I need a UI which runs well on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, without having to build three different ones. Swing is still easily the best, most consistent, and most native-feeling cross-platform environment. It's much better than QT and GTK in most respects. And Java also runs elegantly on a little platform you may know as Android. I have high hopes for go and rust. But until they have mature UIs, they're out (for me).
C and C++ are dangerous languages filled with security failings and footguns, and no modern app should be written in them.
It's been my experience that well-written low-level Java code runs at about 75% the speed of good C code. (Of course lazy coders write in cushy Java which is much slower). When written efficiently, Java's biggest slowdown lies in array access (C and C++ array access is fast because it is very, very unsafe). But Java makes up for this in having a GC which will coalesce related objects into the same page and so take advantage of cache coherency effects in ways malloc and free cannot possibly do. I have some allocation-heavy algorithms in Java which are, as a result, significantly faster than well-written equivalents in C.
Well, I'll tell you one fun item. My teenage kids are practicing the piano downstairs. I hear a very wrong note being played over and over. I yell down to them what note they're playing wrong and what the correct note likely is. My kids take this in stride -- it's just the thing that their Dad does -- ugh, it's Dad again. Then they occasionally get reminded by their music teacher that it's not normal for a dad to do that. :-)
Though I really am terrible at the Theremin, perfect pitch helps a lot there too. I can walk up to a Theremin and pretty much nail the note despite its current settings.
Note that Prasad didn't reject their application: he prevented Moderna from even applying. Prasad overrode a phalanx of FDA career scientists who had studied and approved Moderna's study approach and were ready to review it. He did so suddenly and without warning: the FDA up to that point had not raised any concerns about Moderna's trial protocol. He didn't cite any safety or efficacy issues.
This wasn't the only time he stepped in and overrode experts with seemingly no justification. Just the most prominent example.
I have perfect pitch (or as it is more properly called, absolute pitch). To be honest, I am doubtful that these teach-your-kids-perfect-pitch techniques are effective: I don't think there's much evidence that they are, beyond anecdote.
Perfect pitch is more a parlor trick than anything. Sure, it's impressive, and I wouldn't trade it away. But the most important skill that a musician can develop (and any musician can develop it) is good relative pitch, that is, the ability to identify notes once told a baseline note. But people with perfect pitch are usually terrible at relative pitch.
For example, I was in a sightsinging class long ago, with one other student with perfect pitch. Sightsinging is a course designed to develop relative pitch. The professor would play a note, say, C, tell us it's a C, then proceed to play a series of chords. The relative pitch students would work out the chords based on the C. I and the other perfect pitch student would just write out the notes we heard. The professor got angry about this, so he started starting with a C but telling everyone it was, say, an F#. Then he'd play chords relative to the C and everyone but us two would write them all out relative to F#. The perfect pitch students were totally hosed, desperately trying to transpose the notes in real-time, with our brains constantly telling us that they're all wrong, and because our relative pitch was so bad as we had relied on perfect pitch as a crutch.
This also shows up in jazz. I'm a Jazz pianist and the thing I can't do is transpose in real time. That's a CRUCIAL ABILITY for a Jazz musician. But I can't do it because my perfect pitch keeps telling me the notes I'm reading are not the same that I'm hearing.
When I occasionally visited my parent's church services, the organist, who knew I had perfect pitch, would see me and immediately transpose the organ down by one half step with a dial. I then wouldn't be able to sing anything -- all the notes in the book were wrong. I'd look up and see him grinning at me. He knew that I knew, it was just between us two. He had screwed me over.
Starting around 50 years old, my pitch has started going sharp. This is a very common effect of age in people with perfect pitch. It depends on the instrument: sawtooth waveshape instruments (guitars, violins, harmonicas) are much worse than others. I'd hear a guitar at B and it sounds like a C.
It is hard to explain how disturbing this is. All your life you could recognize colors. People around you, who only saw in monochrome, would show you a blue object and you'd say "that's blue". This amazed them, but to you it just looks blue. But then one day someone shows you an object that looks blue, but it's not. It's green. The green meter confirms it. But it LOOKS BLUE. You can't explain why this is so disturbing because to everyone else it just looks gray. This effect has a strong psychological impact too -- I've seen interesting studies on it -- because the ego has been wrapped up tightly with your perfect pitch, and now it's failing, like a piece of you going wrong.
These are waaay too complicated. Web developers can't even handle the easy stuff. My email address is of the form [email protected], and email address validators on websites reject my address about 30% of the time because it has two periods.
That's not what stability is. A stable bike is one in which the steering is stable and easily controlled at various speeds. It's a function of steering geometry and mechanical trail. And the Strida is among the very most unstable folders on the market.
Answer honestly. Would you ride the Strida downhill at a 30 degree incline with a serious curve at the bottom without using the brakes, like you would a mountain bike? How about at over 15 miles an hour [like a racing bike]? A good folder should be able to do both easily.
Having lived in Italy and used the btwin folder quite a lot, I can assure you there are lots of basic folders in its category and price range which are much better. I'd look into Dahon and Tern for a basic folding bike.
Folding bikes are complex and hard to make safely, and the folding mechanism is costly to engineer right. This means that the manufacturer of a cheap bike is either providing you with a dangerous folding mechanism, or is putting a lot of the cost of the bike into the folding mechanism, so there's not much money left for the rest of the parts. Either way, it means that cheap folding bikes are a bad choice, and the btwin folder is a good example of that.
The strida is certainly the *dorkiest*, not nerdiest, looking design, but in terms of engineering, it's very bad. It is terrible, TERRIBLE to ride, with horrible mechanical trail. It is extremely unstable. It has no gearing options at all and has essentially no standard parts. It is very clearly the outcome of a designer rather than an engineer ("Let's start with the idea of a bike that folds like a ladder").
Praised by whom? The btwin folder is a low-rent and low quality version of a Dahon-style Chinese fold-in-half folder. That folding design is about 95% of the folding market, and has no clever design features whatsoever. It is simple to manufacture, has no patents, and is pretty bad in general riding use. It is neither fast to fold nor compact, and is very bad in customization, particularly with regard to the rider's reach. And it is really, really boring. Dahon and Tern have some okay bikes of this design, but the entire rest of the design category is dominated by bikes of quite poor quality, including the btwin.
I own what could possibly be the coolest folding bike ever made: the Bike Friday Tikit Hyperfold. It has a folding mechanism with an extremely high nerd quotient. It has a reputation as the fastest bike to fold and unfold, requiring no latches, safeties, or adjustment at all. But more importantly, unlike many other exotic folders (ahem Brompton) it largely uses standard parts. You can fit it with whatever drivetrain, brake system, handlebars, pedals, and seat you want. Though it has the same 349 wheel size as a Brompton, it rides much, much better. It was designed by in conjunction with Bike Friday by Rob English, a mechanical engineer who long was (maybe is?) the British speed record holder.
But Bike Friday no longer manufactures it: the frame design is so exotic and weird that they had a number of frame issues and failures they had to overcome in the field, and Bike Friday has a lifetime frame warranty. It was a very popular bike, but by the time they had worked out all the kinks the value of them continuing to sell the bike had probably gone negative. The Tikit was just too bleeding edge for its time.
The Tikit relies on a special part in order to be ridden: its hyperfold cable. This cable is no longer being manufactured for Bike Friday and cannot be obtained anywhere. When my cable gives out, and it'll happen sometime soon, my Tikit will probably wind up on the display wall of a bike store. And I'll be searching for something to replace it. But there is no folder even close to the Tikit in sheer engineering prowess, which depresses me to no end as a tech guy. Bike Friday itself replaced the model with the Pakit, a decidedly inferior bike. I'm not sure what to do.
It's true to some degree now. But it wasn't very true -- or expected to be true -- back when train lines were being established. That was during westward expansion.
It's generally regarded that Hong Kong has the best subway in the world. There are many reasons for this, but one cannot be overstated: Hong Kong's geography. A huge portion of the city consists of long thin urban corridors sandwiched between mountains and the sea. As a result, Hong Kong need concentrate its funding on only a few subway lines to support a huge portion of the population.
This good article aside, I wonder if the same thing is true about Japan when we're talking about long-distance trains. Compared to France or Germany, Japan is basically a stick. A very large chunk of the populace lies on a single train line running from Kagoshima up to Hakodate, running through Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, Yokohama, Tokyo, Sendai, etc. So you can slap a single bullet train line there and service all of them.
I developed and maintain a large and very widely used open source agent-based modeling toolkit. It's designed to be very highly efficient: that's its calling card. But it's old: I released its first version around 2003 and have been updating it ever since.
Recently I was made aware by colleagues of a publication by authors of a new agent-based modeling toolkit in a different, hipper programming language. They compared their system to others, including mine, and made kind of a big checklist of who's better in what, and no surprise, theirs came out on top. But digging deeper, it quickly became clear that they didn't understand how to run my software correctly; and in many other places they bent over backwards to cherry-pick, and made a lot of bold and completely wrong claims. Correcting the record would place their software far below mine.
Mind you, I'm VERY happy to see newer toolkits which are better than mine -- I wrote this thing over 20 years ago after all, and have since moved on. But several colleagues demanded I do so. After a lot of back-and-forth however, it became clear that the journal's editor was too embarrassed and didn't want to require a retraction or revision. And the authors kept coming up with excuses for their errors. So the journal quietly dropped the complaint.
My answer: while 99% of the AI community was busy working on Weak AI, that is, developing systems that could perform tasks that humans can do notionally because of our Big Brains, a tiny fraction of people promoted Hard AI, that is, AI as a philosophical recreation of Lt. Commander Data.
Hard AI has long had a well-deserved jet black reputation as a flakey field filled with armchair philosophers, hucksters, impressarios, and Loebner followers who don't understand the Turing Test. It eventually got so bad that the entire field decided to rebrand itself as "Artificial General Intelligence". But it's the same duck.
US News rankings are garbage based in no small part on opinion surveys and famously manipulated year over year.
Though I strongly disagree with their choice of conferences, probably the best regarded ranking of computer science schools is CSRankings.org (https://csrankings.org/)
C and C++ are dangerous languages filled with security failings and footguns, and no modern app should be written in them.
It's been my experience that well-written low-level Java code runs at about 75% the speed of good C code. (Of course lazy coders write in cushy Java which is much slower). When written efficiently, Java's biggest slowdown lies in array access (C and C++ array access is fast because it is very, very unsafe). But Java makes up for this in having a GC which will coalesce related objects into the same page and so take advantage of cache coherency effects in ways malloc and free cannot possibly do. I have some allocation-heavy algorithms in Java which are, as a result, significantly faster than well-written equivalents in C.