashing threads.

> The way you frame it is only a problem if civil servants are not part of society and that people don't have an influence about what the government spends money on, that is: you don't live in some form a representative democracy.

I mean, we don't live in a representative democracy. Not in the sense you're describing.

(Assuming you, like me, live in the U.S.) Civil servants are not elected, are not directly accountable to elected officials, and are certainly not drawn from a representative cross section of the public. You may feel like they represent you, but that is (to be frank) little more than an expression of your own place in society. Civil servants form a discrete and powerful class, with their own interests, unions, and lobbying groups. Ignoring this is, optimistically, naive.

> For instance Lat goes 0-180 but Lon goes -90 to 90

Surely this is several typos? Longitude, which marks east-west, must span 360 degrees (-180 to 180, perhaps? although 0 to 360 is just as reasonable). Latitude, marking north-south, spans only 180 degrees, and therefore is presumably -90 to 90 (so that 0 is the equator).

Moreover, I've used minute-by-minute forecasts myself, and (at least where I lived at the time) they were quite accurate. My use case was "where is a 30 minute gap when I can walk home without getting soaked", and I never once got soaked. So much of the OP falls into the category of things-I-know-to-be-false-from-experience.

The article really has a strong vibe of "algorithms are faulty, we need humans in the loop to make sure they're behaving well!", with a hidden assumption of "humans are less faulty than algorithms". That's an empirical assertion to be determined on a domain-by-domain basis. It's certainly true that having a human in the loop leads to worse outcomes in chess (unless the human has enough modesty to just not do anything). The same is increasingly true of other domains as well.

Perhaps someday, incorrect, largely content-free FUD articles about how algorithms suck will themselves be written entirely by algorithms.

This is pushing way too many of my buttons, so I'll just close by pointing out (on the other side of the apps/humans scale) that a substantial fraction of the time, when I check the weather on NWS, it says something like "Today's high: 56; current temperature: 58". I certainly hope that a human in the loop would fix that problem.

To explain why I thought this was interesting: from what I read, a Tanomoshiko is (mostly "was") an informal mechanism for loans. If one person was in financial hardship, a group of several people would each contribute a small sum of money, thus curing the hardship. Instead of ordinary repayment, the group would now repeat the same act in a few weeks, but choosing another person in the group (perhaps at random) to receive the money. This would repeat until everyone had been payed.

There were and are taboos around loans in many societies (our own included). This seems like it's probably part of a broader family of methods for working around those taboos.

I came across this only from a side remark in Yukichi Fukuzawa's autobiography. I don't know of a good source (the wikipedia article is admittedly not great).

From the Nature medicine paper:

> Editors’ note, [30] March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.

And from "The Scientist":

> Update (March 11, 2020): On social media and news outlets, a theory has circulated that the coronavirus at the root of the COVID-19 outbreak originated in a research lab. Scientists say there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus escaped from a lab.

And an obligatory link to SA's recent post on the phrase "no evidence": https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence...

I see the dress as blue and gold, which was never even an option. But, I'm color blind.

I've used https://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html#4/39.00/-98.00

Okay, I understand that there's some sort of world-wide supply-chain issue. Recently I've heard about fuel shortages of various shorts. It's unclear how related the mess in Lebanon is, since the article states

> Prior to the outages, citizens had for months only been given a few hours of electricity per day

and I thought the fuel shortages were a recent phenomenon.

Regardless: does anyone have a link to a decent primer on what's going on (regarding supply chains, fuel, and all the other recent economic disruptions)? I'm not interested in the usual politically motivated "just so" stories, just a list of what's happening, what parts are definitely understood, and what parts are not understood.