Zanta · HackerTrans

5 years agodiscuss

An argument presented in this case is that increased pay to college athletes will incentivize them to spend more time on their athletics and less on their academics. How convincing do you find that argument, applied to athletes in a) Top Tier D1 Football programs, b) D1 programs but for less hyper-commercialized sports (say track, or volleyball), and c) D2 or D3 athletes with little-to-no aspirations of a future in professional athletics

Zanta

7 years agodiscuss

I had the exact same reaction to it. Some enormous fraction of all non-fiction is an essay-length idea stretched out into a book length. It's disrespectful to the reader, but it's what they need to do to make a sale. No one wants to buy a pamphlet

Zanta

7 years agodiscuss

Safety is a big concern, and a place to safely store your bike (at home and at work) is another big one. I'd imagine lots of the walkers live in condos or apartments where storing a bike can be really tough.

Zanta

8 years agodiscuss

I used these lectures as a method for learning algorithms as a phys/mech eng with no CS background. I found them incredibly challenging but the lectures were written exceptionally well. On an internet with thousands of resources on this material, this was the very best I found.

Zanta

8 years agodiscuss

Agreed, but jeans are really unattractive at the distances the author is riding. His circumstances are unfortunate, since the set of advice applicable to <5 mile rides is very different to his ~20mile trip.

Related, I'm very impressed by his speed. I ride about 9 miles to and from work and it takes me ~35-40 minutes door to door.

Zanta

8 years agodiscuss

Justice Thomas also broke a multi-year streak of silence to make fun of his alma mater, Yale. Playing the long game.

Zanta

8 years agodiscuss

How do state broadcasters fit into this theory? The CBC and BBC produce content in a similar style to the for-profit broadcasters (better, but definitely similar in more ways than its not), but without the advertising mission.

Zanta

8 years agodiscuss

This is a very dismissive comment. Many of my peers in grad school were developing finite element techniques - it's a huge area of active ongoing research. Getting realistic results is very tough in an application with non-linear materials (probably looking at anisotropic composites) and possibly fractures like this.

Zanta

8 years agodiscuss

I recently read and enjoyed the essay version. Would you recommend the book? Specifically, did you feel that the amount of depth in the book necessitated that format as opposed to an essay?

I'm frequently disappointed by really good ideas that could be presented in a dozen pages being stretched to occupy 200 (e.g. Deep Work)

Zanta

8 years agodiscuss

Neat! I built a little mobile robot that uses omni-wheels[1], a related style wheel. Build report here[2] (forgive the lousy website, I'm a mech guy just starting to learn software)

The wheels allowed some neat driving tricks, but it also made it really difficult to drive in a straight line. You don't get the normal tracking behaviour that wheels give you, and differences in traction from wheel to wheel also tend to distort your course. Adding a gyro for use in a closed-loop angular control system really helped this a lot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_wheel [2] http://willbeattie.ca/Projects/Twitch/Twitch.html

Zanta

8 years agodiscuss

"makes me think that they are running the stepper motors in a closed-loop mode similar to how you'd use a servo. I am not 100% on that, "

Do the steppers have encoders on them? If not, the machine can't do closed loop control. It can keep track of where the rotor should be based on counting the steps of coils it has energized, but it has no way of directly keeping track of the rotor. A large enough torque resisting the rotor's rotation can cause the rotor to skip steps, but this doesn't influence the energizing of coils in the stator so the machine has no idea that anything has gone wrong.

An encoder lets you directly measure what's going on with the rotor (and therefore the shaft of the motor). You basically keep track of where you should be (based on counting the steps delivered to the stator coils) then use the encoder to validate. e.g. 'I've sent 12 steps so I should be 48 degrees from where I started. My encoder is reading 26 degrees, so I must have skipped steps somewhere along the way.'

Zanta

8 years agodiscuss

On the subject of birds, "Great tits also have age-related defects"

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110307130215.h...

Zanta

9 years agodiscuss

I think you mean to refer to another track from that album, "The Irony of It All"

Zanta

9 years agodiscuss

Your point absolutely has merit. I know some, but not many, badly overweight people who exercise regularly. I know some, but not many, skinny people who never lift a finger.

I was mostly trying to address the direct cause-and-effect conclusion the parent comment was making with breathing hard == losing weight

Zanta

9 years agodiscuss

From the paper "Replacing one hour of rest with exercise that raises the metabolic rate to seven times that of resting by, for example, jogging, removes an additional 39 g of carbon from the body, raising the total by about 20% to 240 g. For comparison, a single 100 g muffin represents about 20% of an average person’s total daily energy requirement. Physical activity as a weight loss strategy is, therefore, easily foiled by relatively small quantities of excess food."

Zanta

9 years agodiscuss

The open office from which I type this is usually quiet. Three of my neighboring co-workers have chronic coughs, throat clearing, and hacks. I wear earplugs inside can headphones that are on all day, and still, it's excruciatingly distracting. I would pay several thousand dollars a year to never hear them cough again.

Zanta

9 years agodiscuss

Probably a fair few. MechE here myself. Software is interesting, informed conversation with technical people is nice to read.

Zanta

9 years agodiscuss

Streetcar tracks are definitely a challenge in the city. Probably the root cause of ~1/3 of my friends reported crashes (unabashed anecdata). I ride on fatter tires than I would like in order to avoid getting stuck in em. Certain intersections are just a total mess of tracks (Queen/King/Roncesvalles for example), so I just go to pedestrian mode and walk my bike across the crosswalk there.

So yeah, it's definitely top of mind if you're riding on those streets, but there are things you can do to mitigate risk down to a level that's acceptable for me. For the record I live in Toronto, drive to work, all other trips are on my bike unless there's snow on the ground.

Zanta

9 years agodiscuss

I'm finishing the book Dreamland, by Sam Quinones, which directly addresses your questions (with a particular focus on addiction in middle america/appalachia)

Q1: Medicaid co-pay for $1000 worth of OxyContin was (as of ~2014, might still be) on the order of $3-5. Those unable to get prescriptions fence stolen goods, primarily from rural WalMarts

Q2: Opiods are chemically similar to heroin. Addiction is severe and enslaving. Someone who wouldn't get off the couch to throw out the trash will walk miles in a snowstorm to get their fix.

Zanta

9 years agodiscuss

'> 2) Ban hitting. Everything should be a wrap around tackle. No more players running full speed and launching themselves into other players. Look at how few players actually try to tackle people. I get what you're going after but it's tricky when you're dealing with the boundaries. How do you push a guy out of bounds without "hitting" him?'

Pushing a guy out of bounds (e.g. a two handed shove) is an illegal tackle in rugby. You have to attempt a normal tackle, and basically attempt to force him out of bounds in the process if that's your goal.

I remember clearly being called for this (didn't know the rule at the time) when I was trying to prevent someone from scoring while he was running close to the sidelines. The ref called a penalty try on me for it.

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