montrose

This quote

"We're feeding it to the public in bite-sized chunks."

from a non-paywalled article

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/dozens-heard-amel...

makes it clear that this story is part of a carefully managed PR campaign. Not that that makes it false. But it means we should treat it with extra skepticism.

Does this make these worms the oldest living things?

Privacy nightmare perhaps, but actual threat to SV cos, no.

Reading this, I was reminded of Hardy's Mathematician's Apology. He mentions several of these points.

Though this article sounds plausible, I became more skeptical when I noticed he put the word "facility" in scare quotes.

I've worked at home for decades. In the beginning when I had small apartments, I used to put a table with my computer on it inside a closet. I'd open up the closet door, pull up a chair, and voila, office.

In those days, monitors were thick, and the web didn't exist. Now that monitors are thinner and computers have become many people's de facto TVs, there would be less advantage in doing this.

Ask them what they would pay for.

If this trend is real it will be really good for social mobility.

Than the general population possibly, but not than the applicant pool, which is the comparison that matters.

It seems more likely that in the applicant pool the non-legacy kids would be smarter. Imagine how confident of your ability you'd have to be to apply to Harvard as a random kid from a public high school in Iowa. Whereas if you'd grown up expecting to go there because your parents did, the threshold for applying would be pretty low.

"Legacy applicants, or students with a parent who attended Harvard, were accepted to the school at the rate of about 34%, according to data from six admissions cycles analyzed by an economist hired by the group suing the school. That’s compared to an admissions rate of about 6% of non-legacy students, according to an analysis of Harvard data."

How could they be moving faster than the speed of light?

Do you think the state of the art in quantum computing is already more advanced than we realize, in the same way that the state of the art in cryptography was when R, S, and A thought they had discovered RSA?

Blaming the "startup mentality" makes a good linkbait title, but Occam's razor suggests that when the latest cool-sounding attempt to reform public schools in cities fails, it's probably for the same reasons that previous cool-sounding attempts to reform public schools have failed: politics, turf wars, existing vested interests, and so on.

Ah, thank you.

I notice that although Zuse's patent applications are mentioned in the Wikipedia article on stored-program computers, the Z3 is not included in the list of candidates for first working hardware. Can anyone explain to me why it would have been disqualified?

"Founders rank speed as their 3rd most important criteria and VCs, in fact, ranked it as the least important one."

This disconnect represents a significant opportunity for new VC firms.

To the extent that having interesting problems to solve is motivating, running out of them should be correspondingly demotivating.

The word for the phenomenon he describes is "heresy." For example large numbers of fairly influential people in European history disagreed with official church doctrine, but had to keep quiet or risk persecution of various types.

E.g. Newton had qualms about the Trinity, but he could not talk openly about them, or he would have lost his fellowship at Oxford. (Ironically, he was a fellow Trinity College.)

Watching this made me realize how different things were in 2010 than 1980.

What a horrific headline.

This is an interesting map, but it seems implausible that there is no route between Cirencester and Gloucester.

I have no trouble believing there was extensive lead mining in England in Roman times, but it's harder to believe it was happening in 750. I can't think of anything the Anglo-Saxons would have been using lead for, and it's hard to imagine there was much of an export trade. I would also be surprised if the Franks were making silver coins on anything like the scale the Romans did.

On the other hand, the lead's there in the data; it must have come from somewhere; so that part of the graph seems to me the most intriguingly mysterious bit.

They think there was a lot of mining going on in England in 750?

That is interesting: the Riotinto silver was mixed with lead to a degree that eastern sources weren't?

(If that's the explanation, another interesting thing about this graph is the uptick in the early 700s, presumably due to the Moorish invasion. By 750 they seem to have been mining on a greater scale than the Romans, which is not what I'd have expected.)

At first glance I read "prime members" as "prime numbers," which was intriguing but confusing.

That graph is fascinating to someone who's studied a lot of ancient history.

The thing that strikes me most is how bad things were after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Yes, the eastern half kept chugging along. But judging from this data, it didn't chug very hard.

Another striking thing is how bad things things seem to have been in the first century BC. Apparently the problems during that time were not merely political squabbles at the top of a society that otherwise kept operating as usual.

This is not only an important point in itself, but could be an interesting way to look at medicine: to model it as a process where something overflows. (I don't know what I mean more precisely than that.)

Try Mercury Reader, which can see through this and several other paywalls (and does a great job of cleaning up cluttered sites).

I love it when people doing bad things get busted by statistical traces they didn't even realize they were leaving. There is a lot more room for this kind of detective work.

Instead of his vague recommendation to "accept luck as a primary determinant in your life," I recommend reminding yourself that although luck may be a necessary condition for success, it is not a sufficient one.