ggchappell's comments

I must disagree with you about Wiktionary. It's great.

Nice name. I do something along these lines in my LaTeX source; never thought of it as a thing.

Generally agreed, although the huge number of bugs out there that are attributable to manual memory management suggests that other solutions are worth looking for. Perhaps Rust is heading in the right direction.

Sure, popular election of senators is at least a little problematic. But maybe what we really want is a return to the original model, where members of the House are elected by the people, while senators are chosen by state legislatures.

> ... I can't help but feel bitter towards the proponents of AA who insist on it being a monopoly... especially those in positions of power in the criminal justice or public health systems ....

Not an alcoholic, but I had extended discussions with a number of AA members some years ago. And I found that many of them also felt pretty negatively about the involvement of the justice system with AA. What happens (they said) is that people are forced to attend AA meetings as part of sentencing, but these people generally are not interested in recovery. The result is a lot of wasted time and the diversion of resources away from people who could be helped.

Here we go again: the latest in a long line of sites that I can't figure out, while lots of others comment "cool".

I click "Sort it". Nothing happens. <sigh>

For all those silent folks who are just like me: know that you are not alone.

"Do not stop to be thrifty" -- I imagine that should be "Do not stop being thrifty"?

"Master wedding-feasts" -- what does that mean?

"Grieve for no one" seems odd.

> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, ....

Does it?

The authors are not paid. The referees (who do peer review) are not paid. The editors are not paid. The authors submit LaTeX, so no professional typesetters are needed. Eliminate the hard-copy printed journal, which no one reads these days, and all you are left with are the costs of hosting and maintaining a website -- which doesn't need to be at all fancy. That's dirt cheap.

> I have told the above story to different audiences. Programmers, as a rule, are delighted by it, and managers, invariably, get more and more annoyed as the story progresses; true mathematicians, however, fail to see the point.

I see the point. In fact I'd go so far as to call myself "delighted". But I thought I was a true mathematician.

'Scuse me while I go have a little existential crisis.

I agree with the point of the article.

Still, there is so much out there that is available only in one of the MS Office formats, and Gov.UK is apparently doing better than that. So there is actually some cause for celebration here, IMHO.

The article compares Rodin's drawings of the Cambodian dancers with those by Noël Dorville, but includes no images of the latter.

For the interested, I found this: https://www.ebay.fr/itm/Tableau-Litho-signee-mine-de-plomb-p...

Scroll down for larger images.

This is an interesting analysis, but I have a serious problem with the strong implication that high vividness = good.

At the rock bottom of the vividness scale, we find Jane Austen, Isaac Asimov, Agatha Christie, C.J. Cherryh, and Danielle Steel -- all extremely popular authors. And at the very top, we find George R.R. Martin, Roald Dahl, Poul Anderson, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ray Bradbury, and Kim Stanley Robinson -- also popular, but generally not quite of the same stature as those on the first list.

Possibly the reading public is slightly biased toward low vividness. Meanwhile, I have at least two favorite authors on both lists.

The really tough barrier is getting enough people with the required expertise to do the annotation.

Annotation sites like to say, "Hey, we have this paper and we have this paper." Meanwhile, thousands of new scientific papers are published every day. Of course, the majority of those are not going to be of interest to any journalist. But even when we whittle the pile down to those that are, there is still a huge amount of work to do, and some qualified person has to do it.

And why would they do it? I'm an academic researcher. So I have the required expertise to do this kind of annotation for papers in my narrow specialty. But my life is full with my own research and publishing and teaching and advising and committees and paperwork .... And every October I have to write up a report on my achievements for the past year. Getting a paper published counts for a lot in that report. Annotating someone else's paper is not going to count for much at all. If I start substituting the latter for the former, then my career is going to go down the tubes pretty rapidly.

I think it would be great if this kind of thing could actually happen. But I don't see how to make it happen.

I don't think it's inappropriate either. But we should note that police do not have expertise regarding the administration of drugs.

Someone with no expertise in a field can suggest anything they want to. Those with expertise who are actually making the decisions need to be held to account for them.

> How do you infer that the article concentrates on the misbehavior of police more than misbehavior by EMS workers?

Well, I guess it's not so much that the article concentrates on police misbehavior, but that the actual people involved did so. The article does not give us complete information, of course, but it appears that the police basically said, "We messed up, and we're fixing things," while the EMS people said, "There isn't any problem." And since the EMS people apparently are the problem, I find the response disturbing.

That's an interesting observation.

The problem -- if it is one -- is certainly not limited to the Win 8 Start menu. There are plenty of interfaces where pressing a button, or some similar action, pops up a new full-screen or nearly full-screen UI element that looks & works differently from what was there before.

I wonder whether any research has been done on whether this makes any significant number of users forget what they were doing. If not, I think such research would be worthwhile.

It seems to me that this article is concentrating on the wrong thing. The biggest problem in the incidents in question is not misbehavior by police; it is misbehavior by EMS workers.

Consider: a police officer and an EMS worker are dealing with someone who is difficult to subdue. The police officer -- who does not have the expertise to know whether it is a good idea -- requests that the person be injected with ketamine. The EMS worker -- who does have the expertise -- does so, knowing that it is a bad idea.

What most needs to change here is the EMS system.

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EDIT. I guess I mean to say that the people involved here (as opposed to the article) are concentrating on the wrong thing. The police are the ones that have changed their policies. But it seems to be the EMS system that has the more serious problem.

I think it means that the writer doesn't really know what he is talking about.

And, by the way, there are five regular solids. The other is the dodecahedron. I imagine the writer would say that corresponds somehow to the "quintessence" some philosophers used to go on about. But that still doesn't mean this idea has anything to do with physical reality.

EDIT. By the way, in spite of all the mystical silliness that seems to surround it, personally, I think that the Soul of the World sculpture is a really cool idea.

> Bell knew there was a distinct possibility of a patent fight with Edison, so on three occasions he had papers and experimental products sealed in tin boxes and deposited at the Smithsonian Institution for safekeeping.

You can (or could) do that?

Cool.

Found a pic of the one in Nicaragua:

https://retirenicaragua.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/the-soul-of...