ztravis

The "personalized" basketball example isn't a good one - your hand pushing the ball down and the floor pushing it back up aren't an action/reaction pair. You could, for example, push the ball down over a bottomless pit (or in space or whatever) so that you have one without the other. Nitpicky, yes, and it also seems plausible that this very example would be found in textbooks already, but I wouldn't like to use it.

Nor do I understand why you'd say "ouch, that hurt" while dribbling...

Around 12 years ago I helped design and set up a 48-drive, 9U, ~120TB NAS in the Chenbro RM91250 chassis (still going strong! but plenty of drive failures along the way...). This looks like it's probably the 24-drive/4U entry in the same line (or similar). IIRC the fans were very noisy in their original hot-swappable mounts but replacing them with fixed (screw) mounts made a big difference. I can't tell from the picture if this has hot-swappable fans, though - I think I remember ours having purple plastic hardware.

From the list of words, I think F was the required (central) letter.

There is no "Google Docs" format, though - you have no idea how Google is representing your data, or if there even is any single "blob" that is your file (and even if there is one on the server side, AFAIK you can't get it). I'm not very familiar with Notion, but it seems like it's probably the same way. That means there's no chance of "Google Docs" or "Notion" becoming a standardized format. At least with a proprietary standalone format you (or the community) has a chance at reverse engineering it.

My guess is that the output PDF is still valid, but that an embedded (subset) font has had its `ToUnicode` map stripped, so that there's no link between the character codes used in the text elements and the "actual" characters they represent (there are also other ways this corruption could happen, but dropping or mangling the `ToUnicode` map seems like a likely cause).

Crappy bike infrastructure (e.g. sharrows, bike lanes that end and dump cyclists onto bad/dangerous roads) is a negative for everyone: cyclists, drivers, bike advocates,... better to save the money and build more limited but higher quality infrastructure.

I actually built this product out (for both Uber and Lyft) - SMS/MMS-based ride requests (MMS only for sending google maps PNGs to confirm pickup location). I was about to convert it from a personal project (I used it to get rides on both services for a few years) to a "real" one open to customers, etc and then ran into snags with both APIs at around the same time. Uber's API changed to potentially require a web flow to confirm surge pricing (IIRC - now it's scheduled to be disabled entirely very soon) and Lyft's API was basically shut off entirely (there's a way to apply but I was unable to make any progress even through internal contacts at Lyft). I'll try and keep an eye out for any changes...

I'm stunned by the fact they have a graph comparing two stock tickers by share price. Do they not realize that comparison is essentially meaningless (without market cap, etc)? If you look at YTD performance Copart is actually doing worse than the competitor they're comparing against...

It's actually not too bad. You can run a pool of soffice processes, but unless you really care about the startup time, I'd suggest running individual processes per job, which you can run headless from the command line. For the most part libreoffice does well, although at some point you'll start to discover the quirks in their rendering...

I absolutely agree - Arabic is a beautiful language and a joy to learn, and it is particularly appealing for those who enjoy structure and regularity (e.g. CS and math folk!). Be forewarned, though - the significant differences between MSA (modern standard Arabic, the focus of most "Arabic" courses/material) and regional/national dialects (and the differences between those various dialects themselves) may make it a bit less practical than you'd hope (and a source of disappointment when you go to actually speak with people!).

Permit me to plug a pet project of mine:

http://arabicreference.com

It's basically an online version of Hans Wehr, the de facto standard dictionary for students of Arabic. You can search by root or by word and provides form I vowelling, masadir (infinitives), broken plurals, and other useful information organized by form. I know there exist other good dictionaries out there, but I never found one I quite liked as a reference as much as I enjoyed Hans Wehr. I hope someone else finds it useful! (I've been neglecting it a bit recently, so I apologize for any bugs and for the lack of an SSL cert).

(insert bike credentials here)

For me one of the largest (if not THE largest) factor* in bike safety is route choice, and the main factor in that for me is density and speed of car traffic. As comfortable as I feel "vehicular" cycling (e.g. cutting across lanes to take a true left turn, taking the lane to avoid the "dooring zone" along parked cars), those are the moments when I am most exposed and at risk. Likewise the safest intersections are those that do not have cars passing through!

As an example, a colleague of mine commutes from near my house to our office, and we take very different routes - him along a major artery with (mostly) protected bike lanes, me along back streets with sharrows or no bike markings at all. Even in a protected line, he has to contend with fast and constant traffic alongside him, frequent intersections where he has no protection and is even harder to see (since he's popping out from behind a line of parked cars); the intersections are constantly in use and drivers turn and accelerate faster to make smaller windows in the faster traffic. My commute along back streets is leisurely; I can ride in the middle of the street without fear of getting doored or getting overtaken at speed unexpectedly, and intersections are calm. Of course the major artery is more direct (and so perhaps slightly faster), but it's also a major designated bike route and for that reason sees a lot of bike traffic even though I think it's less safe.

Of course in denser neighborhoods and cities it may be difficult to find "back streets" with minimal car traffic and which still get to where you're going. Still, I think that should be a goal of new bike infrastructure development - I'm happy to act like a car, make turns from the correct lane, stop at red lights, signal, etc., and I don't need a protected bike lane either - a normal road with light, slow car traffic is fine. A set of these which connects the major neighborhoods in a community (e.g. running parallel to arteries but not quite in the central areas) makes for a very nice bike experience (c.f. Berkeley's bike boulevards which is naturally my inspiration here!).

So, when this article mentions the requirement of protected bike lanes on all streets, while I think that's great and I love seeing bicycling given more consideration in urban planning, I also think that it seems a little coarse. Some roads don't need to have any bike traffic at all, some roads can be wonderful for biking without any modification at all, and some roads ought to be made better for biking but in more nuanced ways (primarily traffic easing - roundabouts, narrower roadways, removing through-access, etc - that discourages car traffic without impeding bike traffic). Of course if you want to build independent bike trails (or non-grade lanes, or other more significant changes) that's wonderful too!

Other important factors IMO:

Cyclist density - everyone should bike! Probably preaching to the choir here but there's safety in numbers, drivers get used to seeing cyclists and how they behave, and it makes it easier to advocate for better infrastructure. Also relevant on a micro-level for route choice * Cycling experience/behavior - including "vehicular" maneuvers, general awareness of dangerous/risky situations and driver behavior * Lights

I have the Nokia 3310 3G (relaunched version). It has many noticeable bugs/issues ranging from annoying to near deal-breakers, e.g.:

* Terrible MMS/group chat support (and bugs, e.g. messages showing up in previews but not in the actual channel)

* Inconsistent notifications

* Un-removable built in apps (that auto-install on first open)

I still use it but based on this thread I'm going to be following the Punkt MP02 (although $350 seems ridiculous). Or maybe at some point I'll get around to building that custom dumb phone I've always wanted...

I previously used the samsung A727 which I actually thought was great but is hard to find any more.

This is an interesting project, although as others have mentioned the space of arabic words is (reasonably) bounded and an explicit parsing approach or something that uses known language data might prove to be more efficient and accurate.

Along those lines, I might be able to provide some useful json (the basis for http://www.arabicreference.com) in case you are interested. I've been meaning to do some fun investigations using this data (e.g. predicting broken plurals, masadir, form I internal vowelling) but haven't yet had time.

Yeah, definitely! I'm planning on writing a blog post about how it was built, and I'd be happy to release the code (although I'd like to clean it up some, and I'm not sure how much of it would be of general interest).

http://www.arabicreference.com

I've always wanted a good Arabic root-based dictionary with vowelling, plurals, etc (basically Hans Wehr online). I also wanted the structured dataset for some linguistic "research".

It was a fun project - I built out a web interface for reviewing and updating entries and put in a lot of hours of manual correction (just to get all the entries to validate - I still have a lot more corrections/fixes to make...). I'm a little burnt out on it at the moment, but I plan on:

- fixing those mistakes and a few other bugs

- cleaning up the UI/display

- moving onto a "real" server framework

- writing up some blog posts about those short linguistic investigations I'd like to do now that I have the structured data

- making an API?

Notably lacking is any plan to promote it... I posted it on reddit and I'd love it if people stumble upon it and find it useful, but I did it mostly as a labor of love and something that I personally find useful!

Having browsed through a few different zip parsers in the course of writing my own, most handle a range of malformed/modified input, including prepended/appended garbage, filename encodings (CP437, Unicode "extra field" flags), etc. I found this set of test files useful: https://github.com/Stuk/jszip/tree/master/test/ref

It is annoying that support for these non-standard zips has become de-facto standard (you don't want your tool to fail where others succeed)...

I'm consistently surprised to hear people saying positive things about "Ready Player One" - to me it was one of the most hackneyed and silly books I've read in a long time. My review at the time of reading (originally for private consumption only):

Terrible modern sci-fi about easter egg MMO quest for game creator’s fortune. Childish plot/dialog, cliches everywhere (e.g. ‘L337 Hax0r Warezhouse’), absolutely atrocious, really simple puzzles. The only positive thing I can say about it is that I didn’t give up on it immediately - although I was tempted, the main plot line was at least interesting enough that I wanted to hear the end. Unfortunately the ending itself was disappointing - the final puzzle was just a rehash of the first two. My main takeaways were: I hope the ‘MMO-scifi’ subgenre is finally dead, I should wait at least 10 years for more recent sci-fi to go through quality assurance, and that it seems like based on this, anyone with a half-baked idea and enough pop-culture-nerd knowledge to sprinkle throughout 300 or so pages should be able to write a best-seller. Meanwhile, the politics/worldview it espouses is basically boingboing distilled - big corporation bad, internet is free, knowledge is free, american culture and society is dead, cyber-elite should run world, pop-media is simultaneously in control of world and source of inspiration and true creativity.

More likely it is a reference to its eponym, the Banach-Tarski paradox.

I'm amazed at what is being claimed in the headline/description in this article versus what the paper actually has demonstrated (from the brief description in the article/reading the abstract online) - I actually wondered whether the original poster was intending to highlight this disparity. First, the conclusion of the researchers is that having more cigarette butts in a nest correlates with having fewer parasitic mites, but this article states that chemicals in cigarette butts are already known to repel mites. Wouldn't one expect a correlation here? Of course, it's by no means a given, and experiment is required to bear out this conclusion, but it seems like nobody should come away surprised. Second, a correlation here is completely independent from the conclusion that "city birds use cigarette butts" as anything beyond building material! It leaves open this possibility but as far as I can tell the question of intent is entirely unaddressed by the current research. I already know not to expect more from pop-sci research highlights, but I would have though Nature would do better.

The question of whether something is ethical is very different from the question of whether it causes any harm.

Small stylistic comment: the busy background on quotes makes the text very difficult to read!

No, I think he's saying that MS put out a browser bundled with every windows computer sold, so that was what dominated. Now google can do something similar in leveraging its existing userbase (everyone with a google account) to drive adoption of gdrive (ala google+). You won't have to sign up for something new... it'll already be waiting for you.

> Not all the time. And if they do, there still are subtle variations in suffixes.

There are many patterns and forms in the broken plurals themselves which you can pick up on and learn so that you often can correctly predict new ones without memorization. For example, you give:

-liss => lusuus

And likewise, most doubled nouns of this form take the same plural:

-jadd => juduud

-hass => husuus

-hamm => humuum

Still... this is far from a hard and fast rule, and it also takes a lot of time to build familiarity and notice these patterns. It's also something that al-Kitaab (for example) doesn't ever mention.

(just explaining... not implying that you aren't aware of this)

No, but the parent article did: "I felt what they were doing was a sexual assault."

A good approach is to do an 'active warmup' - some light cardio, maybe ~5 min of biking or jogging, followed by a series of exercises done over ~20meters or so, going out and back:

pull your knee to your chest, quad pulls, lunges, high knees, butt kicks, shuffles, drinking birds, toe touches, karaokes, leg swings, others...

takes a little time, and sometimes looks a little funny... but is great for getting you warmed up.

As a fellow physicist, I agree with you on all counts (except I believe the TR blogger is actually a physicist as well, used to write on www.arxivblog.com). The arXiv is far from the best source of actual scientific developments, but it sure is a great source of 'This idea just might change everything we knew about science!!' blog posts. I'm not sure if I can recall any examples of where this kind of theory has been developed into something more legitimate.

Not that there isn't newsworthy stuff posted to the arXiv, and not that it isn't worthwhile, thought-provoking and fun to read these papers and these ideas - you should just have an idea of where it's coming from, and where it's likely headed...

Berkeley.

I'm interested! Thanks!

Good article - interesting story - but correct "let's" to "lets" right in the opening blurb on zipzoomauto.com!

Perhaps the source might still be emitting photons?