dbatten

I play mostly with the aforementioned wife and kids!

We were shocked by how early our kids could pick up board games, including many of the ones mentioned in this article. Our 2 oldest kids were playing Ticket to Ride and Carcassone well enough to beat us form time to time at 3 and 4 years old. Now that they're a little older, slightly more complicated games like Catan and Flamecraft are on the table!

it feels like Mac's UI is optimized around the assumption most users won't expand windows to fill the whole screen, but rather leave them half-sized somewhere in the middle

IMO, this has been their assumption for years, and it actually turned me off when I tried getting used to Mac circa 2006-2007. Coming from Windows at the time, I just couldn't get over a weird anxiety that my application window wasn't maximized, because it didn't look like it completely snapped into the screen corners.

Now, using 34-inch ultrawide monitors almost exclusively, I never maximize anything... it'd be unusable.

At least based on some of the things he's written in some of the anthologies, it seems like a lot of that disillusionment was not just because of age, but rather because of his battles with the publishers and what not that were pushing him to make changes that he felt would compromise the integrity of the strip. A lot of the comics include subtle jabs about corporate greed, artistic integrity, etc. because he was actively fighting with the corporations that distributed his strip over such matters...

Still, 100% agreed that he stopped at the right time, both because of the creeping cynicism, but also simply because he was running out of fresh ideas...

Gurobi solved the new model to optimality (i.e., the bound became equal to the value of the best solution found).

Ah, I was not aware that that's what this language indicated. Thanks for helping me understand more!

I've used Gurobi (and other solvers) in the past, but always in situations where we just needed to find a solution that was way better than what we were going to find with, say, a heuristic... I've never needed to find a provably optimal solution...

Unless I missed something, though, the highest bound the author reported for the relaxation was 271 2/3 moves, which is obviously significantly higher than 218...

Genuinely interested in being educated here: If Gurobi's integer programming solver didn't find a solution better than 218, is that a guarantee that there exists no solution better than 218? Is it equivalent to a mathematical proof?

(Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that there's no bugs in Gurobi's solver and no bugs in the author's implementation of the problem for Gurobi to solve.)

I guess I'm basically asking whether it's possible that Gurobi got trapped in a local maximum, or whether this can be considered a definitive universal solution.

Any chance she's going to write anything about this when she's done? I'd love to read somebody's account of this experience. Very cool idea.

If you find this interesting, definitely consider checking out contraction hierarchies. One of the early algorithms used by mapping software to enable calculating fastest routes between any pair of places. It's exact, and it's orders of magnitude faster than graph search algorithms like Dijkstra.

This webpage has a very intuitive graphical explanation of how it works: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/contraction-hierarchies/

(I had the joy of implementing this in Python with OSM data a few years ago. Planning a three hour car trip with software I wrote and having it come back with the same path recommended by Google Maps in a matter of milliseconds was a very rewarding feeling.)

To make matters worse, the title and featured image make it very clear that they have confused "macaroons" and "macarons."

Macaroon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaroon Macaron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaron

Used to use some of this data for analyzing cellular service coverage. The info on cellular data (e.g., LTE) availability is provided by the cell providers and is usually... very optimistic.

I'd assume the terrestrial fiber/cable/DSL data is more accurate, though?

Google still does this! They seem to use some sort of generative neural net to produce fake names, descriptions, and even reviews for the trap locations.

You can report the location to Google as "bad data" and they'll delete it, but then a totally different fake location will re-appear in its place a few days later.

It's worth pointing out that the conventional bombing raid of Tokyo on March 9, 1945 was deadlier than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, depending on whose counts you use...

The objection I've usually heard is less about farm land being used for pasture instead of growing crops, and more about the amount of crops that have to be grown to feed the cattle... Growing corn to feed cows to feed humans is massively less efficient than growing corn to feed humans, or at least that's how the story goes.

Is there not an efficiency problem there that we could improve on?

(Not an expert in this area, genuinely curious.)

Lemur Pro owner here. I personally have super-mixed feelings about the machine.

Pros: Battery life is excellent. Used it for 12 hours while walking around a factory doing an IT system install, never had to charge it. Slim form factor is nice. With an upgrade to an i7, additional RAM, SSD, etc., performance is good for any task not requiring a GPU. It would easily be the best laptop I've ever owned, except for...

Cons: WiFi chipset died within months of purchase and had to be replaced. Battery swelled by year 2 to the point that the mouse was unusable, so battery had to be replaced as well. The machine shipped with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which had a Linux kernel bug that caused the machine to freeze when trying to throttle up/down the i7 CPU for power management purposes. I contacted System76 about the problem, and they didn't know anything about it... I ended up having to troubleshoot it myself, at which point I told them the issue, and they sent out an email about the fix to (what I assume was) all Lemur Pro owners. I thought buying a Linux laptop from a company that specializes in making Linux laptops would let me avoid these kinds of nagging issues around things like drivers and power management bugs, but alas it did not. More startlingly, I would have expected a company that specializes in Linux laptops to at least be AWARE of such an issue on their machines, but it seems they had no idea... I feel like I would have been just as well off going with a Thinkpad.

Related final pro: It was frustrating to have to replace multiple parts in this machine (especially so early in its life), but I have to give credit to System76's self-install policy. They sent me the parts and detailed instructions for doing the repairs myself. Saved so much headache.

Overall, I really want to love my System76, but I'd have to think really hard before buying another one.

I'm not even convinced that there will be a "marginal increase in mining required for battery production," nor that there will be an associated increase in localized environmental damage.

Lithium mines produce localized environmental damage, _but so does fossil fuel extraction_. Think about environmental damage from mountaintop removal coal mining, fracking, offshore oil spills, etc.

With fossil fuels, you get localized environmental damage, _plus_ climate change.

With lithium, you get localized environmental damage, but you hopefully support a transition to renewables.

Noteworthy comment:

It is unfortunate that in the public mind, hydrogen as a lifting gas is associated with the Hindenburg disaster. Actually, hydrogen filled airships were extremely difficult to set alight. Just ask the Brits in WWI.

The RAF could easily hit the German airships with gun fire, but couldn’t get them to ignite until they developed special phosphorus filled ammunition. They used sustained machine gun fire to rip a section of the gas bags to get the hydrogen to mix with air at their surfaces. Then, the small number of phosphorus burning bullets could ignite this hydrogen air mix. Even then, the RAF brought down very few of them.

Because of this knowledge of how difficult it is to get a hydrogen filled airship to burn, there has been much speculation that the Hindenburg was sabotaged, set to burn deliberately, in a very public act of terrorism / economic / public relations warfare against the NAZI regime (and who could blame them?).

I had no idea that there were controversies regarding the cause of the disaster, nor that hydrogen was (arguably, at least) dangerous more in the public eye than in reality. I'd be interested to hear other modern engineering perspectives on the hydrogen issue...

"Remain there" indeed.

As anyone who has ever switched from an iPhone to an Android device will tell you, iMessage makes the process extremely painful, and in totally unexpected ways. You get your new Android phone set up, and suddenly find that you're not getting messages from any of your friends that have iPhones... because those messages are being routed over iMessage instead of SMS.

So you do a bunch of Googling or contact support for your phone manufacturer or wireless carrier, who directs you to an Apple tool for de-registering your number from iMessage. You go through that process, but it takes days/weeks for your de-registration to finally make it through "the system" to everybody's iPhones so that messaging with your friends on iPhones finally starts working again.

Did Apple do this intentionally? No, probably not. Could they solve this problem? You bet they could. But why solve something that makes switching to Android a nightmare?

This doesn't seem to explain how it would happen after plugging in a new keyboard, or trying to use the on-screen keyboard, though...

True story: One day, Windows wouldn't let me type the letter p.

I was trying to log back in from the Windows lock screen. Typed my password, got it wrong. Typed it again, got it wrong. Eventually got locked out of my account, despite being extremely careful to type my password correctly. Went to IT and had them unlock my account...

Went back to my PC and tried to log in again. Typed my password very carefully, letter by letter, watching each letter come up on screen as I went. When I went to type the letter p, nothing happened. I hit p repeatedly, nothing.

I figured the switch for the p key on my keyboard had died or something, so I went to IT and got a new keyboard. Unplugged the old, plugged in the new. Still no p. OK, this is getting ridiculous. Clicked on accessibility tools and tried to use the on-screen keyboard to type in my password. _Still couldn't type the letter p, even with the on-screen keyboard._

Ended up having to hard reset the machine, and then everything was fine and dandy. Still have no idea what could have happened. It ended up being the last straw that pushed me to Ubuntu, and I've never looked back.

For those who (like me) didn't get the "toothpaste company" reference - it seems to be a reference to Intel trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of an old architecture (as one would squeeze every bit of toothpaste out of a tube), rather than innovating with new architectures and technologies.

It's hard to figure out exactly where the toothpaste reference originated, but at least one source makes it sound like it was a mis-translation of materials published by AMD. See https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-takes-a-jab-at-intel-we-do...

Also worth mentioning that U-haul trailers are very handy for this. There's at least 3 U-haul dealers that I can think of within a 5-minute drive of me. The one I prefer is probably 2 minutes away, I can rent a trailer for a day for like $15, they're never out of stock, and the owner of the U-haul dealership is the most chill person on the planet. I get all the benefits of a pickup truck, but don't have to pay for one. Win-win.

You're of course welcome to own a pickup truck if you want, nothing wrong with that. And I'm sure plenty of people don't live in suburbia with U-haul dealers everywhere. But if you do, it's stupid simple and you can save a ton of money.

My company style guide explicitly specifies this.

https://github.com/republicwireless-open/sql-style-guide

I think Mozilla's does as well.

Even for planning for personal travel, it's worth noting the massive difference in the amount of tourism between America's top 5 or 10 National Parks, and the countless other National Parks, Forests, Wilderness Areas, etc.

Yes, Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and a few other places are absolutely crawling with tourists. They're victims of their own success as destinations for people to check off a bucket list.

But once you get outside that top tier, America has countless places that are just as beautiful, still legitimately wild if that's your thing, and definitely not as crowded.

In my neck of the woods, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smokey Mountains National Park (which are among the most-visited in the country, by the way) don't have the same sense of overwhelming crowding that, say, Yosemite does, except for maybe during peak leaf season, or at specific times/locations (e.g., Cades Cove in Spring). Most of the year, sure, they're not pristine wilderness, but it's not like they're wall-to-wall people and trash, either.

And, if wilderness IS your thing, you can go right next door to Pisgah National Forest or Nantahala National Forest, backpack for miles at a time without seeing another soul, and see views that are, IMO, equally as impressive as what you get in the official National Parks.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you're looking for a more remote experience, venture away from the big-name National Parks, and hit some of the lesser known areas, and you'll find that America still has a ton to offer.

Yeah, likely part of it. I think there's also been a rise in non-denominational and "seeker-sensitive" churches that just don't have any concept of membership at all...

Thanks for pointing this out.

There's a big difference between church attendance and church membership... Unfortunately, the original linked article glosses over the difference, while the original Gallup study digs into it. According to Gallup, approximately half of the recent reduction in church membership can be attributed to people becoming less religious, while the other half is explained by people who still attend church regularly, but avoid formal "membership" in a congregation.

And, to your point, the historical data is very telling. My understanding is that the idea that basically everybody in the US used to be super religious and go to church all the time is largely a myth. In fact, I believe the high-water mark for US church attendance as a percentage of the population was actually around 1990. (Source: Sociologists of religion Rodney Stark / Roger Finke. Their book "The Churching of America" attempts to get historical stats on this question, and includes this graph: https://madeinamericathebook.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/fin...)

Take from these stats/trends what you will. Just adding some additional context to the discussion.

Fair point. My wife does have "nude heels," which are (more or less) the color of a white person's naked skin. Still, I guess I didn't think that the word "nude" in "nude heels" was supposed to actually mean "the color of a white person's naked skin," but rather that nude meant "naked" and the shoe company had (wrongly and unfairly) assumed that the only people they needed to care about were white...

I'm not disagreeing and I don't have an axe to grind here, this is just anecdotal observation about language and usage in my (limited) experience.

Native English speaker here. Never heard nude used that way. Always just as a synonym for naked. The existence of this now removed definition was a surprise to me.

Anecdotes from the US:

1) When I moved a couple of years ago, I discovered that the deed to our house had a typo. It defined the property we owned by referencing a map, which was on file with the County Register of Deeds. Except, when the deed cited the map, it mis-typed the page number the map was supposed to be on such that it referenced the map for a totally different property. The prior owner's deed had the same typo, back a couple of generations. The sale nearly fell through as the buyer's lawyer argued that it would be risky for them to buy the property given the typo and that a title insurance company might even refuse to insure the sale over the issue (not sure how much of that was real vs. theatrics). In the end, our lawyer tracked down an owner several generations prior in another part of the state, and sent a paralegal to his current house to have him sign new paperwork clearing the matter up.

2) A while back, I got a little too interested in the history of a local state park, which was a farming community before it was a park. I found some of the original deeds where the property was sold from the original farmers to the US Federal Government, and then to the State. The deeds defined the property by saying things like "beginning at a holly bush on the bank of Crabtree Creek, and extending for 500 yards north to a rock." A holly bush? Which holly bush? What about when it dies or somebody cuts it down? Which rock? The woods are full of rocks! In a world of Google Maps and GPS, it's wild to think that land used to be bought and sold this way, which apparently worked well enough for the time.

I can't speak for the other commenter, but personally, yes, I have changed my working hours to be as early as I feel is reasonable. I generally work from 7:00 AM until 4:00 PM. I feel that shifting any more than that would start to cause problems with not having enough working hours overlapping with coworkers to facilitate meetings and what not. (And it's worth pointing out that some people don't have this luxury. Students don't pick when school starts, shift workers don't pick when their shift starts, etc. They're beholden to the 8:00 bell or the 9:00 whistle or whatever. And a lot of society revolves around these schedules - especially the school schedules, where parents have to be at least somewhat on the same schedule as their kids.)

Anyway, despite my early schedule, I STILL find that this only buys me barely an hour of daylight in the winter when I get home. Staying on DST year-round would give me an extra hour of time to play outside with the kids, go for a family walk, etc. in the winter months. Selfishly, I'd love it.

And I say selfishly, but I don't think it's entirely selfish. It's not like I'm the only person in this boat. As another commenter pointed out, most social activities tend to happen after work/school in the evenings. I'm imagining the majority of people having more time for outside socializing, exercising, etc. if you just started the school/work day in a couple of hours of darkness and then let them have the sunlight after it was over...

Surely "all people are equal" does not mean "we should never do sociological research on people" or "any sociological research that finds statistical differences in how different groups of people behave is necessarily wrong and evil."