If you track how kids perform at this, you actually find a bathtub curve. When they are really young and just learning words, they are actually quite good at irregular conjunctions (for the few words they know). Then, as they get older and learn a bunch of other words, they start messing up the irregular ones they used to get right. Then, of course, they eventually learn the exceptions as exceptions.

Municipal steam networks are still operating today.

For new infrastructure, Electricity is just so good-enough, that it is hard to justify building out partial alternatives like steam pipes. But where we already have them, they are still useful.

I had a similar realization when studying undergrad linguistics.

One of the classes had us read Chomsky’s “Remarks on Nominalization” paper. The overwhelming sense I got from it was that the author did not understand X-Bar theory, despite knowing that Chomsky was the one who came up with it (and not realizing at the time that this paper was essentially Chomsky’s first paper on the subject).

I will also say that it is a credit to his writing that the paper still holds up pretty well; even if it spends an entire section coming up with bad answers to what was literally a syntax 201 homework assignment.

Yes. The “correct” behavior is to assume that people are male. That is what we are actually taught in grade school (at least when I went ~15 years ago)

In reality, using they when the gender of who you are talking about is not known has been a thing in English for over 600 years.

Singular “they” is actually older than singular “you”, which has only been a thing for about 400 years.

A fun observation is that both singular they and singular you are grammatically plural. E.g, you can never say something like “you is tall”, only “you are tall”, even when you are talking to a single person.

The same is true for “pants” and “scissors”; but somehow only seems to confuse people when it comes up with “they”

China is the most populace country.

“Calories” is actually two different things. The first thing is a unit of energy. In this sense, calories are very much interchangeable. Wood has calories, which is why we use it for fire. However, if you tried eating wood, you would mostly just be increasing the caloric value of your poop. This is not inherent to wood; if you were a termite and tried eating wood, you would actually get nutritionally relevant calories from it.

For nutritional purposes, we generally use some variant of the Atwater system. The core idea was to measure the caloric value of food, as well as the caloric value of the subjects feces and urine. This gives you a better estimate of how many nutritionally relevant calories there are.

Nowadays, we have standard values various core food components (e.g various fats, proteins, etc). By breaking down a food into its components, we can apply the standard conversion for each component and add up the results to get a value for the food as a whole.

This process is actually pretty bad. The digestibility of individual components does not perfectly predict the digestibility of a whole food. The measure of individual components is not perfect. The actual digestibility of some foods can vary significantly between people.

As a practical matter, “counting calories”, really just means eating less in a way that roughly measures food by effective energy content. It turns out that an accurate accounting of calories just isn’t super important or useful for this. There is even bigger variance in the “calories out” department (including the annoying tendency of bodies to become more energy efficient when less energy is available). Further, all of the errors in calorie counting tend to be consistent. If you reduce calories by reducing the quantity of food you eat, you are reducing actual metabolized calories, even in the exact measurement is wrong.

It is a little more complicated if you reduce calories by changing the composition of the food you eat, but broadly speaking lower reported calories are actually lower effective calories there as well. Further, if you are adjusting the composition of your food specifically enough for this to be a problem, then you are well past the point where you should be caring about other nutritional factors.

Where in those axioms does it say that ↑ = 0∗ = 0 {0 0 } is not a number? No where, that’s where!

The actual reason that ↑ is simply that it is too ill behaved. The stuff I thought were the “numbers” of combinatorical game are actually just called Conway games. Conway numbers are defined very almost identically to Conway games, but with an added constraint that makes them a much better behaved subset of Conway games.

I suppose you could call this an axiom of combinatorical game theory; but at that point you are essentially just calling every definition an axiom.

<s> Getting back to my original point; this distinction just goes to show how small minded mathematicians are! Under Conway’s supposed “reasonable” definition of a number, nimbers are merely games, not proper numbers. However, the nimbers are a perfectly good infinite field of characteristic 2. You can’t seriously expect me to believe that those are not numbers! </s>

I was going to make a comment about surreal numbers not being numbers. But I did a bit of fact checking and it looks like all of the values I was objecting to are not considered surreal numbers, but rather pseudo numbers.

I find this outrageous. Why can’t ↑ be a number? What even is a number that would exclude it and leave in all of your so-called numbers?

I’m going to take this as an opportunity to point out that bees are a type of fish in California.

If you are building a static system, SELinux is amazing. You need a few lines of policy per application to label things appropriately, then you can see what accesses programs made and decide if you want to allow them or not.

Taking a full Linux system and adding a locked down SELinux policy can be done in less than a week. If you are starting with an SELinux enabled system and just want to lock down your application, it can be done in less than a day.

Once you know what you are doing, there is also a pretty powerful policy analysis tool that lets you see what a given domain can do; including transitive things like “domain sandbox_t can launch a program in Domain vim_t, which can write a file in Domain sshd_config_t, which can be read by domain sshd_t” which may indicate that your sandbox has a hole allowing it to compromise your sshd configuration. Although, to be fair, doing this level of analysis is not simple, even with the tooling. And you very quickly notice issues that are inherent in how Linux works.

The problem with SELinux comes when you try applying it to general purpose systems, because you do not know ahead of time what the user will want to do. To be effective, policy needs to be written for the specific system it will be running on.

An example I like to use is Android. Android makes great use of SELinux, and is a general purpose system. But the SELinux policy itself does not protect the general purpose Android system. It protects the special purpose system that is the Android runtime. All apps run with the same policy that says things like “cannot access the filesystem at all, unless given access by the Android runtime”, then the actual security policy users see is all implemented in use space by Android. SElinux is just a means of preventing apps from bypassing the Android permission system.

Also, AppArmor might not exist without SELinux.

When the NSA first implemented SELinux, they did so directly, but were not able to get that merged into mainline because there was concern that SELinux was not the correct solution.

What they ended up doing was creating the Linux Security Modules (LSM) framework, which is just a bunch of hooks in the kernel that a module can implement. SELinux was then rewritten as LSM module. This allowed other solutions like AppArmor to be implemented without any invasive work; they could just plug into the same system SELinux used.

Some time later, the ability to run multiple LSMs at once was added.

Incidentally, Linux capabilities are also implemented as an LSM.

A typical employee would have taxes taken out of every paycheck. Employers calculate that assuming they are your only source of income and you have nothing interesting going on tax wise, which is correct for 90% of people. Employees can ask for their income tax withholding to be changed and employers will do so no questions asked [1]. At the end of the year, you’re employer will give you a form W2 that says how much they payed you, how much they paid in taxes on your behalf, how much they payed into your tax deductible account on your behalf, etc. Basically everything about your job that is tax relevant. A copy of this W2 form is sent to the IRS.

If you have investment accounts, work as an independent contractor, or various other forms of income, you will generally be given a form 1099. Again, a copy of this will be sent to the IRS. Income tax is not automatically withheld from these, so if you get a lot of income through them, you may owe taxes at the end of the year.

You may also qualify for tax deductions that lower your effective income for the purposes of computing your income tax. For instance, the interest on you mortgage, charitable donations, etc. However if you choose not to claim these, you can instead claim a deduction of about $14,000; which is more than most people would be able to deduct anyway, so there often isn’t a point of keeping track of these.

There are a couple of less common situations that you may need to deal with

1. You can deduct significantly more than the standard deduction, so actually need to keep track of all of your possible deductions.

2. You are self employed. In this case, you need to keep track of your business expenses, as those are deductible. You also do not have anyone taking out your income tax for you, so you are responsible for making sure you have enough saved come tax time (these tend to be the people who have problems). You are also supposed to pay taxes quarterly.

3. You have a significant amount of income that is not from a single W2 employer. This can be multiple W2 jobs, 1099 jobs, investment income, proceeds from criminal activity, etc.

4. You make a significant amount of money from unreported cash tips. (In practice, you can underreport this and no one will know).

5. You choose to deduct your state’s sales tax instead of your states income tax; and do so by actually tracking how much you pay in sales tax instead of estimating it based on your income.

Having said all of that. For 99% of taxpayers, the IRS knows exactly how much you owe; because all of your income was reported to them, as was your only significant deductions, and nothing else matters because you just take the standard deduction for the rest. The IRS could send you a bill/refund based on this and let the remaining 1% file if the IRS gets it wrong. However, that would collapse the tax preparation industry, so companies like TurboTax have lobbied against it for years.

What actually happens instead is you go to TurboTax, upload all of the forms that were sent to the IRS, and let them file taxes on your behalf. This service was “free” until they were sued for false advertising on account of charging money.

[0] At least for income tax. There’s a few other taxes on payroll that you cannot change.

[1] Assuming you asked in the form of a properly filled out W4.

No. There haven’t been any real birds since the US government exterminated them in the 60s. Any “bird” you see today is a surveillance drone.

All models are wrong, but some are useful. Thinking of evolved features as having a purpose is wrong, but it is also incredibly useful.

Why do we have eyes? In some sense, there is no reason, just a sequence of random coincidences, combined with a slightly non-randon bias refered to as “survival of the fittest” (itself an incorrect model).

However, saying that we have eyes to see has incredible explanatory power, which makes it a useful model. Just like Newton’s law of Universal gravity. We’ve known it that is wrong for a century at this point, but most of the time still talk as if it’s true, because it is useful.

Its not symbolism.

The reason people view Dax as a trans is that they were at times male and at times female. That is not symbolic of being trans, it is just being trans.

However, despite exploring what it means to be a trill passing through generations of hosts, the changing gender aspect of it never comes up. If Kurzon was a women, I doubt we would be talking about Dax as a trans stand-in, but I can’t think of a single plot point or character development that would meaningfully change.

Normally I’m a believer in death of the author, so I won’t be offended if anyone wants to completly ignore thus section, but in the DS9 documentary, they have a section on LGBT representation, and their big example for it was Jadzia. However, that was not for being trans, it was for being in a gay relationship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ya8WTQc93yI&t=5467s

Don’t, Jadzia clearly appreciated it.

Trill’s relationships to their past hosts is complicated and never fully explored, but it is clearly established that the distance they create between their current host’s life and that of their past host is something that is enforced apon them by broader trill society.

Both Kurzon and Jadzia were, at least at times, clearly unhappy at the extent to which they had to distance themselves from their past life.

https://youtu.be/Qu-bP5367Yo?si=YNBFC_IUo7o7FpCd

The thing is, Trill are not trans. Dax didn’t go from being a man to a woman. Kurzon was always a man and Jadzia was always a women. And DS9 actually took this concept seriously on its own terms.

One of the lessons I have learned as an engineer is that device quality doesn’t matter if you do not need a high quality device. There are times when you need a high quality press. Squeezing juice out of a pouch is not one of them. All of that extra quality you bought is doing nothing, because all you are using it for is squeezing juice out of a pouch.

Not sex related, but I learned it in sex ed. Most males do not have a big depression in their chest. Turns out that the males in my family happened to have a condition known as Pectus Excavatum.

The BBC also doesn’t call them terrorists:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67083432

So, will the people currently living in the to be annexed territory be allowed to become Israeli citizens and retain full rights to their homes? Will the people who left northern Gaza at the instruction of Israel (instructions which Israel used to justify their bombing campaign), be allowed to return to their homes as Israeli citizens?

Will the conditions in a smaller and more densely populated Gaza; where Israeli annexation is now fresh in everyone’s living memory be less conducive to terrorism. Will this help Israel’s relationship with its Arab neighboors, which had been seeing significant normalization prior to Hamas’s attack?

I’ve been hereing a lot of people warn of this offensive as being a second Nakba. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba Comparing this reporting with what happened in the Nakba, that seems like a scaringly likely prediction.

Looking at how the first Nakba turns out, it is hard to see how anyone can think repeating it will end well for Israel.