robochat42's comments

Doesn't high intensity exercise have a greater risk of injury ? For instance, they did sprint intervals here, I think that I might need a 15 minute run just to warm up my knees enough to do the sprints (getting older sucks).

I think that you're missing his point which is that when you are unhappy, it is not always easy to pinpoint the cause of that unhappiness and it is very easy to start casting around for an explanation and end up blaming the wrong part of your life for your misery. You might think that this isn't believable but the unhappiness colours everything in your life and so it isn't as obvious as it seems.

Nice plots, they seem to be svg and link directly to the appropriate github commits if to click on a particular point. I wonder if they were coded by hand or if a plotting library was involved.

I made a nomogram of the electromagnetic spectrum many years ago using pynomo while I was still a researcher, that really helped with all of the different units.

ps. time flies

[1] http://thefreakazoid.blogspot.com/2010/03/nomograms.html [2} http://pynomo.org

So it's lies, damned lies and statistics again. When I was young I believed that rational debate could actually solve issues; now it feels like a sufficiently clever actor can basically argue for any point of view with solid 'looking' reasoning to back them up. All very postmodern (post-truth) although it was always thus.

Is the point of this article that we shouldn't trust anything (even when there are numbers to back up the conclusion) or that we can find the truth if we are smart enough to ask the right questions?

The tsunami killed 15,899 people with 6,157 injured and 2,529 people missing and in 2015, 228,863 were still living away from their homes [1]. But that story was completely overshadowed by the Fukishima melt down that killed 1 person because anti-nuclear stories are media catnip. It also led Germany to commit fully to the shutdown of it's nuclear plants and a 2019 article found that the increase in air pollution will kill 1100 people a year and an increase in C02 of 36.2 megatons per year. So where is the real disaster?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_phase-out#German... [3] Jarvis, Stephen; Deschenes, Olivier; Jha, Akshaya (December 2019). "The Private and External Costs of Germany's Nuclear Phase-Out" (PDF). National Bureau of Economic Research. Cambridge, MA: w26598. doi:10.3386/w26598.

I use Geany every day, I like how fast it is and that it has highlight of all occurrences of the current variable. I'm a bit disappointed that it hasn't implemented any of the language server protocol (LSP). I think that would be a fast way to improve the intelligence of it's autocomplete for many languages.

I've read a few more articles on the subject now. One side or the other is lying through their teeth but I've no idea which side. It's depressing how possible it is for someone to argue almost any point of view especially if they are shameless and willing to lie and it's so hard to prove anything.

In Forbes there is a contributer "Michael I. Krauss" who subscribes openly and fully to the view that Chevron is innocent, that any pollution is due to the Ecuadorian petrol company and that Donziger is a crook [1] who fixed the trial through bribery. This blog post (one day later) by Clyde Osborne also takes Chrevon's side [2]. Weirdly both articles use the similar phrase

"If I were a legal journalist, I would track down Mr. Donziger's legal ethics professor at Harvard. I would ask that professor what he or she thinks of his or her former student. Harvard might want to create a seminar about the Lago Agrio case. Note to HLS's Associate Dean: I would be delighted to teach that seminar. It would be a great case study about how not to practice law."

and

"If I had been a felony journalist, I might track down Mr. Donziger’s felony ethics professor at Harvard. I would ask that professor what he or she thinks of his or her former pupil. Harvard might want to create a seminar about the Lago Agrio case. Note to HLS’s Associate Dean: I might be overjoyed to educate that seminar. It would be a tremendous case observe how now not to practice law."

That's a bit weird. Ironically today's article did speak to Charles Nesson, an attorney and Harvard Law School professor who takes Donziger's side and even "teaches Donziger's case in his “Fair Trial” course, using it as an example of a decidedly unfair trial." This other publication also seems to be more aligned with Donziger [3].

This is clearly a divisive issue with 9 billion dollars at stake for Chevron and millions at stake for Donziger (Chevron demanded a few years ago that he pay for all of their legal fees and he was fined for comtempt of court too) and so I'm not sure how much you could trust any reports unless you put a lot of time into studying this issue in depth. There's so much money swilling around and both sides have accused the other of running misleading publicity campaigns through to outright propaganda.

To me it still seems like a massively unequal fight though and demonstrates that a sufficiently funded corporation can crush most people legally if they wish to. Legal costs are simply too expensive for most individuals.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkrauss/2019/07/17/suspen... [2] https://lawcer.com/2019/07/18/suspended-ex-attorney-steven-d... [3] https://www.law.com/dailybusinessreview/2019/10/18/chevron-m...

Think about it from the lawyer's point of view. If the story is article is accurate then someone has a vendetta against him. Someone has already spent a lot of money on an Ecuadorian judge to fabricate evidence against him. Now they want his phone and computer. Who knows what they could 'find' on them.

Even if the truth is more murky than presented in this article. He may have needed to contact shady people as part of his work and this could clearly be used to smear him.

Of course, the article could be a gross misrepresentation of the truth but a quick google search reveals that the feud between Chevron and Donziger has been widely reported and lasted more than 20 years. The fact that he is unwilling to hand over his phone is just the latest salvo in a long battle.

I love reading about high energy physics and this isn't the first account from a high energy theorist which excludes weariness at the lack of progress over the last decades. We can hope that someone has a breakthrough that unlocks a new era of high energy physics. Maybe the neutrino masses hold the key or new symmetries will be found. Maybe a small alteration will make an old idea viable. So many promising ideas have been shot down: Grand Unified Theories looked for proton decays, axions looked for light spontaneously going through solid walls and supersymmetry searched for new particles. Nothing was found.

As an ex-physicist with a more experimental background in condensed matters, the real discussions and theories are way beyond me though. Just look at this paragraph from the article:

"Assume we consider two-dimensional Schwinger model with one massless Dirac fermion of charge 2 [18]. More exactly, in addition to the dynamicalcharge-2 fermion, there is a heavy probe charge-1 fermion whose mass can be viewed as tending to infinity. Next, assume that in this model we compactify the spatial dimension on a circle of circumference L, i.e. impose either periodic or antiperiodic boundary conditions on the fermion fields. Then one can show that this model has two discrete Z2 symmetries – one 0-form and another 1-form. These two global Z2 symmetries have generators which do not commute with each other [18]. Thus, only one of these symmetries can be implemented,the other one must be spontaneously broken. Hence, the ground state is doubly degenerate. In other words, we observe in this example (see Appendix on page 15 and also [17]) the power of the mixed anomalies – the prediction of the projective action of the symmetries and the ground state degeneracy. This is a strong result at strong coupling. Sorry for the pun... After [12, 13, 14] a large number of non-trivial applications has been worked out.Many relevant references can be found in [18, 19]."

My hope is that there will be a revolution in accelerator technology. The LHC is a triumph of collaborative engineering but maybe the next accelerator will be based upon different principles such as wakefield acceleration or miniaturized accelerators. Or we could find different ways of testing high energy physics, more subtle than smashing two particles together!

It seems like this would be the easiest approach but the second part of the article talks about the importance of syncing body clocks with daylight hours. If that argument has merit then we shouldn't be skipping breakfast but missing dinner.

make.py looks great.

I also wrote a make replacement in python (2.7) [1]. I'm proud of it but it doesn't do parallel builds and there are so many other build tools that are better tested. But I'll put it here in case it gives anyone any ideas.

[1] https://github.com/robochat/buildbit

There are build systems that use strace to find dependencies. For instance tup [1][2] and Fabricate [3]. Also see this post by Waf which discusses some issues with this approach [4]

[1] http://gittup.org/tup/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12622671 [3] https://github.com/brushtechnology/fabricate/wiki/HowItWorks [4] https://waf.io/blog/2015/02/using-strace-to-obtain-build.htm...

I use this site. It isn't always accurate but it gives me a starting point: www.justwatch.com

I thought that you were just passing through.

This looks interesting and useful. It might be a feature that wouldn't get used a lot but I've always felt that it would be great to have a 'unit' field to specify the physical units of the values. Have you ever discussed adding this as an optional field to the specification?

This looks very cool. There's no overview of how it actually works. It seems to launch a goroutine for each Jupyter code cell but any variables defined are also available for use in later cells so I'm not sure how that works.

Just playing with the code in the mybinder.org it feels responsive enough. As well as for data analysis, this will be a great way to do those quick checks that I like to do in python to confirm how an api works. I've been meaning to start using golang more and this might be how I do it.

magnetohydrodynamics is a real field of study that has been researched as a form of propulsion in water, so I guess that Clancy was just following the latest in research. A quick look at wikipedia confirms that there were prototypes made in 1965.

I did a short project on it while at university. One issue we had was that using any DC currents in salt water inevitably leads to the production of chlorine gas which isn't a great idea. We could only test our MHD motor for less than a minute before we needed to stop and ventilate the area!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_drive

This is exciting stuff but will it have any downsides for the majority (??) of users who don't use pandas for big data? Also, this all sounds very similar to the Blaze ecosystem, whatever happened to that? Finally, will arrow/feather replace hdf5 and bcolz in the future?

Maybe the OP was referring to the rebate that the UK had negotiated under Thatcher. This is a special reduction in its contributions to the EU (it was a £4.9 billion reduction in 2015). It was a sweet deal argued principally with regard to the UK receiving less CAP subsidies than France (for example).