Okay, now input the family trees in the appendix of Lord of the Rings and see if it can calculate how many cousins Frodo has, and their exact degree of separation.
"These on-chip devices accelerate sub-relativistic electrons of initial energy 83.4 keV by 1.21 keV over 30 μm, providing peak acceleration gradients of 40.3 MeV/m." (Sapra et al. Science 2020)
Lasers on a chip plus photonic waveguide technology, oh my!
I think it's very valuable for people who might not already now this to see an example of why it's true, as the post does:
> "What’s happening here is simple: The web application has the ability to decrypt different records encrypted with different keys. If you pass records that were encrypted for Alice to the application to decrypt it for Bob, and you’re not authenticating your access patterns, Bob can read Alice’s data by performing this attack."
An interesting question here is whether or not there's a god key that allows the administrator to decrypt all the data even if they can't authenticate as the user (or if they just have copies of all keys). Searching HN for 'lavabits' turns up some results related to this, e.g.
The one data structure that crops up again and again when looking at complex systems is the graph. Nodes on the graph represent the components and elements like state variables (e.g. population, resources, temperature, servers and clients, etc.) of the system, and edges between nodes represent interconnections, e.g. flows of matter, energy or information between nodes.
A good introduction to this way of looking at the world is "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows. Important concepts include analyzing systems to determine their relative robustness or fragility under stress, the nature of the feedback loops in the system (possibly some nodes are connected by partially directed edges, so flows in one direction are easy but not in the other), what kind of temporal delays matter the most (e.g. how long does it take between creating a change and seeing the result of that change), and so on.
Given the natural utility of graphs in modeling systems, it's really a bit strange that graph theory really only developed in the 20th century, with some minor exceptions like Euler and Kirchhoff. It's interesting to think about an alien civilization whose mathematics began with graphs and how it might have developed.
The explanation for this is simple and has been true for decades: the major investors in utility corporations have huge holdings in fossil fuels. So if you own the electric utility and are trading gas futures and hold many shares in gas producers, then a transition to solar - while good for the customers and for the utility's balance sheets - hurts the investor's other larger interests.
It's comparable to kerosene lamp manufacturers and kerosene producers trying to block rural electrification because people would use electric lights if they only could get access to them.
Of course, this is why the US government - whose politicians are little more than middle managers for the investment capitalism system - implemented huge tariffs on Chinese monocrystalline silicon PV panels.
What an odd, off-topic comment. The utility companies in this article, Mohave Electric Cooperative (MEC) and Arizona Electric Power Cooperative (Aepco), aren't investor owned. Have you considered looking into what's actually happening instead of inventing imaginary conspiracies?
Happiness is when a web page that requires JavaScript to display its content happily redirects you to the simple text version when it detects you have JavaScript disabled. It makes one feel that the web page cares about your preferences (NoScript in Firefox as default).
Sorry about that, there is no excuse, we only need a bit more time to make it properly static. In the meantime I'm happy to PM you the text if you're interested.
It takes no extra effort to make a static webpage. Imagine if we all included a script on our pages that blocked the content and showed instead, "please disable JavaScript to read this page."
Getting the data on the chemical composition of the PM2.5 fraction of air pollution requires fairly advanced instrumentation and lab capabilities. It is the important data in estimating toxicity, for example:
This is a nice write-up, although it focuses solely on the US industrial output, which is indeed impressive, going from ~2,100 aircraft to ~50,000 in six years. However, that first table raises some questions - the Soviets were already at ~10,300 in 1939, and the Germans at ~8,200. How were they able to do it?
One major influence is that American industrialists were busy expanding global markets and happily supplied their technology and manufacturing processes to the two major buyers, Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, in the 1930s, with Ford being one of the major actors, perhaps more active in Germany:
In Germany:
> "Ford and the Führer: A History of Ford Motor Company's Involvement in Nazi Germany" by Paul Ingrassia and Joseph B. White: This work delves into Ford's business activities in Germany, documenting the introduction of assembly-line manufacturing and the company's interactions with the Nazi regime."
> "The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich" by Max Wallace: This book explores the relationship between American industrialists like Henry Ford and the Nazi regime, including detailed accounts of Ford's manufacturing contributions."
In Soviet Union:
> "Gorky Automobile Plant (GAZ): Built with the technical assistance of Ford, the Gorky Automobile Plant began producing vehicles using American-style assembly lines. Ford provided machinery, blueprints, and training to Soviet engineers and workers. Soviet engineers and technicians received training in Ford’s American factories, learning about assembly line production and modern manufacturing techniques."
I don't know if there's a particular moral to this story, other than that in search of short-term profit major American industrialists were happy to get in bed with any and all buyers.
> the Soviets were already at ~10,300 in 1939, and the Germans at ~8,200. How were they able to do it?
The US was pursuing a largely isolationist foreign policy, and was not investing in armaments.
The USSR had, between 1917, and 1939:
* Spent six years fighting an incredibly brutal and bloody civil war.
* Was attacked by Poland in ~1920.
* Spent another decade putting down various secession movements, mostly in central Asia.
* Had multiple minor conflicts with China and Japan.
* Was heavily involved in the Spanish Civil War.
* Also needed a strong, standing army to put down any further internal resistance.
* Could smell which way the wind was blowing, and was ready to capitalize on German's ambitions in Europe, by taking its chunk of Poland (And later invading Finland).
Given all that, it was functioning on a war economy pretty much from ~1917 to 1941. (At which point it transitioned to a total war economy.)
This was all in the context of a strong central push for mass industrialization. Steel production alone increased ~5x between 1930 and 1940. Up until the Nazis took power, the USSR worked very closely on both industrialization, and military armament with Weimar Germany. Krupp was building factories in the Don, and future Luftwaffe pilots were being trained in Lipetsk.
You're significantly oversimplifying the absolute clusterfuck of ethnic and ideological and territorial wars that sprung up in the immediate collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires.
Both of those states fought with the goal of expanding their borders to a pre-partition status - the USSR aimed to reclaim territories lost in Brest-Litovsk, Poland to something resembling the pre-partition commonwealth. Poland won the war, and made significant territorial gains, in exchange for recognition of Soviet Ukraine... And then 1939 happened.
Both of those states fought with the goal of expanding their borders to a pre-partition status - the USSR aimed to reclaim territories lost in Brest-Litovsk, Poland to something resembling the pre-partition commonwealth.
This is actually gets a bit closer to a fair reading of the basic cause of the war. But it also glaringly contradicts what you just said previously ("Poland attacked the USSR in 1920, and that's it"¹). If you knew this was a gross (and misleading) oversimplification -- then why did you open with it? And in what year did the USSR come into being, again?
Anyway, we're far removed from the topic of the original thread. If the two of you want to hash this out amongst yourselves, perhaps one of you can start a new top-level post on the topic, and see if you can get people to join you there.
What I should have said (and couldn't find a way to put in a sentence) was that at some point in the Polish/Soviet war, Poland was fighting a successful offensive in the USSR, won the war, and made territorial gains.
I had a very interesting work-study job in my first year in college, teaching dyslexic students who were struggling with basic algebra - essentially, walking through their homework assignments with them. Success meant figuring out some way of presenting the problem that worked for them, typically with some kind of physical example. I remember one student in particular could simply not grasp the notion that feeding x into a function f(x) would generate a point y on a two-dimensional graph, not even for a simple straight line, let alone an exponential or sine curve. Eventually a machine analogy worked: here's a vegetable slicer, you throw a number into it, it spits out another number - reproducibly. To describe this machine, we write an algebraic equation.
However, this would have been absolutely impossible in a large class - these students needed individually tailored one-on-one attention for at least an hour each to get the ideas across to them. Some parents can afford to hire such private tutors, some can't.
Also, people seem to have natural affinities for different areas of mathematics, just like people naturally take to different sports. I have no idea of whether genetics plays a role, although clearly in physical sports body types matter - the long-distance runner is unlikely to also be a champion weightlifter, etc. I've also noticed that some people who claim to be 'bad at math' often have good mathematical skills that they don't even think of as math, e.g. combinatorics as applied to playing games like cards or Scrabble.
In the end, mathematics is a hard subject and students who want to master any aspect of it will need at least three hours of study on their own (or assisted) for each hour spent in class listening to an instructor. It's not for everyone, and that's okay.
Solve one problem with the help of a LLM, then solve three problems of the same type without the help of a LLM. Might need a human teacher to explain to the student why this approach is necessary, though.
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