Today I Learned

[KingGambit]

Today I learned that LHC costs ten billions dollars!

LHC is the biggest machine on Earth to study the smalest thing in the universe??
Phew... Those scientists, they really know how to spend money, eh.

 

[rsk]

LHC was an utter steal compared to the 37bn sterling spent on a test and trace system which didn't work.

 

[DaveC426913]

I'm curious here: why is it that amazon's treatment of its workers is so much worse than other delivery services? Are the profit margins for amazon and, say, UPS that different?

I kind of wonder if they're in "loss" mode, or whatever the term is. Their goal is to dominate the world of online delivery - to do so, they need to be fast and utterly ubiquitous, which implies desperate and unsustainable. Presumably they will happily "burn" the goodwill of their emps as "fuel".

 

[Keith_McClary]

Presumably they will happily "burn" the goodwill of their emps as "fuel".

Just until the robots are ready.

 

[kyphysics]

I kind of wonder if they're in "loss" mode, or whatever the term is. Their goal is to dominate the world of online delivery - to do so, they need to be fast and utterly ubiquitous, which implies desperate and unsustainable. Presumably they will happily "burn" the goodwill of their emps as "fuel".

They're profitable finally (since 2015), but still have largely the same philosophy of investing profits back into growth.

AWS is a cash cow and their fastest growing segment, while their online delivery/retail business might be sort of mature now. Only so many brick and mortar stores they can completely wipe out...it's still happening, but they may be getting closer to their limit.

It's been interesting to see shopping centers and strip malls pop up or get transformed with the same types of non-Amazonable businesses (and non-outsourcable ones): salons; cafes/restaurants; gyms; child care/play gyms; discount stores (from clothing to general dollar stores); movie theaters; pet stores; niche stores - like cigars or comic book stores; and the like.

Big box stores like Best Buy, Walmart, Target, etc. are fighting back and surviving/thriving in part by turning their own back storage areas into fulfillment centers and doing local delivery. This big box store strategy/pushback will be interesting to observe in the decade ahead.

 

[kyphysics]

As Parents Forbid Covid Shots, Defiant Teenagers Seek Ways to Get Them​

​

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/health/covid-vaccine-teens-consent.html

Increasingly, frustrated teenagers are searching for ways to be vaccinated without their parents’ consent. Some have found their way to VaxTeen.org, a vaccine information site run by Kelly Danielpour, a Los Angeles teenager.

The site offers guides to state consent laws, links to clinics, resources on straightforward information about Covid-19 and advice for how teenagers can engage parents.

“Someone will ask me, ‘I need to be able to consent at a vaccine clinic that is open on weekends and that is on my bus route. Can you help?’” said Ms. Danielpour, 18, who will begin her freshman year at Stanford in the fall. . .

Recently, Dr. Mobeen H. Rathore, a pediatrics professor at the University of Florida medical college in Jacksonville, told a patient whose mother refused consent that she couldn’t get the Covid vaccine until she turned 18, three weeks hence.

“She got vaccinated on her birthday,” Dr. Rathore said. “She sent me a message saying that was her birthday gift to herself.”

I was surprised by the stories in this piece of teens fighting with parents over wanting to get vaxed. It's a part of the pandemic I hadn't really heard much or thought about. It can be easy to forget about how young people, who are statistically less likely to have major complications from the virus, are experiencing things and their views on vaccination.

I think I had assumed it wasn't something they worried a lot about and that they just went along with whatever their parents' decided. It's interesting to see this teen vs. parent vax choice dilemma and the legal rights involved. Probably more than anything, I was just encouraged to also hear of young people being conscientious about the elderly and other vulnerable people around them. Some cite wanting the vaccine to go out and party with their friends, but others mention wanting to protect those around them.

I'm glad for stories like this. It sheds light on things I don't hear much about.

 

[pinball1970]

As Parents Forbid Covid Shots, Defiant Teenagers Seek Ways to Get Them​

​

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/health/covid-vaccine-teens-consent.html

I was surprised by the stories in this piece of teens fighting with parents over wanting to get vaxed. It's a part of the pandemic I hadn't really heard much or thought about. It can be easy to forget about how young people, who are statistically less likely to have major complications from the virus, are experiencing things and their views on vaccination.

I think I had assumed it wasn't something they worried a lot about and that they just went along with whatever their parents' decided. It's interesting to see this teen vs. parent vax choice dilemma and the legal rights involved. Probably more than anything, I was just encouraged to also hear of young people being conscientious about the elderly and other vulnerable people around them. Some cite wanting the vaccine to go out and party with their friends, but others mention wanting to protect those around them.

I'm glad for stories like this. It sheds light on things I don't hear much about.

This is good in one way and kind of crazy in another.

Should not this be the other way round? Silly know-it-teenagers on social media and conspiracy websites arguing that it’s a hoax?
The parents, whose education and life experience far outweighs that of their offspring explaining that the scientists actually know what they are doing?
That this thing is real, dangerous and there is a reason why we do not have polio and smallpox anymore?

 

[mfb]

There are plenty of parents who grew up in a world largely free of smallpox and polio now - but the anti-vaccination nonsense is far older than that.

TIL: The English Wikipedia article about tau has 100*tau views per day (627/day, 100 tau = 200 pi =~ 628).

 

[fresh_42]

There are plenty of parents who grew up in a world largely free of smallpox and polio now - but the anti-vaccination nonsense is far older than that.

TIL: The English Wikipedia article about tau has 100*tau views per day (627/day, 100 tau = 200 pi =~ 628).

Tau what?

 

[BWV]

TIL: The English Wikipedia article about tau has 100*tau views per day (627/day, 100 tau = 200 pi =~ 628).

Funny thing its the same 628 people each day

 

[DaveC426913]

Tau what?

In case this is a sincere question: Tau is a constant, equal to 2*pi.

 

[DaveC426913]

Hey! Today is Tauday!

 

[diogenesNY]

Of all of those, I think English only has Queer Street, and it's an informal (and mostly archaic) saying meaning trouble - to be "up Queer Street" means to have had things go wrong.

In the US, a similar usage applies in the sport of boxing, from at least the early 20th century to the present:

'Holy cow! After that right uppercut by Jones, Smith has been left on Queer Street.'

--diogenesNY

 

[fresh_42]

YIL that peanut butter can well be used to thicken sauces.

 

[Borg]

I use it in a homemade salad dressing - one tablespoon of olive oil, one of balsamic vinegar, and a small dab of peanut butter. Stir until consistent and drizzle on the salad.

 

[fresh_42]

I had some vegetable leftover: a red bell pepper, some tomatoes, and onions. Cut them and gave them with some olive oil into the pan. I used almost all the spices and herbs I could find to add some taste to it, and finally some PB. I was surprised that it not only gave some flavor but also made a perfect consistency which prior to it was only water and oil.

 

[DaveC426913]

I used almost all the spices and herbs I could find to add some taste to it...

Have you considered getting tested for Covid-19?

 

[pbuk]

I had some vegetable leftover: a red bell pepper, some tomatoes, and onions. Cut them and gave them with some olive oil into the pan. I used almost all the spices and herbs I could find to add some taste to it, and finally some PB. I was surprised that it not only gave some flavor but also made a perfect consistency which prior to it was only water and oil.

That is almost exactly the recipe for a satay sauce

 

[fresh_42]

That is almost exactly the recipe for a satay sauce

I ate it with rice (basmati), and it made sense.

 

[kyphysics]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ransomware-attack-paralyzes-hundreds-u-232413623.html

WASHINGTON (AP) — A ransomware attack paralyzed the networks of at least 200 U.S. companies on Friday, according to a cybersecurity researcher whose company was responding to the incident.

The REvil gang, a major Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate, appears to be behind the attack, said John Hammond of the security firm Huntress Labs. He said the criminals targeted a software supplier called Kaseya, using its network-management package as a conduit to spread the ransomware through cloud-service providers. Other researchers agreed with Hammond's assessment.

That sucks.

 

[BillTre]

TIL (from here) that staghorn ferns can form colonies (in nature) of many individual plants. Different members of the colony can take on different functions to benefit the colony.
This is called eusociality and was thought to be limited to colonial animals like bees and ants (workers, queens, soldiers).

 

[ergospherical]

TIL that "sick pay" doesn't mean the job pays really well.

 

[Ibix]

TIL that "sick pay" doesn't mean the job pays really well.

"Sick" in the sense of "weak and feeble", however...

 

[gmax137]

TIL that "splat" is a term for asterisk, as in:

It appears that you are using multi-character variable names with splats ("*") for multiplication.

I like it.

 

[phinds]

I like it.

So does Rotten Tomatoes

 

[epenguin]

TIL that "splat" is a term for asterisk, as in:

I like it.

Ever since it was in the parodying film 'Modesty Blaise' whenever someone in a film falls off a building or a cliff I wait a second and then say in a flat voice 'SPLATT!'

 

[phinds]

Ever since it was in the parodying film 'Modesty Blaise' whenever someone in a film falls off a building or a cliff I wait a second and then say in a flat voice 'SPLATT!'

And, appropriately enough, Modesty Blaise got a splat:

 

[diogenesNY]

In the same vein as '*' is sometimes spoken as 'splat', '#' is sometimes spoken as 'crunch' and '!' is 'bang'.

--diogenesNY

 

[Ibix]

In the same vein as '*' is sometimes spoken as 'splat', '#' is sometimes spoken as 'crunch' and '!' is 'bang'.

! universe #

 

[gmax137]

In the same vein as '*' is sometimes spoken as 'splat', '#' is sometimes spoken as 'crunch' and '!' is 'bang'.

--diogenesNY

"Bang" I know. What's the connection between "#" and "crunch?"

When I was a kid, "#" was "number" or "pounds." Lately it's "hash" or more annoyingly "hash tag" from twitter. As far as I know, "hash" in this sense is a variable type, like integer "I" or "F" floating point. Wasn't "H" Hollerith type in FORTRAN, similar to # today in PERL? I'm no programmer. Obviously.

 

[diogenesNY]

"Bang" I know. What's the connection between "#" and "crunch?"

When I was a kid, "#" was "number" or "pounds." Lately it's "hash" or more annoyingly "hash tag" from twitter. As far as I know, "hash" in this sense is a variable type, like integer "I" or "F" floating point. Wasn't "H" Hollerith type in FORTRAN, similar to # today in PERL? I'm no programmer. Obviously.

I am familiar with the more descriptive names of hash, pounds, etc for '#'. Crunch, along with splat and bang can be found in the MIT 'Jargon File' as spoken vocalizations of those symbols when reading certain sorts of programming source code.

I _think_ that the term 'crunch' is some sort of throwback to 'adding machines' of the electro-mechanical sort that were ubiquitous in the mid-twentieth century, where the # key would total (crunch) all the previous entries.

--diogenesNY

 

[jbriggs444]

Wasn't "H" Hollerith type in FORTRAN, similar to # today in PERL?

A Hollerith literal was a way of encoding string values in a program, for instance, 3HABC. The leading digit gives the string length, the H identifies it as a Hollerith literal and the remaining characters are the string value. e.g.

I = 3HABC

It was before my time. I started on VAX Fortran-77 which had perfectly good (*) fixed length character strings, string literals with double quotes and a slice notation for sub-strings.

(*) Well, almost perfectly good. Null strings were not well supported. You could not do an empty string literal. If you compiled with bounds checking enabled, a null slice such as mystring(1:0) was disallowed. My code made liberal use of null slices to denote empty strings. It worked fine with bounds checking disabled.

 

[BWV]

Italy has 34 separate languages, all of which evolved independently from Latin. Modern Italian is a single dialect of Tuscan that was chosen in the late 19th century, after unification and independence, to be the national language.

 

[KingGambit]

Today I learned, why aliens never visit us.
Forget about Fermi paradox, Filter, Goldilocks, etc...

When I try to see if there's some discussion about cosmology from an enginner view as opposed to a scientist view (not that I regard Bill Nye is not a scientist).
And I type
Bill Nye Degrasse Tyson Big Bang I got this.

 

[jasonRF]

Today I learned that Earnst A. Guillemin, who was an EE prof at MIT and wrote a number of books on circuits and networks, earned his PhD under Sommerfeld.

I have had his Mathematics of Circuit Analysis for 25 years and never knew anything about him. That book was written in the late 1940s and features a truly excellent semi-rigorous presentation of complex analysis. It also has some good chapters on matrix algebra, including things like simultaneous diagonalization of two matrices, although the notation and language is a little different than modern treatments.

 

[Astronuc]

TIL that I'm related to a Richard Nixon (England, 1700s), not the Richard M Nixon (37th President of US), whose Nixon ancestry goes back to Cappagh, Tyrone, Ireland. So I have to go back further, which is a challenge.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

TIL that I'm related to a Richard Nixon (England, 1700s), not the Richard M Nixon (37th President of US), whose Nixon ancestry goes back to Cappagh, Tyrone, Ireland. So I have to go back further, which is a challenge.

Have you tried using the LDS Geneology Records/Files? ... (It works - independent of religion)

 

[Astronuc]

Have you tried using the LDS Geneology Records/Files? ... (It works - independent of religion)

Yes, that was one of the first databases I used. Since then though, I have used church records, government records and some historical publications from the 1800s.

Edit/update: I should add that I prefer to find independent sources. Sometimes, different online databases use the same original source, which may be incorrect. At least, that is what I found in my case. It's best to go to original archives, e.g., church records, or government census documents, or for recent family members, newspaper articles. Going back into the 1800s, or 1700s and earlier, church records, or family letters or documents, may be the only reliable source. I just happened to discover some old texts from the early 1800s, that I could cross-reference with other records for independent confirmation. Some churches were much better in records than others. I've also found spelling errors in various census documents.

 

[Stavros Kiri]

Yes, that was one of the first databases I used. Since then though, I have used church records, government records and some historical publications from the 1800s.

Combination of all available sources is always the best idea. Good luck in your research! ...

 

[Klystron]

TIL the astonishingly beautiful musical movements incorporated by Stanley Kubrick into "A Clockwork Orange" were based on excerpts from "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary" by Purcell. With all the emphasis on 'Ludwig van' in "Clockwork", I assumed Kubrick had adapted phrases from Beethoven.

Wanting to hear orchestral versions I sifted through Beethoven recordings, aurally searching for the distinctive phrases; surely in the glorious Ninth. While a great excuse to listen to Beethoven, the elusive piece escaped my searches. J.S. Bach, perhaps? Mozart?

IK, read the movie credits; but that felt like cheating. Luckily I watched a Polish movie about Native American exploitation that climaxed in a mock funeral featuring a rendition of the music I sought. The credits following that movie listed Purcell's "Funeral Music for Queen Mary". Case closed. I am listening to Beethoven's 9th Symphony even as I type.

 

[BWV]

TIL the astonishingly beautiful musical movements incorporated by Stanley Kubrick into "A Clockwork Orange" were based on excerpts from "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary" by Purcell. With all the emphasis on 'Ludwig van' in "Clockwork", I assumed Kubrick had adapted phrases from Beethoven.

Wanting to hear orchestral versions I sifted through Beethoven recordings, aurally searching for the distinctive phrases; surely in the glorious Ninth. While a great excuse to listen to Beethoven, the elusive piece escaped my searches. J.S. Bach, perhaps? Mozart?

IK, read the movie credits; but that felt like cheating. Luckily I watched a Polish movie about Native American exploitation that climaxed in a mock funeral featuring a rendition of the music I sought. The credits following that movie listed Purcell's "Funeral Music for Queen Mary". Case closed. I am listening to the Beethoven's 9th Symphony even as I type.

Rossini's Thieving Magpie is also in the film

 

[kyphysics]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/30/politics/eviction-moratorium-house-vote/index.html

(CNN)An eviction moratorium for renters from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on track to expire Saturday night, after the House of Representatives adjourned for August recess without passing an extension.

Democratic leaders scrambled throughout the day Friday to try and find enough votes to extend the moratorium beyond the July 31 deadline to no avail. Just after 6 p.m. ET on Friday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer attempted to pass a bill to extend the eviction moratorium by unanimous consent, but it was rejected by Republicans. The House adjourned shortly thereafter. . .

The end of the moratorium could affect the estimated 11.4 million adult renters are behind on rent, https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/tracking-the-covid-19-recessions-effects-on-food-housing-and

Short of a miracle, it looks like the eviction ban will wear off this weekend.

The Supreme Court is unlikely to support a CDC extension of the ban, given Brett Kavanaugh's opinion on the last extension (essentially saying he was doing a one-time okay, given the short period of the extension). And Congress is tied up with infrastructure negotiations and will be out of session after next week until September - making a hearing and vote difficult.

Looks like August will see a lot of evictions. For those in badly COVID surging states, I feel for you.

 

[ergospherical]

TIL that Billie Eilish is only a few days older than me, but whilst she's won 7 Grammys and has a net worth in the millions, I didn't even have enough money in my account to buy a chicken wrap from Pret this morning.

 

[BillTre]

TIL that Billie Eilish is only a few days older than me, but whilst she's won 7 Grammys and has a net worth in the millions, I didn't even have enough money in my account to buy a chicken wrap from Pret this morning.

Yeah, but you have a deeper appreciation of the physical world around you.

 

[kyphysics]

Don't know if this qualifies as something "I learned," but I thought this graphic was pretty neat!

 

[Rive]

Today I learned that the effectiveness of sticky fly-traps can be easily boosted...
... by sticking a piece of dry cat-food in the middle of the sheet.

 

[DaveC426913]

Today I learned that the effectiveness of sticky fly-traps can be easily boosted...
... by sticking a piece of dry cat-food in the middle of the sheet.

And then - what? ... the flies are attracted to the stuck cats?

 

[Keith_McClary]

flies are attracted to the stuck cats?

To get rid of a wasp nest in a tree, go out at night when they are asleep and put a piece of fish on the nest.

 

[DaveE]

To get rid of a wasp nest in a tree, go out at night when they are asleep and put a piece of fish on the nest.

Because the wasps will stick around gorging themselves on the fish (and, bonus!, they'll leave you alone). Then after a while they'll figure out that they'll never make it onto the centerfold of PlayWasp magazine unless they start a diet. Eventually, and with great reluctance, they will depart and build a nest in a healthier location. Kind of like why I won't buy ice cream at the grocery?

 

[Keith_McClary]

Because the wasps will stick around gorging themselves ...

No, it was meant to be a nasty trick to play on a cat.