These days when people see consecutive pithy sentences with parallel structure, they immediately holler "AI generated."
For years I've wanted to improve my writing and reduce my tendency to string together long floppy clauses, and now I'm like, well good thing I never did that...!
Similarly, in 1790s America, farmers west of the Appalachians were growing plenty of corn, but because of bad roads the only feasible way to transport it to the much larger markets east of the mountains was as whiskey. When Alexander Hamilton imposed a tax on distilled spirits, the result was a "Whiskey Rebellion" in which George Washington himself rode out at the head of an army against other American citizens.
Ever since the invention of the printing press, every new communication technology has reduced the effort needed to widely disseminate information-- and misinformation! So you could say this is nothing new. On the other hand, this is remarkably little effort.
This collection of "Rabinisms" [1] (thanks to the Internet Archive for keeping it from being lost) can give you some of the flavor of the delightful experience that it was to take one of his classes. RIP.
[If P = NP,] then all of modern cryptography collapses. On this happy thought... (1998-11-24)
I'm one of those people who is just never wrong. I mean, not one of those people. I'm like everybody else. Nobody is ever wrong. (1998-12-08)
After all I said, put here the word "obvious". (1998-12-15)
I am going to show that in one round the probability of not reaching agreement is less or equal to 2. ... Yeah, we're establishing new ground in probability theory. (1998-12-17)
It's more than 10 years old. It's either classical or incorrect. (Fall 1998)
The article "FTFY Buddhist Ethics" [1] comes to a similar conclusion about the development of West Coast Buddhism but isn't on board with it. IMHO an interesting contrarian take.
I have this problem despite adjusting my monitor height properly.
I consulted a practitioner (in Taiwan, so I'm not exactly sure how to describe her.) She directed me to do the following: stand on tiptoe closely against a flat wall where the ceiling is higher than I can reach on tiptoe. Keep forehead against the wall. Reach upwards, keeping the part of forearms nearest the wrist against the wall. Inhale and exhale, relaxing muscles and stretching to reach further and further upwards with fingertips. Do this for at least 30-45 seconds, relax, repeat a few times daily.
I am not good at sticking to the program but it does seem to be helping
"My current laptop is an aging X1 Carbon generation 7... A few months ago a few keys of the keyboard stopped working. I decided it was time to look for a replacement."
Isn't that like deciding to replace your bike because some of the cables are rusted? Like a new set of cables, a new keyboard is a small expense compared to a whole new laptop.
Like replacing bike cables, swapping in a new Carbon X7 keyboard might be slightly challenging for an amateur. iFixit calls the keyboard replacement "moderate" in difficulty [1] taking about an hour with a new keyboard running about a hundred bucks. But it would be a simple job for a repair shop. So it seems hard to justify the expense of a whole new one rather than just the new part.
Of course, sometimes you just want a new laptop, because the bike analogy breaks down a little: unlike bikes, newer ones are inherently faster.
This puts me in mind of the words of George Bernard Shaw:
‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
I am usually working with historical documents, where both Otsu and adaptive thresholding are frustratingly almost but not quite good enough. My go-to approach lately is "DeepOtsu" [1]. I like that it combines the best of both the traditional and deep learning worlds: a deep neural net enhances the image such that Otsu thresholding is likely to work well.
Bikes can work great for travelers aged from, say, 13 to 70 without much luggage. Not so great for travelers outside that age range, with more luggage, or with physical disabilities. I wonder what fraction of travelers falls into the latter category.
The article is quite one-sided. My experience is certainly that B6 has an effect on nerves, but in my case that's been a good thing.
I started a software job in 1995, writing a lot of code. By mid-1997, I had severe nerve pain in both wrists, even with ice, stretching, and ibuprofen.
I went to an excellent orthopedist who prescribed two things: a Kinesis Advantage keyboard to mostly immobilize the wrists while typing, and 50 mg of Vitamin B6 per day.
The combination saved my career. I sometimes get out of the habit of taking the B6 for a week or two, out of sheer forgetfulness. After a couple of weeks, I'll start noticing very minor nerve pain if I'm using the Kinesis Advantage keyboard (I'm typing this on one right now.) But if I'm typing on a normal keyboard at a client site, a week or so is enough to bring back noticeable nerve pain, which reminds me to start the B6 regimen again. After a few days on B6, the pain recedes.
I was a little nervous at taking 2500% of the RDA, so I researched the medical literature, and the studies I found showing problems caused by excessive B6 all described people taking 200mg or more per day.
The article notes that "since 2022 the TGA has required a warning label for listed medicines with more than 10mg of B6." So maybe studies showing the potential for harm have come out since then; I don't know. On the other hand, has anyone ever gathered data to show whether supplemental B6 actually does improve cases like mine? Vitamin B6 can't be patented, so there's no money to be made, so who is going to fund that study?
This is great and has a lot of early historical perspective that I had never seen chronicled before.
But it is necessarily limited in the amount of album covers it can feature from what many would consider to be their heyday, the 1950s through the 1970s.
If you just want to feast your eyes on a lot of great album covers from that period, pick up a copy of the "Album Cover Album" [1] or one of its six (!) follow-ups. Designers Storm Thorgerson (who worked with Pink Floyd) and Roger Dean (who worked with Yes) created these incredibly lush books, with album covers printed nice and large in vivid color, organized in a really insightfully thematic way. A bit more speedy than your average used book, but not by much. Highly recommended, good for hours of reverie.
Jane Jacobs's grandmother, Hannah Breece, was also a remarkable, dynamic woman: the first American schoolteacher in Alaska after its purchase from Russia. Jacobs did valuable work editing her grandmother's incomplete memoirs and publishing them with commentary [1]. If you are interested in Jacobs, give it a read; both women's personalities come through quite distinctly.
Perhaps not. But you could still imagine a for-profit matchmaking service that would do a better job of aligning its interests with those of its clients. For example, it could collect only a small fee upfront with an agreement that if you meet Mr. or Ms. Right you'll release a larger fee held in escrow.
I imagine that would need to be quite personalized and high touch, but it would be an appealing contrast to standard dating sites, which have interests diametrically opposed to those of their users: a user who makes a long-term match will stop paying the membership fee, so the site owner has no real incentive to help the user do anything but churn.
If you can't get photons from the future, just get a hold of some thiotimoline, a compound invented by SF master Isaac Asimov that dissolves slightly before it is added to water. After first describing it in a spoof chemistry paper, he returned to it several times, exploring its different applications and the new scientific field it created, "chronochemistry".
I have seen references to using uv for Python package management before and been thoroughly confused. I never realized it was not the same thing as the very nice asynchronous cross-platform library libuv (https://libuv.org/) and I could never figure out what that library had to do with Python package management (answer: nothing).
Maybe we need a Geographic Names Board to deconflict open source project names, or at least the ones that are only two or three characters long.
For years I've wanted to improve my writing and reduce my tendency to string together long floppy clauses, and now I'm like, well good thing I never did that...!