> “It’s almost as if you’d already decided how you were going to feel, and then everything you were sensing was filtered through that,” he said. “The mood has become primary.”
This is 1000% what depression feels like, once you've properly come to terms with it. Your brain seems absolutely compelled to apply the most horrific, negative interpretation to everything that happens to you.
Even when you understand it's wrong, or at least heavily negatively biased, fighting those interpretations feels like trying to swim upstream in a terrific current.
Depending on the age groups, my family has had fun with the following various games:
Settlers of Catan
Carcassonne
Clash of the Cards
Codebreakers (Mastermind)
Codenames
Cards against humanity
Chess
Gin Rummy
Dice games (10k, etc)
Dominoes and variations
If you're still suspicious of SPAs, you can be sure there's still an alternate universe outside of the Valley bubble that builds server-side web apps on modern frameworks, though now we use Vue.js instead of jQuery. PHP has continued to be a top language of choice for the working class dev, and Laravel is an example of one of the most beautifully crafted (and wildly popular) web frameworks ever made.
Examples of the kind of tooling built by the community that betrays the cultish appeal of Laravel (yep, people actually make a living off Laravel-specific tooling)
I worked in insurance for over five years. One of the more common reasons we had to send out HIPAA notification letters was due to relatives in the same city with similar or identical names getting claims processed under the wrong policy. These were very often two male relatives -- father and son, twin brothers, cousins. They sometimes even lived on the same street.
There's also this story about two women with the same name and birth date who kept getting mixed up by the government of the city they lived in and finally met to sort it out:
There are very real issues with not being able to reliably identify people in a world where we so routinely interact with people who don't personally know us. Thanks to my ex and I both having first-hand experience with family members having similar names, we both agreed on making sure our children had names that wouldn't cause that type of issue for them.
Yet I still have mixed feelings about our systems insisting on a particular name format. If it were a foolproof system, identify theft would not be a thing. Plus, it places a lot of weird, intrusive limitations on people who may not in actual fact get called by the name they are required to give as their "one true name."
> Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.
I would like to nominate “Sam” as poster child for why the feedback systems in Google Search and Facebook are so damaging. It’s one thing to continuously confirm the beliefs of old people, it’s quite another to funnel impressionable children into one extreme or another based on a few semi-random data points.
> So even if quark stars exists, they will have a maximum mass somewhere in that range
You don't know that. If the quark degeneracy pressure is high it could support far more massive objects. After all simple heat is enough to support far more massive objects (large suns easily exceed that limit).
Why would you assume, without data, that there is no other degeneracy pressure that could support such pressures?
> within a radius of less than about 10^13 meters; we know its mass is about 4 million solar masses
> The only way to pack that much mass into that small a space without an object being there that would be easily visible to our telescopes is a black hole.
That is not true. A cold object would be invisible. If the area around it is empty of mass there would not be any jets to see either.
> X-rays and gamma rays emitted by hot matter falling into the hole.
How do you know it's a black hole and not a neutron star? The jets would look identical. You can not tell that there is an event horizon.
> An object on the other side won't be able to see that object anyway; the hole will block its view.
It would "see" it gravitationally.
> Incorrect.
You say that, yet you have not explained how I'm able to see anything fall toward the black hole. Anything heading toward a black hole would (from my POV) look like it was frozen in time.
This isn't something I've made up - all scientists agree about that part. No one has ever reconciled that with how the black hole is supposed to form in the first place.
"Light from the collapsing material takes longer and longer to reach the observer, with the light emitted just before the event horizon forms delayed an infinite amount of time. Thus the external observer never sees the formation of the event horizon; instead, the collapsing material seems to become dimmer and increasingly red-shifted, eventually fading away." https://web.archive.org/web/20130526224126/http://www.imamu....
How much clearer than that can you get? And you should recognize the name of the author.
Join the black-hole deniers club and take that next step: Since we can never see any black holes form, black holes do not exist.
Coyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can’t hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don’t shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote.
Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t scared.
Personal Connection
This reminds me of a turning point that I had in high school. When I was young, I would get in trouble and try to get around the rules each time I got in trouble. /“Well, technically…”/
But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren’t getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.
They are not paying for someone to take the power - that's poor journalism.
It works like this: Every energy producer bids a price for their power, the lower your price the higher you are on the order book.
Then energy consumers will meet the demand by buying from the producers in the order of their price.
Once they have filled their power demand they pay everyone the price of the last price they needed to fill their needs.
So by setting a negative price they ensure they are always on top of the order book - but they don't actually have to pay for their power since other power sources have positive prices, and that's the price that is actually paid.
> Self driving tech is poised to save many many lives.
The computer would have to be 99.99999% reliable to do that.
The accident rate is around 74 per 100 million miles (and fatalities is 1.13).
It's unclear exactly how to turn that into a percentage, but no matter how you do it it's quite high.
Say an accident takes 5 minutes, and people drive 30 miles/hour. Then that works out to 99.999% for humans. If you use the numbers for fatalities then it's 99.99999%.
I.e. 99.99999% of the time, as whole across all [US] humans, people drive in a way that does not cause a fatality.
That's the bar computers have to cross in order to save any lives at all.
Why do you think that human drivers are "far from 100%"?
Anecdotally, I can only recall a handful of car crashes involving myself or any friends or family. I can't recall any injuries or deaths due to car crashes among any friends or family. Is it a regular occurence in your circles?
U.S. government data I could find quickly reported that the death rate per 100 million vehicle miles travelled in 2010 was 1, which is a per-mile success rate of 99.999999%. The injury rate was 75, which drops the success rate to 99.999925%.
