mathogre

I use parm rind (Parmigiano Reggiano rind) for a couple things. One is to make a parm broth for Fettuccine Alfredo. Another is when making a pomodoro sauce loaded with aromatics (garlic, red onion, fresh basil, etc).

"Cheese buyers aren't going to eat this embedded label." Are you sure?

Would that be........bad PR?

From 2010 through 2020, I was working as a mathematician, programmer, analyst, researcher full time on an odd schedule, Tuesday through Saturday. I was also working on a side hustle. I was doing fashion photography as a hobby, with the intention of going full time.

When the work week ended, my photography week began. Work was on its own computer and I never included any work communications in any of my personal devices. When we hit lockdown, everything was done from home. That said, they gave us iPhones for our regular telephone communications.

My time is mine. I earned raises and promotions, and had benefits based on my desires. I worked my schedule. If someone scheduled a meeting during a time when I was off, I would discuss that with the person. If I was needed, I'd attend; otherwise, it was my time off.

Yes we had Outlook, Teams, Slack for communications. I would stay connected during the work week, but when I was off, it was my time. My supervisors had ways to contact me in an emergency, and I let them know it was okay to do so in an emergency.

The fashion work ended, but it was one heck of an adventure! It was my time.

From the article: "The FAA is encouraging airlines to use bigger aircraft with fewer take-offs and landings." I worked in ATC R&D for many years. NY Tracon, N90, is crazy busy and very complicated. DCA handles lots of Regional Jets. Each aircraft is an "operation". If you're an airline and can carry the same amount of passengers in fewer aircraft, re: fewer operations, you're at an advantage, and the system continues to work.

The airspace and airports with the available controllers can handle only so many operations, and the FAA will limit operations accordingly. The airlines can either let the FAA randomly deny flights, or they can say to the airlines, as they apparently did, "We can only handle so many operations. How do you want to do this?" In situations like this, airlines themselves can decide how they're going to change their operations. In NY, it's probably easier to use/lease larger aircraft. Yes Teteboro, TEB, could take some traffic if this were just airport operations limited, but I suspect it is an N90 issue, so offloading to TEB really isn't an option. With DCA, it's more likely the airport. Airlines like United can offload to Dulles, IAD. Additionally, the airlines could even work with each other to some degree to get through this. They do that in significant weather events, though this is a much bigger event than a snowstorm at someplace like O'Hare (ORD).

fuckcensorship: "During depressive episodes, I have no interest in connecting with other people. This includes friends, therapists, family, etc. So the idea that I would ever pick up the phone and call a suicide hotline to talk to someone on the phone about my depression is borderline laughable."

cpill: "yeah, but clearly you haven't committed suicide yet, so maybe you don't really know what is like to _really_ want to kill yourself? I knew someone who did do it and they did want to connect every time they tried, even the last one."

cpill, it's good your friend wanted to connect on every attempt they made. Not all people are like that. Additionally, saying that a person who doesn't actually kill themself doesn't know what it is like to want to kill themself suggests a lack of knowledge on your part. There are people who cry out for help; there are also people who simply exit.

fuckcensorship, I grok.

It is a sad, soulless world in which we live today. I went to an otherwise anonymous state college on the east coast in the latter 1970s. One of the fun things I remember was picking up lunch from McDonalds using my former roommate's Ford Pinto. If you're not familiar with the Pinto, look it up. It was a "great" car. Yeah.

Driving to McDonalds was fun and exciting! This Pinto was a 4 speed manual, where the shifter could easily be lifted out of the drive shaft tunnel. But that was trivial in comparison to the fact the brakes were limited to the parking brake. The drive to MickyD's was five to ten miles, including travel on a highway. You plan your stops. A real emergency would be bad, but regular driving was merely interesting. When I got back to my former roommate's house, we enjoyed a great lunch! The drive was fun.

I'm saddened by what Stanford has become. I look at the list of companies founded by Stanford Alumni, and am duly impressed. I look at what the "edges" of the Stanford population is today, and see the end of Stanford dominance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_founded_by_S...

Here are your choices about life. It's wobbling on two wheels until you get it right or depending on training wheels and helmets to keep you safe. It's taking risks or saying, "Mommy, may I?" Mommy's gonna say, "No, honey, I don't want you to get hurt or for you to hurt anyone else."

Training wheels and Mommy's protection?

Fuck that.

Take 10 minutes to model it and you'll find there is no benefit in changing. As a couple others have pointed out, it isn't the Monte Hall problem.

Below I did two runs with a million cases. One envelope has 1 unit; the other has 2 units. I shuffle the envelopes, and the "player" chooses an envelope. "noChange" means this is the payoff if the player doesn't switch envelopes. "yaChange" means this is the payoff if the player switches envelopes.

$ python3 ./twoEnvelopes_00.py 1000000 noChange = 1500023 yaChange = 1499977

$ python3 ./twoEnvelopes_00.py 1000000 noChange = 1499984 yaChange = 1500016

When modeling Monte Hall, the payoff for changing is obvious.

For a bit of background, go to: https://x.company/projects/loon/

I was working on the Air Traffic Control side of unmanned free balloons in 2020, and Loon was an exciting project. While it's a shame it wasn't financially viable, they had it working with up to 60-ish balloons in the stratosphere at any given time. This was an amazing accomplishment.

The navigation was equally amazing. It was Loon who did some real research on stratospheric weather. While many meteorological entities throughout the world knew and understood tropospheric weather, the stratosphere was mostly unknown. In addition to AI, Google really did expand the knowledge and science of stratospheric weather.

We had our first and only at 40. (My wife is two days younger than me.) I retired a year ago, and our daughter is approaching a quarter of a century old. That was a miracle in itself as she almost didn't make it past hour one.

I loved this essay, saved it even. It's how I've lived my life for all of the days since our daughter's birth. I'm reluctant to say it's how I lived all of the years before that, as I wasn't as aware of time and of my mortality. That said, I had a sense my average life would be 75 years, and privately celebrated my 37.5 year birthday.

Paul Graham has at least two essays related to this: http://paulgraham.com/vb.html http://paulgraham.com/kids.html

For me, I consider my life as a book. There's a chapter where I would read the Wizard of Oz books to our daughter most nights. We went through the set of 15 books three times, and then it stopped. There's a chapter where I was doing fashion photography as a hobby for eight years. Me?! Yes! I even had two fashion shoots in Manhattan. There are many chapters of me working as a mathemagician, working on air traffic control R&D projects, one where I had to simulate stratospheric balloon trajectories and balloon control and navigation logic. I also had to learn a lot about stratospheric weather, which our in-house meteorologists had almost no experience.

I take essays like this and the two PG essays, and realize I have the chance to live a little more. This afternoon I'll be at the library while our daughter is working from home. I'll be continuing the writing of a story, may work on the migration from Freemind to Freeplane so that I can return to my personal work on the Traveling Salesman Problem. I'll grill dinner tonight for the family, will attend an in-person luncheon on Saturday, have an on-line chat with some folks in Berkeley Sunday night (I'm outside DC.)

The clock is ticking, the sand is flowing through the sandglass (I love that from Tom Scocca's essay!). The meaning of life is what we produce and what we create in the limited time we have. It's our mortality that establishes the context for meaning; it's what we do that is the actual meaning.

I worked with VRML in '96. It was fun and interesting. Our company even had a couple reps from SGI demonstrate it on an SGI O2 machine. The two companies at the time who were the main proponents were SGI and Sony, though SGI was clearly the primary commercial force behind VRML. SGI even produced a 3D animated "cartoon" twice a week called "Floops". Then one day in 1997 SGI announced they were no longer supporting VRML, and it was over. I personally walked away from it right then.

Was VRML cool? Yes! Was it clunky? Yes. VRML had all the finesse of XML, but it worked. If you could think in 3D, you could create items fairly easily in VRML. On a Windows 95 machine (good heavens!) using Netscape with a plug-in, moving through a VRML world was not fast or smooth, but it was doable. I created a 3D version of my office to show my managers what was possible, and discussed how we might actually do some things with it.

Yes there are posts here indicating VRML is being used today. For all practical purposes however, it's dead and has been for a quarter century.

Here's what I did and/or do.

1. I constantly ask trusted friends and family members if I was blundering in social situations. I asked my wife this evening, when our daughter had her boyfriend over for dinner. I didn't blunder. I asked anyway. I will ask during an event, especially if it lasts for hours. Ultimately when I blunder, I reprogram how I will respond when that situation arises again. While that could be a thousand little actions, I find I can generalize things, and that makes it easier.

2. Put yourself in tough social situations. I did fashion photography for 8 years as a hobby. I worked with 20+ models in the DC area, and did 2 shoots in NYC. Yes it was all about getting the photos, but to do that you focus your attention on the model. This book helped: "How to Win Friends & Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. Ultimately, the intimidatingly gorgeous woman in front of you and your camera is a regular human who comes from some place, has family and friends, and has interests. When you work with someone like that for 8 or so hours, you need to make her feel comfortable.

3. Work with some successful and highly extraverted people, whether in business or in a volunteer situation. I was working with and being mentored by someone who owned the world. There were no limitations with him. He could go anywhere, do anything. Obviously he didn't actually own the world, but his presence said he did. This was in a volunteer situation. This person was very hard working, wealthy, an overall good person, but took no garbage from anyone. He was also very smart. Actually there were a couple others like him in that volunteer situation - power, money, capabilities, responsibilities, accomplishments. Learn from them.

Good luck! This is what I did. You'll always feel socially awkward, but if you work at it, you can power through it in the tough situations. Hope this helps!

At my old company, Hadoop, JSON, Parquet were the solutions looking for a problem to solve. Yes we handled lots of data, but none of it was time critical. No matter, we had BIG DATA™. Bow when I say that. We weren't Google or Twitter. We were not surgically retrieving data, and while we had lots of data, we didn't have huge data centers; Dremel wasn't relevant to us.

It's funny! It would take our Hadoop team three weeks to get data together for our use. I often didn't have three weeks. In those times when I needed to use the data from the previous day, I'd just grab the raw data, organize it, process it, and be done with it in a few hours, using Unix/Linux tools and a bit of mathemagical wizardry.

"You're supposed to use Hadoop."

"You wanted to know what happened yesterday."

"I did!"

"If you want it from Hadoop, it will be ready in three weeks. Probably. That's if they have everything done."

<Crickets>

Actually, you're right. You made very good points here. I always assume other people are rational. While many are, many are not, and I often forget the latter. Thank you.

Fuck YouTube. If they're going to control what news I get, I'll choose other than YouTube. I do not need them. I have read from both hard left and hard right, and am intelligent enough to make my own decisions about what makes sense. Let them play their games, whether silly or dangerous. I form my own opinions. Losers!

Sigh

I was in Australia when I read a piece from him on Desert Shield/Storm in an Aussie newspaper. I saved it. A few years later he was to sign books in DC, and I brought along the paper. He signed my book, and also signed the paper. I'd told him I'd seen it while in Australia. He said, "I wonder if I got paid for that?"

RIP, PJ. Thanks for the laughs and the insights.

My "to-do" list is a Freemind (and soon-to-be Freeplane) mind map. It's my calendar, my to-do-list, my project planner, my external brain. When I need to write something down, it goes to the mind map or a piece of paper where that information will go later to the mind map.

What about those things that never seem to come off the mind map? If it stays on the map too long without completion, I realize it's something I'm never going to do and I simply delete it. I never look back.

Here's a great FPV video from Portugal. Just saw it a month ago on YouTube. (If it doesn't play for you, search for "NAZARÉ x FPV DRONE CINEMATIC" on the channel "RED- FPV".) I was actually more hopeful that Europe was doing better than us! I'm not even sure how the FAA would deal with something like this, other than to require some elaborate waiver that would take all of the creative energy out of a project like this.

https://youtu.be/Vsn7jyJ4xhQ

On BVLOS, FAA Advisory Circular 107-2 §5.7 actually covers the allowance for brief moments when a drone is out of VLOS. It's one thing for a drone to be behind a tree for a few seconds, and another when a drone is so far away one cannot possibly see it.

As regards FPV and even the very good remote viewing in the Mavic Mini, regular general aviation regulations essentially nullify either of those capabilities as being inadequate. §14CFR91.113(b) states, "vigilance shall be maintained by each person operating an aircraft so as to see and avoid other aircraft." That means in addition to looking forward, you need to regularly look above, below, left, right, and to the extent practicable behind.

On night time flight over a huge empty field, yup, I get it. The regulations make no sense for this.

I could begin a long discussion over the regulatory process in the US, but I won't. I will say however that it behooves drone operators to be aware of and to become involved in the regulatory process. Whether you like the process and the products of that process or not, it isn't going away. The regulations exist, the FAA appears at some level to actually be interested in educating rather than punishing, but they have the power to do what they think is necessary to maintain order and safety.

As a hobbyist: Good! I like flying my drone, and I do so responsibly. I don't want people like this ruining it for others, and I especially don't want people like this endangering others with their irresponsible behavior.

I have a DJI Mavic Mini. If you're marginally competent, DJI makes it very clear that you are operating an aircraft and have rules to follow. In certain circumstances, you do not need to be Part 107 certified to operate this aircraft, nor do you need to register your aircraft. That said, you still must follow all related FAA regulations, like them or not. From the linked video from @nathancahill below, I see the Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) issue, night time flying (appeared to be started before the 30 minute twilight, and I doubt he had supplemental lighting which would have brought it over the weight limit for registration), and generally reckless operation. Height is to be 400 feet AGL (above ground level) unless near structures, which allows you to operate 400 feet above that (§14CFR107.51(b)).

The FAA warned him. He didn't pay attention. Maybe a $182K fine will get his attention.

There is nothing like a whiteboard. I use paper and pencil and the Freemind mind mapper to capture and evolve ideas, but I have to have a whiteboard. When I was in the office, I had one behind me, and I used it all of the time. On Saturdays (part of my regular work schedule), I would sometimes go wild with a 15 foot wide whiteboard in one of the conference rooms. After we all began working from home, I ordered a 2ft x 3ft whiteboard for my home office. I'd truly be lost without it.

I'm not even sure how to explain it. Sometimes just putting something on the whiteboard, walking around, contemplating it, is what I need to do. I also use at least four different colors as needed. And today, with smart phones, it's very easy to capture what I've done and share with others.

Sometimes I'm creating a sketch, sometimes code, sometimes just a set of data structures. Once it was a system architecture, highlighting data exchange and functions. It can be one column or more, horizontal or angled, I can add curved arrows. Try to work out a bilinear interpolation scheme for a 3D grid over multiple time sets on a computer. Yeah, it can be done, but developing it on a whiteboard is, well, easier.

I need my whiteboard. I would be lost without it.

That's bullshit. The MAX aircraft are not the same as the earlier 737 line. These should be completely certified as new aircraft, and my guess is they would fail real certification. The required "design changes" are nothing. Not only would I not want to fly on one of the MAX aircraft, I wouldn't want to live underneath a procedure - departure, airway, approach - used by a MAX.

Go for it. Let them fly. 'Boeing has built so many, we can't let them fail!' Uh huh. Political Sunk Cost.

I had the problem with Outlook; I have to use it for work. While waiting for the help desk to get back to me on Outlook crashing, I used "quick repair" and it cleaned up the problem.

https://redmondmag.com/articles/2019/05/10/repairing-office-...

I'm not using private browsing. But you're probably right, weird caching issue.

I work an odd schedule that includes 10 hours on Saturday. I could work from home on Saturday, but almost always work from the office as I've got the place to myself (bad weather notwithstanding). It means driving 30 minutes each way, as well as everything else with going out to work. The peace and quiet is priceless as I've got an essentially empty 6 floor building all to myself. Security passes by once or twice during the day. Generally there are no phone calls, no meetings, no messages, no one stopping by to interrupt me. I can go on a think walk and - get this - think.

If instead I work from home on Saturday, I am interrupted each time I leave my "cave" to get a coffee. Sometimes it's my daughter, sometimes my wife. The phone will invariably ring and will either be a spam call or a call for one of them. There is no opportunity for a think walk.

JFC, that's such bullshit. You want the mundane? Go for it. You actually want someone who can take a bunch of real operational data and solve the problem when the Person With The Money says, "We need to know what is actually happening with ____. And we've promised it in two days. You're it."

Who gives a flying fuck about writing the best sorting algorithm? "sort" works just fine, unless you're Google and microseconds matter. And then, you're really at the edge of R&D. You need to be able to manipulate data with aplomb. You need to be able to write an algorithm that works, and then refine it to make it go a hundred (or more) times faster once you understand why it is so slow.

I just had fun crashing cars. 25 crashed with 1.8km travelled. I know it's not the point, but I don't care (nod to Icona Pop). I love it. I needed the laugh.

Can you say Vermel? VRML? That's Virtual Reality Markup Language. SGI was the champion of VRML, with Sony a somewhat distant second. It was really cool. Imagine 3D multi-media environments in a web browser. You could download 3D clip art for free. :D While SGI optimized VRML for the O2, it worked acceptably on a cough Windows machine. For a while, each week SGI produced 2 VRML animations with "Floops".

I was into VRML. It was great. We even had a couple SGI reps visit our company, demonstrating VRML and the O2.

Then one day they dropped support of VRML. That was the day I walked.

I was looking at changing companies many years ago, from a large company to a small company. With the large company, I had lots of benefits that I would lose by going to the small company. Regardless, the small company was attractive. I also had the advantage I didn't need to change jobs.

When the vp of the company asked what I wanted, I gave him a figure that got his attention. He remarked it was beyond what they could do. I responded that the amount I was asking essentially covered the benefits they didn't give. When they finally made an offer, it was almost exactly what I requested.

It was the nature of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries to spy on its citizens. We, the United States, were supposed to be better than that. We were, but we're not any more.

It is our choice as developers, creatives, et al to decide if we as individuals will do work that will directly lead to spying on our fellow citizens.

It's too fucking late. Government, we don't trust you anymore. You're not a part of us. For once, I'm ashamed of being an American.