ninly

Article authors don't typically write the headlines that appear above their pieces.

This site is not as ground-up or comprehensive as Susan Rigetti's page, but I have found it useful: https://statisticsbyjim.com/

Got it. Now, where is the car?

Its reputation is eternal: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=12012003

When I first went back to school for tech stuff (ultimately a master's in EE), my instructor for the entire calculus sequence -- and later on for linear algebra -- struck what I found to be the ideal balance. Something like:

0. Homework is never collected or graded, but don't be fooled into thinking it's not required -- that is, if you don't do the homework, you are extremely unlikely to pass the exams/course. Essentially, this is not knowledge we were learning -- it is skills that require practice. Homework is an opportunity to practice and hone skills.

1. Each lecture introduces a concept and/or technique, and works through a few demonstrative problems to show what it means or how it is done. Homework is assigned from textbook problems that involve the same techniques with progressive difficulty or complexity. The textbook used that pattern where odd-numbered problems included solutions, and assignments usually involved the ones with solutions.

2. The last one-quarter to one-third of every class period was dedicated to review and questions about the homework assigned for the previous class. Because we had the correct solutions in the text, we knew what to ask about (i.e. the ones we couldn't get to come out right). This particular instructor was fantastic at thinking on his feet and working problems on the fly, correctly and without preparation, so usually he'd just work the problem on the board and we could stop him to ask for a more detailed explanation if necessary.

Granted, this model didn't work as well for his linear algebra class. Since many of those problems involve long slogs through tedious and error-prone matrix operations before/while you were really dealing with the concept or technique being introduced, he couldn't as easily demo entire solutions during the question/review periods. I suppose that difficulty would apply to several other higher-math topics, as well, but even so, later in my education I often found myself wishing this or that professor would follow the pattern of my humble calculus teacher.

I think these things are changing, though I hope the changes come sooner than I suspect they actually will. I know there is ongoing discussion about how to bring rules more in line with modern practice and tech, such as the explosion of interest in digital operation over the past decade or so. I doubt this will reach to authorization of fully encrypted casual comms, though some form of encryption isn't out of the question when you get into the emergency comms piece of amateur radio, which is restricted from passing certain health and welfare information over the essentially "open line" of ham radio.

It's unfortunate that that was your experience. The VE experience does vary a lot from one region or group to another. I know there are VE groups that absolutely do better than this even with the conventional paper approach, make it a priority to do things efficiently, and make sure people can sit for all the exams they need/want during any given session. Also, for what it's worth, the entire study and exam process has been undergoing a lot of transformation, especially in response to the pandemic. I expect to see changes in this process, including expansion of online test opportunities, in coming years.

I agree, but would add the importance of #3. You can't transform/manufacture things without some process for doing so (or doing so more efficiently or effectively than was previously possible), and the physical means to this itself needs to be created/manufactured. It's 'tooling' and there's a kind of chicken-egg thing going on. Also related to the distinction between algorithms in the abstract sense and the infrastructure (software or otherwise) that enables their implementation.

A couple years ago I threw together some MATLAB functions to take a wolfram number and a seed row, along with some cosmetic parameters, to generate elementary cellular automata. Nothing very big or elaborate, but fun and handy for exploring the ECAs themselves.

https://github.com/ninly/ecafun

The survival and progressive sophistication of human society and culture has always depended on the effective function of community-level values -- whether understood in terms of duty, honor, shame, mores, rule of law, or other mechanisms. Some influential portion of a population agrees (organically, culturally) that certain ways of behaving are more valuable (or unacceptable) to the community, even if not every individual necessarily agrees. This can obviously result in extremely non-free societal structures, as you suggest, but community at any significant scale will always require some compromise of individual freedoms.

This is necessitated by the very diversity of individual human proclivities and interests. To refer to the compromise, sacrifice, or diminishment of some of those interests as "oppression" strikes me as selfish and melodramatic, even if it is often regrettable from certain perspectives. Certainly sometimes it is oppression, and it is frequently unfair, but extreme individualism doesn't fix or even address this fundamental tension.

'indexes' has been a just-fine variant of the plural for a very long time -- actually it's the first one listed in Merriam-Webster, so probably the more common variant, though I haven't dug into other references. That said, you're correct that the more common or preferred variant will depend somewhat on the culture/community/industry. The house style guides in finance probably tend toward 'indexes' -- in part because an index is a branded product they produce, so consistency is important -- while software/tech companies (or at least people in them) may tend prefer 'indices'.

He typed (edit: and handwrote) hundreds of these open letters, technical notes, reports, etc. Here's the archive at UT:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/

On this topic, Douglas Hofstadter's book Le ton beau de Marot is organized around this and related topics: poertry, translation, language and literary play, and the challenges and freedoms offered translators, all woven in typical Hofstadterian fashion with a breathtaking array of topics and observations. One of my favorite books, and it may interest anyone who, as you say, is fascinated by translation and its difficulties!

Fair warning: the book gets a bit dark in parts (he wrote it after his wife's death, and covers that a bit), but not overwhelmingly or throughout.

ETA: To address your original question, Hofstadter's book is organized around the challenge of translating "Ma mignonne", a very tight little French poem by Clément Marot (hence the book title), and goes into great detail about the challenges it presents, with lots of different approaches and translations. He talks about many other significant challenges to the translator -- the one that comes to mind is La disparition by Georges Perec[1] -- a novel famously written without appearance of the letter e. It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void -- also lacking that most common of glyphs. Other unpublished e-less translations exist, as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void

The "don't roll your own" argument isn't against having lots of encryption algorithms, though. It's because it's nearly impossible for a nonspecialist to implement tools that other specialists can't fairly easily recognize as broken and exploit (whether cryptologically broken or due to side-channel exploits).

I don't entirely disagree, but I feel like quotations are so often used in discourse without any context, and with a problematic sort of "pure" attribution to the genius of the person quoted. Quotations from Einstein or Lincoln are frequent examples of this, even where the quote is not misattributed.

Of course, blatant misattribution is also so dang common that it seems better to me in general to cite some kind of context or whatever. Plus (for me, a prior editor) use of quote marks typically implies verbatim, citable quotation, so that's a factor whether the attribution is "safe", as you suggest.

Not to criticize anything here at all; I just wanted to throw in some of that sweet sweet context!

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/26/two-reasons/

Right? At 300 baud you could almost read the text as it appeared. Buying a 9600 baud modem after a year or two at 2400 felt amazing, like, "wow, whole lines of text appear before I even start reading!"

Then, with the jump to 14.4k it was like, "wow, a whole PAGE of text practically just pops up!" One whole... screenful of bytes. Wow.

Then you'd start an XMODEM transfer of a single image file and go make dinner.

[heart-eyes emoji]

Or would she have received a slap on the wrist for that.

Or would she have received a pat on the back, given that she went through the Standard Procedure for adding a feature to the browser plug-in?

And the popup message is one Google is required by law to make available to its employees.

Certainly bold and perhaps ill-advised, but I would hardly characterize this as "injection"

Spiers told NBC News that she was inspired to create a digital notification because “a poster in the cafeteria is not the best way of reaching the majority of Googlers.”

The message included a link to a statement that the NLRB required the company to post for employees following the settlement of a complaint that was filed against Google in 2016.

Spiers, 21, said she went through the standard approval process, which requires two co-workers to greenlight changes, before updating the Chrome browser extension. Another source at Google familiar with the update approval process confirmed to NBC news that those two approvals are standard practice for a browser extension update.

Even if the Boring Company is hip, I guess no one can get away with saying they're not boring.

The Control Lectures series by Brian Douglas on YouTube is a fantastic resource (https://www.youtube.com/user/ControlLectures). Also U. Mich. has a great set of control tutorials put together with a focus on implementations in MATLAB/Simulink (http://ctms.engin.umich.edu/CTMS).

All of my own experience in controls (both as a student and professional) uses MATLAB/Simulink to model and generate controller code. Other tools are out there, but I don't know much about them.

I lived in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn for a few years, and absorbed as much orthography and pronunciation as I could during that time. I ate a few pączki, too.

While I learned to speak a little bit, it was not enough to be functional beyond basic greetings and ordering food. It was always a lot of interesting fun, though.

The main outcome of all this is that for ten years, whenever I see a Toyota Camry, my weird brain thinks "hmm... tsahm-rih..." and I roll my eyes at it.

Haven't read the other one, but the Yates is great. Another indispensable book for historical context about the Classical transition from oral to literate culture (and its implications for memory, education, and Greek thought) is:

- Preface to Plato, by Eric Havelock

The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman. Assigned in a college course and it raised a ton of still-important questions about the foundations that our scientific and materialistic worldview(s) rest on. I'm "over" this one in a lot of ways, but it was huge at the time I read it.

Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson. Bateson was mentioned in the other book, and by the professor who assigned it. This is his most comprehensive piece of work (really his only comprehensive work -- pretty much everything else is topical papers, collaborations, interviews, etc.). It introduces systems/cybernetic thinking in an accessible and applicable way, such that they become relevant in basically any context.

Edit: wrods.

I'd tend to expect the same (and agree that "not an expert" is vague), but I'm actually a bit more curious about the proposal that it's a normal distribution. Why would it be? If I had to guess, I might go for something downward-skewed, or maybe even some kind of typically bimodal thing.

I'm curious about the claim (er, "observation") that

At scale, the skill level of developers reading/writing/maintaining/testing code is going to be a normal distribution around the mean of "not expert."

Has this been researched or shown in any formal way? Or have similar observations been formulated elsewhere?