deisner

As an aside, bit-player.org is an amazing blog and resource. Recently I've been thinking about what will happen when Brian Hayes, its author, shuffles off this mortal coil.

Other than relying on the Wayback Machine, what are the options for keeping a site like this alive and at least minimally maintained, at its original URL?

Appears to be down. Archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20230301110743/http://h14s.p5r.o...

When do you get a yellow square? I couldn't find this documented anywhere, so I took a look at the code.

Here's what I found: For each guess, Worldle calculates a proximity score from 0 to 100 -- higher is better. Each row is basically a quantized proximity score meter, from 0 to 100 in increments of 20. If you get at least half-way to the next increment of 20 (i.e. to the next green square), you get a yellow square, too.

Example: If your proximity score for a guess is 63, you'll get 3 green squares and two blank (white or black) squares, i.e. GGGBB. If your score is 71, you'll get three green squares, and since 71 is at least half-way to 80 (i.e. >= 70), you'll also get a yellow square, so GGGYB.

The proximity score is round(100*(MAX_DISTANCE_ON_EARTH - d)/MAX_DISTANCE_ON_EARTH). Though that max distance is defined to be 20,000,000.

This is the important part: https://github.com/teuteuf/worldle/blob/67db30bdf79c0965c19a...

Anecdotal, but: I work in an engineering department at a major U.S. university. Non-citizen grad students (i.e. grad students) I personally know -- and their friends at other universities -- upon graduation decided to seek (and obtained) employment abroad (Netherlands, Canada are the two countries I know of) rather than stay in the U.S. Before Trump they wouldn't have considered this.

I doubt our handling of the covid-19 crisis has helped, either. My wife is German and in frequent contact with her family in Germany. They look at us with pity. I feel like my country has really lost its shine. Maybe permanently (hopefully not).

For what it's worth, the price/bandwidth in Cologne isn't bad: https://www.netcologne.de/privatkunden/telefon-internet/tari.... And not surprisingly, it appears to be fiber (FTTB and HCF): https://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/CaseStudies/NETCOLOGNE_...

My question was slightly sarcastic, but primarily sincere, in that I want to hear first-hand accounts from cancer patients in other OECD countries.

Rudy Guliani said this in a campaign ad [1] when he was running for U.S. president in 2007-2008. I also recall him saying this in one of the Republican debates. When my (now) wife, who is German and has also lived in Denmark, heard this she couldn't help laughing.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/giuliani-ad-chances/

"But none of these is her most gnawing, ever present concern.

That would be the convoluted medical bills that fill multiple binders, depleted savings accounts that destroy early retirement plans and so, so many phone calls with insurers and medical providers."

Is it like this in other OECD countries? I ask because I'm told that we in America have "the best health care system in the world."

I also enjoy this: "Why Lie Detectors Don't Detect Lies" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyDMoGjKvNk -- 4.5 minutes long.

"Recently they ran an ad featuring Bob Dylan which made laugh, or would have, if had made not me so angry." Wait, is Roger Schank an AI trying to convince humans that AIs are impotent and harmless? Pretty sneaky, Schank-bot.

One day not too long ago I changed my Facebook News Feed settings from "Top Stories" (the default), to "Most Recent". It was eye opening -- so many friends (and "friends") whose posts I hadn't seen in months or years. I hadn't even noticed they were gone.

On the other hand, the posts of close friends were just us likely to be lost thirty pages down in my feed as were those of people I knew only peripherally.

I think you meant to say "coördinate". :^) I've been a subscriber for almost two decades now. If I had to subscribe to just one magazine, The New Yorker would be it.

The article I'm currently reading: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/19/reddit-and-the...

It's pre-pay.

This is a good article, with a particular focus on Sweden: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/imagining-a-ca...

It's beginning to happen in the US, too. One of my favorite restaurants, Sweetgreen, no longer accepts cash, and I'm boycotting them. I'd like the option to make an anonymous transaction, and I worry that we're entering an economy where those without access to banking services are excluded.

It's just that if security is a core priority, you'd expect to see this mentioned at least once. Based on what I read, the core priorities are speed, privacy, and convenience.

Compare this to Chrome, Safari, and Edge (tagline: "A fast and secure browser that's designed for Windows 10"): https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/features.html, https://www.apple.com/safari/, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge.

Perhaps this is just a marketing or internal communication issue. Did somebody from security engineering have a seat at the table when the Firefox 57 marketing material was discussed?

I'd feel a little better if the words "secure" or "security" appeared at least once in the marketing material: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/57.0/whatsnew/, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/.

More here: http://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2016/09/restoring-the-fi...

"The Manchester computer had a special instruction that caused the loudspeaker—Turing called it the 'hooter'—to emit a short pulse of sound, lasting a tiny fraction of a second. Turing said this sounded like 'something between a tap, a click, and a thump'. Executing the instruction over and over again resulted in this 'click' being produced repeatedly, on every fourth tick of the computer's internal clock: tick tick tick click, tick tick tick click. Repeating the instruction enough times like this caused the human ear to hear not discrete clicks but a steady note, in fact the note C6, two octaves above middle C. ...

Turing was not very interested in programming the computer to play conventional pieces of music: he used the different notes to indicate what was going on in the computer—one note for 'job finished', others for 'digits overflowing in memory', 'error when transferring data from the magnetic drum', and so on. Running one of Turing's programs must have been a noisy business, with different musical notes and rhythms of clicks enabling the user to 'listen in' (as he put it) to what the computer was doing. He left it to someone else, though, to program the first complete piece of music."

This is the definition of chutzpah: "The [sugar] association also questioned the motives behind the new paper.

“Most concerning is the growing use of headline-baiting articles to trump quality scientific research,” the organization said. “We’re disappointed to see a journal of JAMA’s stature being drawn into this trend.”

Yes, the dubious ethics and research quality at issue here are clearly JAMA's, and not the lobbyists' who, by their own admission, paid scientists to publish a journal article to exonerate their own industry.

It's worth comparing this account with Joshuah Bearman's reporting in Wired in May: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/silk-road-2/. The NYT article describes a frustrated IRS agent (Alford) who strongly suspects Ulbricht is DPR and struggles in vain to get anybody on the investigation to listen.

In Wired's version of events, however, Alford's sleuthing had turned up the email address "rossulbricht@gmailcom", but "[t]he IRS didn’t know what any of this meant, so that’s where it ended. The info sat in a case file until dumb luck put Alford in Tarbell’s lab ..."

The NYT's and Wired's depiction of Alford's role in the case seem at odds.

I was taught to go element-by-element: element c_ij of the product = the linear combination a_ik*b_kj. What's presented here is the "same" but represents a higher level of abstraction, so that you think in terms of linear combinations of rows or columns, rather than linear combinations of scalars.

Something similar seems to have worked for Paul Krugman:

"I have some recent experience along those lines. Yes, I’ve lost a fair bit of weight over the past two years (no special forcing event, just the approach of the big six-oh), and learned a few things about myself along the way. ... But what has worked for me is severe caloric restriction two days a week. In case you’re wondering, it’s actually very unpleasant. But periodic suffering seems to suit my personality."

Of course, he goes on to say he has a fitbit, does daily cardio, and tracks his weight, so I'm not sure how he's teasing out the confounding variables.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/this-dieter-is-d...

I bet the humanitarian work of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation is his way of atoning.

Another great article on the topic, from American Scientist: "The Future of Time: UTC and the Leap Second", available either from the magazine (behind paywall): http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/2011/4/the-f... or on arXiv.org: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1106/1106.3141.pdf .

Pied Piper needs to pivot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1vfXoUNDYA

Zoom into "A Sunday On La Grande Jatte" at the Art Institute of Chicago: http://www.googleartproject.com/collection/the-art-institute...

Seurat knew a lot about dots -- but seriously, the resolution is pretty impressive.

I had an idea for a mobile app where you'd take a photo of a legal pad full of handwritten text and equations, and the app would generate a latex document or a PDF. Maybe this is possible now?