wombatpm

Can’t say enough good things about Database Design for Mere Mortals. I keep a physical copy on my desk to give to other developers to read.

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: every organization has two groups of people. The first group cares about the organization's main goal. The second group cares about the organization itself. Group two always wins, takes control, and writes the rules.

So NGO’s go from combating homelessness to being the organization about homelessness.

I sometimes think organizations should be set up with hard end dates. At which point the organization is disbanded and resources redistributed. If the problem still exists a new ord should be created with a new scope and new timeline.

Lots of scientific code in Fortran has sparse arrays, so a NxN array that only has values on 5 diagonals will store that as 5xN array to save memory allowing you to run a larger problem.

Sulfur is produced when the H2S is removed from petroleum and natural gas. Elemental sulfur is burned to produce Sulfuric acid using the Contact Process.

Physical Chemistry (I think it was Chem 361 at UofI) took most of the semester to get to the point where we could derive the shape of the hydrogen orbitals. Probably the best lecture of that class.

XML is like violence. If it’s not solving your problem, you need to use more.

Physics 107 at U of I in the 80’s had all quizzes on the PLATO system. Please for the love of mercy do not not go back to inflexible systems for exams and quizzes.

Same problem with chemo and radiation. A tumor may start off with a single cancerous mutation, but by the time it spreads there may be several. Once the cell repair machinery has been broken, the cancer cells are prone for more mutations.

Chemo, radiation, and CRISPR will kill everything it can reach that is susceptible. That leaves everything that was unreachable or resistant behind to start growing again.

Kill cancer cells is easy. Killing ONLY cancer cells is very hard.

You just need to get a breeding pair and you can raise as many as you need.

Wasn’t Tesla found to have FSD disengaging just before a crash so that the driver would be at fault?

Old joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar. On average everyone there is a millionaire

Police would just argue that the second datapoint was wrong.

But that is also a problem with structures derived from the methods you list. None of them are 100% equivalent to in vivi structures.

Bette White has an honorary degree from there for her Rose Nieland character on Golden Girls

100 years of science fiction clearly shows that unforeseeable consequences are not that unforeseen.

Screen share on slack or teams gives you the same. I’d routinely work with remote teammates that way, and we’d jump in a control each others machines as needed. We’d do hours of that as a team, breaking into breakout rooms as necessary. Much more effective that a hot conference room

Until there is a coordinated effort for every user to demand arbitration. Suddenly a corporation wants to combine all complaints into a single case, because each arbitration has a fixed cost for the corporation.

SpaceX is now an AI company with a rocket side hustle. At least that’s how the S1 looks.

And the RTO fad means those Low Cost areas continue to decline.

They grew out of red light cameras, which everyone saw as a naked cash grab- especially once towns were caught tweaking the yellow light timings.

Cops love them, and look longingly at the UK panopticon and how easy it is to solve crimes.

Mass produced and pre-staged. Think zipcar for guillotines pre positioned in finance districts and rich neighborhoods.

People say this, but the cash is returned only if you sell. A dividend is cash in pocket plus the stock.

Are you going to allow ER’s to refuse patients and let people die on the street? What if the Patient is unconscious with no identification but looks Hispanic? Can they be turned away?

Stripping away all wefare because of immigration is a bad bad bad idea.

So knowledge becomes meta stable. There was an AIDS drug in the 90’s that we stopped being able to make. IIRC Apparently there were two different crystal/folding structures for the compound and the desired one was not the lowest energy. After years of production, the wrong version was produced and they could no longer make the correct version do to contamination. And every facility that tried to study it, wound up no longer being able to make the correct version. It was like a real life ice-IX situation. Scary that changing weights or model parameters could lead to the same thing happening with knowledge.

I would have thought with all the data centers being built the parts for cooling systems would be standardized with replacements available from Grainger immediately.

Once you own the company you take out loans to pay a onetime dividend to you to pay off your purchase loans. Same thing perfectly legal

If you have a pee-er, the make a pee-pee tee-pee to place over the wenis to protect from errant spays.

Also, turbines for gas plants are back ordered until 2030

Turkey’s main goal is preventing the establishment of a Kurdish state for fear of losing it’s Kurdish region.

I expect the prices to rise to almost cover the cost savings from layoffs at large companies.