HN user
I work there, and when we give tours and people raise the issue, I like to point out that we had the name first and so we're not changing it. Though we did once get an official reminder that, to avoid ambiguity, we had to always say 'ISIS Neutron Source' in full on immigration and customs paperwork, especially in anything that also uses the word 'nuclear'.
Are there any clever tricks for the data processing involved here, given that the delay is a shift in the time domain and the Doppler effect is a shift in the frequency domain? Maybe involving fractional Fourier transforms, or wavelets?
Good point. I wasn't sure from the given examples that overuse of classes in this way was all that harmful, e.g. the performance penalty hopefully shouldn't be all that significant. But then I remembered all the Python code I've seen that was obviously written by capable and experienced C++ programmers.
For a real-world use case, maybe cruise ships? Internet service on the ships is expensive if it works at all, but that's not necessarily what people need - they just need to be able to exchange whatsapp style messages with people already on the same ship, especially if they can't find each other. Music festivals, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, might face a similar issue as they can be in remote locations.
The McGurk effect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k8fHR9jKVM is another example, which might be described as people learning to lip read without them being aware that they have done so.
Searle, is that you?
I always knew my experience with RISC OS wouldn't go to waste!
Any way? There are left-leaning social positions that would be entirely expected from a modern tech-focused VC company. I support those causes and positions to various extents (if not always their approach to advocacy and addressing other viewpoints), but they're still left leaning.
+1 for also looking for a tool like this (online or otherwise) before, and being disappointed with what I found previously. Two projects immediately spring to mind: firstly, we have a theodolite to align some lab equipment, which I'd like to add a live digital camera to, and secondly we're designing a material heating system based on halogen tubes, for which we need to optimise the shapes of reflectors around the bulbs, subject to some geometry constraints.
I'd not seen the sharedigm.com platform before either, possibly itself also interesting for other things.
I've heard this can happen where money laundering is suspected. Apparently the banks aren't allowed to tip off the account owner that they're being investigated, with the result that the account owner's subsequent interactions with the bank become kafkaesque.
The drug in the article is roflumilast, which seems to share some structure with the nootropic ampakine CX-546. I've never consumed that, but I've had some experience with IDRA-21 doing something like what the article describes, such as having vivid dreams of minor chart hits from decades ago that I'd previously gone a long time without being reminded of.
Unauthorised third-party modifications and add-ons may end up being part of the solution here. It's already established that this can be a viable business model with e.g. car accessories, games consoles and printer inks. I can see a market for one-off DIY modifications to various things that unlock what was intended to be a subscription feature.
A related issue is the increasing possiblity of devices being effectively bricked because some cloud service or online system has ceased support. Could there be a niche for a company selling improved after-market firmware for other companies' devices?
I never thought I'd see the issue of pulse selection in spallation neutron sources referred to on HN, let alone linked to music theory. In practice, most systems that select a subset of these pulses will select 1 pulse in every 2^n pulses, so fancy patterns aren't needed. But I work at a facility where 1 in every 5 pulses are removed in order to supply another part of the site, and where the particular instrument I work with uses 1 in every 2 or 3 pulses. At the moment, the selection of 1 in 2-3 pulses is accomplished with a spinning disc ('chopper') with a hole in it, to let though the required fraction of pulses. But the spin speed of the disc must generally be constant once set, meaning sometimes it lets though one of the missing 1-in-5 pulses that were already diverted somewhere else. We would need a better switching method to let through arbitrary irregularly spaced patterns of neutrons. I think I worked out once that it could offer the most advantage when running in our 1-in-3 mode.
There's imechanica.org, I followed it more closely in my time at university but not sure what it's like more recently.
Incidentally this is why I see no problem with phrases like 'PIN number', despite others apparently being very bothered by them. English does not use a macro preprocessor to expand acronyms.
"To Avoid Criticism, Say Nothing, Do Nothing, Be Nothing"... https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/01/09/say-nothing/
If you want to go digging on Usenet, check out Albert Silvermann (I think it was) on rec.music.theory.
Obligatory https://xkcd.com/125/
If a flawed mathematical paper were used as the basis for what then became a flawed cryptography algorithm, I can see that having impact if the bad guys noticed the flaw first. But yes, I expect examples like that would be comparatively rare.
While opinion is split on this, these days I don't think you can appeal to strictness alone to justify 'data' being plural, given the way usage has already gone. People (like me) who say 'data is...' are simply using data as a mass noun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun), which seems to be a reasonable direction to be taking the language. I may be influenced by the fact that I usually see 'datum' used to refer to a reference point or marker in some arbitrary space, and thus in my mind is now another word separate from 'data' (albeit with shared etymology). If I had more than one datum, I'd call them 'datums', though I've yet to test how acceptable this would be in a formal setting.
They claim it's ultimately related to the latin debitum, but the b was lost before being reinserted by prescriptivists later. Not as bad as the s is island, which appears to be based on a false understanding of the etymology https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/island#note-1
That's still more than a bit of a stretch considering the drawbacks, such as making that vault or bulkhead material radioactive even after the neutron beam has been shut off. In practice the duraction of the induced radioactivity varies considerably depending on the material; just hope it's not an alloy that includes cobalt.
As a species I feel we need a means to overcome this problem within organizations, and demonstrate convincingly to others that we have done so. Chernobyl and Fukushima were also both created by a culture of deference to higher-ups. The anti-nuclear crowd were wrong about the science, but may have had a point once you consider human fallibility.
To demonstrate this more fully, consider the case of having the wheel flanges on the outside, with the conicity of the wheels pointing the other way. Gravity would still tend to centre this arrangement, but I'm told that if you build such a system in practice, then it won't run nearly as smoothly.
(PhD was 'Residual stress in rails', for what that's worth. Judging from the profiles of the rails I saw, direct contact with the wheel flange plays a substantial role in keeping the train in place on curved track. But on roughly straight track, I'm satisfied that the argument about conicity applies).
I'd be willing to have a crack at this if I thought it could help (my background is in nuclear methods for materials characterisation). But I've a feeling that the difference in uptake between cancerous and normal tissue might not be large enough to make this especially useful. Fluorine-18 labelled glucose is used in PET imaging, but not for treatment as far as I'm aware. On the other hand, if a compound can be found that is more selective for the cancer in question, making it radioactive may offer a further improvement.
Did you have a Multiface? Not all that cheap, but probably ended up teaching me more about low-level programming than anything else, short of writing a Spectrum 128 emulator for Risc OS :)
Perhaps I'm a bit biased against 95 as I was happily using Risc OS at the time :) My memory of Microsoft from back then was that the Office apps could be quite capable, but the underlying OS was just something you had to put up with.
Windows operating systems may themselves represent the 'pivot points' that wenc talks about. Every so often, a version of Windows seems to come along that gives you a genuine improvement over what came before - in my view Windows 98 SE, Windows XP and Windows 7 for example, which may represent the nostalgia valleys. Other intermediate versions seem to at best introduce new problems to replace the old ones.
Of course, it would be great to have the Risc OS experience while doing modern computing tasks, so I'm pleased to hear that the lessons it brought to the world have not been forgotten.
Is there any kind of standard file format describing lens internals, or database of different lens designs or actual commercially available lenses? I'm interested in this kind of simulation for some machine vision applications that may need to cope with not all of the image being in perfect focus at once.