Some back story, from thousands of days gone by:
Range heater element patch held up through a few breakfasts until a hot spot burned through. Replacement burner expected today. DIY success: fashioning a replacement air return vent cover. Ugly replacements seemed expensive, presentable ones were over $100. Key search term was “decorative metal sheet.” https://designertrapped.com/diy-vent-cover-its-pretty-and-easy/
Turns out it’s pretty simple to diagnose a bad burner on an electric range as a switch problem or a burner problem. Mine turned out to be a burned-out spot in the heating element. In our post-apocalyptic world, badly corroded burners harvested from old appliances go for $40, so I plan to try to bridge the gap with a copper ferrule. Melting point is 1984°F, but I haven’t found a good estimate for how hot the resistance wire itself might get. There are stories of unattended aluminum pans (mp 1221°F) melting on a stovetop.
ATH was yesterday mk, your sloppy forecasting cost us 5%!
Three slots remain open for the rare opportunity to vanquish enemies and conquer Europe!
When the gut reaction is "junk science" it's interesting to try and find out how it might be junk. Probably the study titled "Facial recognition technology failed to expose political orientation" didn't get accepted. The abstract claims 69% accuracy with controls but this figure does not appear in the body. A million faces sounds like a lot but "controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity" greatly reduces the power. Table 1 shows that the samples were 65% female and 68% white, leaving 35% non-female and 32% non-white. If, ideally, these features are completely uncorrelated, that gives just 11% of the total sample (121,609) "minority" faces for the control group. (If we allow that there is more than one category of minority, it gets worse.) Controlling for age is worse, even bracketing by decades would provide half a dozen categories; the algorithm tried to match within one year. The algorithm scored a barely-better-than-luck 58% by determining which way the head was posed, and 57% by evaluating facial expressions like anger or surprise. The accuracy was better (66%) for personality, but I'm not clear on how personality was evaluated. Somehow these numbers are combined to come up with 73% overall. Might be more clear when the dataset is posted in mid-January.
Coming up with explanations is easy. Weighing evidence and forming sound conclusions is the hard part. When coastal, high-density cities with lots of international travelers were infected first, how much weight do you put on the fact that they tend to vote Democratic to explain the spread?
"Security clearances are not mandated for the President, Vice President, Members of Congress, Supreme Court Justices, or other constitutional officers." Source: Congressional Research Service Security Clearance Process: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions Can you provide a source for this information? More than a million people hold a TS. Source: Office of Management and Budget, 2014 Suitability and Security Security Processes Review (Table 1) "The PDB is produced by the director of national intelligence" Source: wikipedia stuff Is John Ratcliffe on call to debrief any of these million TS holders on request? Source: Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush This passage is mentioned in the discussion page of the Wikipedia article when the statement "Former Presidents are entitled to receive the PDB" was removed for lack of evidence in March 2013. One could speculate just as easily that he didn't request it because he didn't expect to receive the PDB after leaving office. Without a source, we have no way to judge. The New Yorker, source for the Newsweek article, claims that "some of Trump’s most fervent supporters in the White House" and "some of the new President’s advisers" suggested revoking security clearances of former president Obama and his officials to prevent "access to intelligence briefings that were made available to all of his living predecessors." I see no evidence that these briefings are the same as the PDB, or that they are available to anyone with Top Secret clearance who requests them. I think a responsible title would be "Former presidents can get intelligence briefings." Anyone can request whatever they want, but I don't see any way to even request access to the PDB. Sorry for the aggressive fact-checking, but I think these days concern for truth is more important than ever. As the CIA says in a source available to all, "Verify. Verify. Verify."First, the President has Top Secret clearance
Second, anyone with Top Secret clearance can request a debrief from the CIA
The CIA produces the PDB, and the same individuals who produce and present the PDB content are the ones that would debrief the Top Secret clearance holder who made the request.
Third, people like George HW Bush was said to get it every day
Bush inhaled the daily CIA briefings sent to former presidents, and he remained addicted to the news, following it while restricting his commentary to close friends.
Fourth, is has been noted that other Presidents - like Bush 43 - never asked for it, after leaving office. This mention alone indicates there is some expectation that it is normal for a past President to request briefings.
Fifth, there was some uproar over Obama getting debriefs after he left office
Indeed! Thanks for posting. I didn't spot it because Hubski search is Umlaut-sensitive.
It could be a mild cold, so continue to practice defensive hygiene and avoid close contact with others. If you can stay home, that’s the most effective way to avoid transmission. No one should seek early exposure to the virus. Even under dire forecasts, a sizable fraction of the population will avoid getting sick. A virus that is perhaps ten times deadlier than the seasonal flu will have more severe symptoms than the seasonal flu. But if you do need medical care, its good that it is relatively early. Things are going to be messy in April and May. Here’s an interview with a recovered patient that outlines his symptoms as his infection progressed. He is in isolation but looks healthy, is exercising and painting and studying Russian. Prepare for a few weeks of recovery, make sure bills are paid. Try to stay positive and practice gratitude. Recovery rates are around 99%, and reinfection appears to be rare. Take care of yourself, try to eat and sleep well. We will all OD on information, so take offline breaks. Be well, best wishes and please let us know how you fare.
Thanks kingmudsy for making the space! I rarely finish even half the projects I start, but starting is the fun part, so here's a status report. Resisting the Irresistible Status: complete The "best by" date for the Milano cookies arrived on Sunday, January 12. The previous Friday afternoon, I decided that it wasn't necessary to wait for the cookies to expire to prove my resistance. I did manage to leave some cookies for Monday. Dopamine fasting might be taking things too far, but I can appreciate the idea of making conscious decisions to maximize enjoyment of treats, rather than indulging and overindulging whenever fancy strikes. During the cookie incubation period I stopped adding sweetener to my coffee. It took a couple days to adjust, and now I prefer it black. It's been a while since I've had a cola, too, but I did enjoy those cookies. Status: in progress The top level of the parking garage at the metro station is deserted in the morning, so I have been climbing the stairs most weekdays and tossing peanuts around. Sometimes I draw a crowd, but usually the crows keep their distance and wait for me to go away. I hide peanuts while they are watching, and so far only one difficult hiding place, inside a standpipe, has kept a peanut safe. Also experimenting with a motion-activated camera at home, looking for ways to discriminate between crows, blue jays and squirrels. bonus: additional effort to be smarter than other animals Ayumu is a genius. Since I am an average dumb primate, I spent some time trying to recreate Ayumu's training program before realizing that someone else must have done it. There's a great iOS app and a variety for Android. Finding out that there is a level 7 was one of the great moments in life. (I have three stars up to level 4.3.) Rubik's Cube Status: adequate There's been an unsolved cube floating around the house as long as I can remember. I could always solve one side, and some of the second layer, but after that it was hopeless. I supposed continuing was the same, using intuition and strategy to make progress toward the goal. It's not like that at all, at least for an amateur like me. The day the cookies expired I looked up the solving guide and spent an hour or so learning the notation and following the algorithms. It's all mechanical brute-force after the first layer, using a six-step algorithm to position each edge piece in the middle layer, then a six-step algorithm to get edge pieces to the top, then a six-step algorithm to arrange the top edge pieces, then eight steps to move the top corners around, then many repetitions of a four-step pattern to orient the corners. It's completely thoughtless and mechanical, at least using these basic techniques. My best time is four minutes, but getting a record time depends on getting lucky so you can skip some steps. It's fun when your muscles memorize the patterns and you can watch your hands manipulate the cube, but when something goes wrong it can be hard to correct. I most often make the correct rotation but in the wrong direction, especially when using my left hand. The kid insisted on getting a "speed cube" and is almost down to three minutes. EliM&Minator Status: initial research I don't eat blue food. As a justification to work on some coding with the kid, we plan to build a robot that will separate blue M&M candies from the edible ones. Last night we connected the $8 camera accessory to the Raspberry Pi and got it to take some images using the Python PiCamera library. While aiming the camera around on its short ribbon cable, I accidentally touched the bottom of the camera circuit board to the pins of the Pi and caused the whole thing to reboot. The plan is to build some kind of hopper and connect it to a motorized arm that will guide M&Ms into position one by one. The camera will take a photo of each one. We will manually code the photos by color, then train a TensorFlow instance on the image set with color data. Finally we will get TensorFlow to identify the color of incoming M&Ms, kicking blues into the trash and good ones into a bowl. We might throw some coins and buttons in there too. Pen & ink Status: ongoing cW pioneered the eVox, a digital voice recording that you send to a friend. We exchanged many, considering the merits of various forms of communication: written versus oral, immediate versus deferred, digital versus tangible. He is now promoting a new format, unnamed as far as I can tell. You write a letter on paper, photograph it, and send the digital image. You end up with two handy backup copies. My preliminary efforts were simple but cW was kind enough to send a Jinhao x450 with a refillable cartridge as encouragement. I am a bit clumsy with the cartridges, and found that I could dip the nib into the ink bottle and comfortably get several sentences down between dips. Coding Status: always behind A guy at work showed me the app he created for his iPhone which wasn't on the App Store. He was having some trouble with notifications but otherwise it was working well. When he described the installation procedure, I told him it was nice but really just a bookmark to his web site saved to the home screen. He pointed out that his app didn't run as a tab in Safari, there was no sign of the browser, and it worked offline. I was surprised that Apple would allow this workaround to the lucrative App Store, and even more surprised to learn that Apple is promoting progressive web apps. I have made but little progress in experimenting, but love the philosophy, that rather than scaling down your full-featured application to include users on smaller and older devices, you start with a minimal feature set that everyone can use, and optionally add features for users that can support them. Is anyone still working on a Hubski app? Home improvement Status: neverending Like a sucker, I bought the recommended wallpaper removal spray and perforating roller. The spray burned my eyes and the bottle trigger jammed before the bottle was half empty. I experimented with water and found that it worked just as well, and even better if you refrained from perforating the wallpaper, so it peels without tearing. My method was to spray the wall with water and adhere half-sheets of newspaper from top to bottom. Keep each sheet of wallpaper very wet as you continue papering with more newspaper. When the wallpaper has soaked for ten minutes, slowly peel it from the top. I could usually get the outer vinyl layer off as one sheet, and the inner layer was water-absorbent and easy to remove after more soaking. Sometimes both layers peeled off together. Might not work for every kind of wallpaper and wall surface, but ended up being fun when progress was slow and steady rather than tearing off millions of little bits one by one. Had to buy replacement batteries for my eight-year-old DeWalt drill. I almost bought a Hole Hawg for $30 at Second Chance in Baltimore after our Amazon tour. It just seemed like more drill than I could ever use, but now that it takes half an hour to hang a towel hook I bet I could manage. The TV antenna is still going strong in the attic, but the WiFi tuner is flaky. There is coax in the walls, but it would be a challenge to map it out in time for the Superbowl or Oscars. Ayumu has been a participant since infancy in the Ai Project, an ongoing research effort aimed at understanding chimpanzee cognition
“Deuced odd, thought I, that I should find her prettiness so fascinating; as though, forsooth, she was the first sweet girl I had ever seen!” —An Ocean Tragedy, William Clark Russell Seems he might have missed some.
I like the thorough approach, but I wonder if the big points get lost while providing so many small details for detractors to cling to. Guzey quotes Walker claiming "Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer" without providing evidence. Guzey also points out that Walker misspelled the name of the publisher of the Encyclopedia of Sleep. These are both errors, and both are relevant to the argument that Walker is careless and unreliable, but they are not equally important. Among many comments (with no word from Walker after two days) I have seen only one substantial critical response. Kinkajoe repeats Guzey's point about sleep-releated health studies showing only correlations, while also citing studies showing correlations e.g. between low sleep and obesity. Kinkajoe also neglects to mention the cancer quote, which is Guzey's very first example of an extraordinary claim.
This is a great analysis. There are costs and benefits to any approach, and no easy answers. The only alteration I would suggest is to change "not giving a shit" to "prioritizing the interests of oneself and loved ones, friends and associated people over more distant people, and prioritizing clear present desires over uncertain future desires" as pretty much everyone, everywhere has pretty much always done.
Sub-optimal commute Tuesday morning as I received confirmation that it's time for new bike tires a mile away from the office. I changed the tube anyway and the new tube blew up as I used my third-to-last CO2 canister to inflate it. A 20-minute walk isn't so bad, if you haven't already spent 20 minutes getting your hands filthy and you don't have to push a bike on the bike path. The new tires are the first made-in-Germany product I remember buying since the Audi we nicknamed The German Patient. Hopefully the tires will last longer than the car. I managed to get the rear tire mounted at work without my tire levers (a plastic knife broke and I found that stubborn thumbs can manage) and used my second-to-last CO2 canister to top it off after inflating with a hand pump. (Not quite: the recommended pressure is 110 PSI and I'm not sure if I reached half that; my car pressure gauge is useless for Presta valves.) Heading home now with a single CO2 cartridge and mismatched tires, hoping the front won't die of old age and the rear won't pinch flat.
I don’t see him saying that tech companies cause no negative effects, rather that the “huge boon to humanity” (as you describe the Internet) they enable is so large in comparison to the costs that it is ridiculous how e.g. #amazon is so often portrayed as a force of evil. I don’t know why the author calls them populists, but I do think critics could save themselves a lot of angst by simply not patronizing the tech firms they criticize. Yet they often confess they can’t imagine life without Prime.
A B-52 or something similar just flew over low and loud. I didn't get a good look and couldn't get a photo through the trees. It didn't show up on Planefinder. I see a pair of Ospreys fly by now and then but they never appear on the app. ADS-B Exchange shows a number of military flights nearby but no sign of this aircraft; the closest match has only four engines. Anyone have any tips on military planespotting?
True, but the spamming kind are not known for following best practices. I think the simplest explanation is that websitetasker is promoting their eponymous website. StudyPool, like Hubski, allows non-authenticated random people to create accounts, then gives them a customizable profile page with a unique URL. This free welcome mat is generous and subject to abuse. websitetasker has similar profile pages crammed with links at flightaware.com/user/websitetasker, cracked.com/members/websitetasker, flickr.com/people/166815399@N03, and elsewhere. Some of these sites, perhaps in response to friendly, apologetic requests from other people trying to make the web a nicer place, have removed the spammer's profile since Google's last crawl. When you see "For a good time call..." scrawled on a bathroom wall, it's possible that the phone number belongs to the vandal. But the best response is probably just to paint over it.
And in 2019, I just entered the phrase "is 4294967297 prime" into a search engine. That level of effort might explain why I only got two out of three of the examples above correct (no better than chance!) before looking at the solutions. But #1 stumped Fermat too! I didn't know that this problem sparked Euler's interest in number theory, according to "How Euler Did It" (4-page PDF). It was one of the many problems left over from the famous Fermat-Descartes correspondence. I figured Euler must have scribbled out a lot of long division problems to crack the Fermat number conjecture. But apparently he found a shortcut. [SPOILER]Fermat and Descartes did not like each other very much. In fact, some people describe their relationship as a “feud,” but it seems that Descartes resented Fermat more than Fermat disliked Descartes. They probably never met.
Euler’s mentor in St. Petersburg, Christian Goldbach, alerted Euler to the conjecture in 1729. Euler responded almost immediately that he could make no progress on the problem, but by 1732, close to a hundred years after Fermat had originally made the conjecture, Euler had a solution: Fermat was wrong. In Euler’s first paper on number theory [E26] Euler announced that 641 divides 4,294,967,297.... What Euler did not tell us in E26 was how he thought to try to divide 4,294,967,297 by 641. He hadn’t simply been dividing by prime numbers until he got to 641. He had a much better way, but he waited about fifteen years, until E134, to reveal that secret.
It once was. Insurance companies were taking losses on flood claims, so they separated flood coverage and raised rates. Then FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program was introduced to make sure building and rebuilding in high-risk areas would remain affordable. FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program had 87% of all flood premiums nationwide in 2017. To make the simple economics work, FEMA borrows from the Treasury. It is now about $25 billion in debt. The debt limit is $30 billion, and the program was scheduled to sunset this year, but Congress authorized an extension.Insurance will eventually be the lever
(Yeah, FEMA funds are available, but even those are limited.)
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, houses that repeatedly flood account for 1% of NFIP’s properties but 25-30% of its claims. Five states, Texas among them, have more than 10,000 such households and, nationwide, their number has been going up by around 5,000 each year. Insurance is meant to provide a signal about risk; in this case, it stifles it.
Great report, thanks! I didn’t write up my last marathon because it started at a normal time, the train got me there in an hour, it didn’t rain, was only a little warm, aid stations were as expected, and I was slow because I’m slow. I see a big can of Pocari Sweat right there at the start. How did you miss it?
Diplomacy is a turn-based strategy game set during World War One. The object is to conquer all of Europe. Each player controls one of the seven powers: Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Turkey. Europe is divided into 56 land territories and 19 sea terrirories. Players control armies (shown by large circles) and fleets (shown by triangles), which are assigned to special "supply center" territories (marked with small circles) at the start of the game. Conquering a new supply center allows a player to build a new army or fleet. In each turn (a spring or fall season), players submit secret orders to move their forces. When all players are ready, or time for the turn runs out, the orders are revealed to see what moves where. After the fall season (that is, every two turns) players can create new armies or fleets if they gained supply centers, or must destroy some if they lost. Much of the fun and strategy is based on diplomacy: messages sent between players, promising to work together against other players. These messages can be public, so all players see them, or private so only some players see them.
Got a free shirt! I often record my commute with the Charity Miles app, getting a corporate sponsor to pitch a few coins to Habitat For Humanity while I enjoy riding my bike. (The Hubski team has recorded 1790 miles so far and could use some help!) Now and then there's a promotion. The t-shirt is cool, but a free hormone test kit was an unexpected surprise. I haven't overcome my reluctance to jab four fingers with needles, but I'm curious to see my numbers. For the new year I am following veen's example, avoiding distractions and aiming to read more. First book finished this year was The News: A User's Manual, and was about as expected, though it got me to delete a bunch of apps, including some foreign newspaper apps that were supposed to help me practice language but just bugged me with headline alerts I had already seen in English. The Road to Wigan Pier is wholesome misery literature that makes frozen toes on the way to work seem like no big deal.
"I don't know" the day after is pretty nearly a sure thing. Those chews are awful. I grabbed some of those jelly bean things at a race and could barely get one down. I suspect that people handing out licorice are experienced runners trolling newbies. Sounds like the cold worked out to your advantage. Great job!Will I do another? I don't know.... I'm already signed up for three half marathons next year.
Heh, I may have left out a step. I had so many tabs open I couldn't find my way back to the Pub.
Aftermath: Signed up for a couple more... Sounds like a complete success!The Race: Show up...
Anyone lose a dog? A brown dog was running westbound with evident joy on the Washington and Old Dominion Trail this morning. I assumed it was with the woman and leashed white dog, but soon encountered some concerned dog walkers wondering about the loose dog.
Yes, I thought that name sounded familiar when I saw it in headlines. An image search for "Neil Gorsuch outdoors" returns a million photos of him wearing jacket and tie walking down corridors or standing behind a lectern. But he's a really nice guy! It occurred to me that I had never noticed EPA offices in downtown D.C., and just discovered that their spacious campus is tucked between two awkward neighbors. thenewgreen, when should I make that reservation at Central?
Thanks! I hope there are not too many errors, but some probably slipped in. I wasn't able to corroborate all the facts and relied on the magazine article more than I would like. I also feel like I left half of the best material out. Herbert Needleman is a pediatrician and might be considered something of an activist. He told some great stories to an interviewer, starting with his own experience working at DuPont's Deepwater plant. He saw workers who worked with TEL, they just sat and stared into space. When he said he carried his cigarettes in a plastic case, my sense of irony wanted him to say it was to keep them free of lead, but it was to keep them dry from "like 13 pounds" of sweat he lost daily. He said "anything with a nervous system" should not work in such a place. Later, he measured lead in children by having kids contribute teeth they had lost. They were to receive a solid silver half dollar in exchange. Seeing Like a State looks quite interesting after reading Scott Alexander's review.I discovered that some of the dentists were giving the kids two quarters and keeping the half dollars. I spoke at a community meeting and I said, “How’d you like that Kennedy half dollar?” And [the kids] said, “What do you mean? I got two quarters.” This was my first experience with the corrupting power of cash in science.