Professor Appel was my boss when I was a system administrator for the UIUC Math department, working my way through grad school. He was one of the best bosses I’ve had over the past thirty years and had a real knack for dealing with the immature twenty something’s (like me).
He was incredibly humble about the 4 color proof, and well, just about everything. He continued to learn new things — I remember him asking me to help him debug some PostScript and I couldn’t believe it was happening.
I’m in River Forest and the deer are a pain to deal with. They eat your plants, they’re not afraid of people (because they get hand feed) and they get hit by cars.
They’re lacking their natural predators — and the logical solution of introducing them is ruled out because the local forest preserves aren’t large enough to support wolf packs.
Maybe the coyotes will figure out how to take them down.
I was writing software at a bank and found a bug. I was told to save it for when we had our audit —- because no matter what, the auditors were going to insist we fixed something and it might as well be something the development team wanted fixed too.
I’ve heard of contractors who leave electrical outlets out of their plans so that the building department, which will insist something be changed in the plans (proving the department’s usefulness), does not insist on something hard.
I meet Greg when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University and he was earning his PhD. I helped out a bit with some of the graphics programming for his thesis. Greg was a class act, always patient and kind. It was super helpful to me when I went to UIUC for graduate schools and he showed up as a faculty member there; he knew how to get access to campus resources and was more willing to help me than faculty in my own department. He was a model RIP.
I think people tend to underestimate the risks in allowing suicide —- here’s a blurb from the linked article:
However, social acceptance may lead to more egregious abuses: the issue gained a higher profile in early 2010, when an 80-year-old man escaped after discovering his intended fate and heard his family members discussing how they were going to "share" his lands, and took refuge in a relative's home.
There’s no practical way for a defense lawyer to find out what the error rate is for, say, a state lab. Occasionally organizations can do this, for example the innocence project figured out that the FBI’s hair analysis was bogus for decades (https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-testimony-on-mic...).
No. When it comes to evaluating forensic evidence lawyers are, by training, too process oriented to solve the problems.
Ask a prosecutor what the error rate is for fingerprints or DNA evidence and you’ll get a blank stare. They don’t even try to measure it.
He was incredibly humble about the 4 color proof, and well, just about everything. He continued to learn new things — I remember him asking me to help him debug some PostScript and I couldn’t believe it was happening.