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idlewords
Joined 29,487 karma
http://idlewords.com, http://pinboard.in, http://bedbugregistry.com, maciej@ceglowski.com

  1. Getting on the train that's physically in front of you, no matter how crowded, is the rational decision basically everywhere outside Japan, where you can have metaphysical certitude that the next train will show up as scheduled.
  2. Grug use few words, make it easy read grug.
  3. The style is the most charming part of this essay.
  4. And for the lazy, there's the 1:1 scale model under your feet.
  5. The universe is a UI nightmare
  6. An exponential curve looks locally the same at all points in time. For a very long period of time, computers were always vastly better than they were a year ago, and that wasn't because the computer you'd bought the year before was junk.

    Consider that what you're reacting to is a symptom of genuine, rapid progress.

  7. My blog is static files. It preserves a moment in time when PHP was complaining, forever.
  8. Reading Graham's essays on writing always puts me in mind of the videos where Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA), or a Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook make rice (https://youtu.be/53me-ICi_f8?si=0AaZ82dk_AYFqJAx&t=226).
  9. What's the useful part of Pocket's feature set that doesn't overlap with Pinboard?
  10. I'll take it off their hands.
  11. In this thread: all the difficult employees
  12. Great, now who is going to bring back web rings?

    Discoverability remains the one great problem of online self-publishing. A history of how solutions have changed over the years would make for a fun history of the web.

  13. The 2-3x uncertainty in tumor risk comes entirely from the heavy ion component of GCR. Please go back and re-read that section of my post if you need to.
  14. 1) Radiation

    2) Partial gravity

  15. It does not; see the paper cited in my other reply to you. GCR dose is 1.5-2x on Mars compared to ISS.

    The mention of "quality factor" here just begs the question. The reason we need research on biological effects of high-Z ion exposure is that it has a different mechanism of damage, not captured by that paradigm.

  16. I didn't choose AL shielding as the reference standard to use in the literature; I'm sorry it bugs you.

    You can read the author's other work, that goes into great detail about different types of shielding, if you want to gain confidence in his math. The upshot is you need many meters of polyethylene to effectively shield the heavy ion component of GCR, which is what the fuss is about.

    But the point of that particular diagram is not shielding, but to illustrate the 2-3x uncertainty in estimates of tumor risk based on our poor understanding of high-Z ion exposure.

  17. Total GCR dose is 3-5x in transit to Mars compared to what you get on ISS; on the Martian surface it's from 1.5-2x the ISS dose. (see https://www.swsc-journal.org/articles/swsc/pdf/2020/01/swsc2...).

    On a long-stay Mars mission, that adds up to 12-18 times the accumulated GCR exposure compared to a six-month ISS increment.

  18. No one has ever done a "years long" expedition to ISS, and the radiation flux in transit to Mars, in particular GCR dose, is much higher than experienced on the space station.
  19. I think you misunderstood a diagram; grams of Al per square centimeter is a standardized unit of shielding in the literature, not an engineering choice.
  20. Solar electric propulsion has great specific impulse [i.e., efficient use of propellant] but very low thrust. You're forever spiraling away from and then down into gravity wells.

    It's terrific for cargo, but not viable for crews.

  21. Have either of you ever met a five year old?
  22. Where are those families now?
  23. I lived near this particular park, so the article struck a chord with me.

    For things to be better, we need to start doing things differently, and one starting point is to have compassion for the people who are denied the use of public spaces by the hardcore homeless who refuse outreach and aid.

  24. San Francisco's homelessness budget in 2021 was $1.1 billion, for a homeless population of maybe 10,000. That works out to $110K per person before you add in state and Federal money.

    Say this budget was doubled. What should that money be spent on, that isn't being funded now?

  25. Because this is a person wants to sleep rough in a park and has to be pushed through every step of the process to leave it. I would imagine things go much faster if you hate sleeping in a park and want a roof over your head.
  26. This is an article about a man who was given all those things, repeatedly, and went back to sleeping rough in the park. How would giving him money make any difference?
  27. The title let me down; I was hoping this would be an article about a trebuchet. [edit: I see the post title has changed, the original one was something like "park ranger uses extraordinary methods to remove homeless from SF parks"]

    I lived next to the park for several years and grew to loathe the dynamic where the lives of people sleeping rough in Golden Gate Park or Civic Center merit months of one-on-on outreach, while the lives of all of those who can't walk through the park in safety, can't send their kids there to play, and can't sit on the grass for fear of stepping on a used needle or a pile of human excrement, don't seem to matter.

    I would like to see the city adopt a compassionate approach that doesn't at the same time enable years of lawbreaking by people who make nominally public spaces off-limits to the law-abiding. I'd like to see a San Francisco where there can be at least one clean, safe, working public toilet.

  28. Thank you; I really appreciate that!
  29. Just fill the ball with water.

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