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nrf1

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It's odd how much Appalachia has gripped the popular imagination, and how outsiders and a few well-positioned insiders perpetuate it.

Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina are key swing states. That's the primary reason Appalachia gets so much attention. This electoral reality goes all the way back to the war on poverty.

I am hopeful. We're in for a rough ride, but we will survive.

1. Rate of progress and market adoption of key technologies (ICE alternatives and renewables) is much higher than I would have anticipated even 10 years ago, let alone 15 years. I am hopeful that, even with only market forces, by the end of my lifetime developed economies will have more-or-less righted the ship on GHG production with a corresponding blueprint for the rest of the world.

2. I think we still have a long time before some of the worst-case feedback loops are triggered.

3. The realities of climate change are becoming difficult to ignore. This is, paradoxically, good news because it makes denial a less tenable barrier to action in the mid-term future.

All that said, I'm hedging my bets with real estate investments in regions that are most likely to benefit from mid-term impacts of warming.

The Fly America Act is pork for the Airline industry; they aren't intended to save the taxpayer money. Exactly the opposite.

I've even seen identical itineraries -- one under a US flag carrier and the other under a foreign flag -- with a mid-3-figure price difference. The airlines know what they are doing.

Call your congresspeople.

No, that's letting the perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Outright bans make open access harder; editing+publishing with reasonable quality and archival levels of access guarantees can be cheap but it's never free.

Just limit it to a very reasonable $/page. Even upper bounding it at some obscene amount like $10/page would be a vast improvement and a completely trivial expense (you don't want to know what plane tickets to IJCAI cost this year...)

To clarify, I'm saying any research funded by the NSF should have this requirement imposed on all publications regardless of funding source. I.e., DON'T say "NSF $ can't be used for more than $X in publication fees", say "NSF $ can't be used AT ALL if you ever pay more than $X in publication fees".

Seriously.

This issue could be solved over night if the USFG (NSF/NIH/DoD) stepped in and said "all publications supported by our grants must be published open access and we'll pay no more than $N/page in publishing fees."

but if we stick to the evaluation order defined by the language

Is this true? According to the linked page:

"The program will continually pick rules at random from the set of applicable rules, until there are no such rules."

In your encoding, we could end up transition from state {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob} to state {3Eve, 1AliceBob}. I agree that, in the next time step, we might transition back to {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob}. But there are two problems with this formulation:

1. We often (in many domains always) really care about the intermediate behaviors of the model, not just the final state. Which means that an observation of the trace:

    {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob} ~> {3Eve, 1AliceBob} ~> {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob}
is often not necessarily equivalent to simply staying in state {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob}. This is especially true in physical systems (including chemical reactions).

2. We might end up back in the "right" state, but only for those two rules! In particular, we might not actually end up back in state {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob} after all if there are other transition rules. For example:

    Eve + AliceBob → Alice + Bob + Eve
    Alice + Bob → AliceBob
    AliceBob + Eve → WEIRDNESS
With some probability (which the docs don't specify) we might now observe the following transition:
    {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob} ~> {3Eve, 1AliceBob} ~> {2Eve, WEIRDNESS}
with no way to get back to {3Eve, 1Alice, 1Bob} :-(

One additional problem: this encoding is not equivalent to the guarded version if transitions can have side-effects (e.g., if transitions consume a global implicit "fuel" or some other abstract representation of cost).

I am not certain how it'd be best to define a rule that predicates on an absence of a token but that syntax is terrible.

That would be pretty confusing. Instead, transitions can always be allowed to happen if the left hand side is satisfied and then the "don't transition if there's an Eve" semantics -- when necessary/desired -- can be made explicit by adding assertions to each nondeterministic transition.

For example, if you want 1 Adam and 1 Bob to transition to 1 AliceBob regardless of Eves then you write:

    Alice + Bob -> AliceBob
but if you want to insist there are no Eves for this rule to hold, then you write:
    assert(0Eve);
    Alice + Bob -> AliceBob
in which case there must be 0 Evens in order for the Alicebob transition to happen.

These sorts of nondeterministic transitions with optional guards are expressible in dynamic logic; see see A3 + A8 in [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_logic_(modal_logic)