I believe Michael Cain has also been known to talk to (or taunt) computers….
More threaten than taunt. Most famously, in a hotel ballroom in midtown Manhattan at 2:00 in the morning. Did it work? All the demos worked for the new board of directors later the same day, in significant part because the computer I threatened did all of its jobs properly :^)
or for (as my students tell me) “vibing” to as they chill or do other things. Breaks in pattern and variations distract from the vibe and demand attention.
When I was in college I had what my housemates called "Mike's math tape". Everything on it was loud, 4/4 time, muddled lyrics. I dug it out and put on the headphones when I had to do math proofs or work through complicated bits of code. Reputedly, the housemate who had taken it upon himself to manage my social life once told a female friend of mine on the phone, "No, you can't talk to him. He's in there with the math tape on, covering page after page in that cramped little handwriting. You could parade through naked and he wouldn't notice."
I’d love to get rid of the current avatar images though. I usually use a photo of this old bronze head in other places.
WordPress is all in on Gravatar. Subscribers can specify their own profile photo, but I believe that WordPress uses that photo and the subscriber's e-mail to create a minimal Gravatar profile on their behalf.
Here's an odd request, and I have no idea if the current comment plugin supports it. I'd like to have a "reply" button at the bottom of each comment. Say, on the same line as the -0+ rating thing, but over against the right border. When the button is clicked, the comment box should move to be directly below the comment where reply was clicked. No scrolling up or down to find the box.
A small complaint about the current comment plugin... When I post a comment, it appears at the top of the comment list, but any comments that have been submitted since I loaded the page and the time my comment is posted do not appear. I have to refresh the page in order to see them.
1) My opinion is that three links are okay, more are not. Something with more than three links generally deserves to be a top-level post with its own discussion, not a comment.
2) 14 days seems too short. 30? I believe that long open periods don't stimulate additional discussion because very late comments are almost invisible. The post has long-since scrolled off the front page, and the comment will quickly scroll off the recent-comments list.
3) The most useful feature is probably not having to type your name or e-mail each time, with possible mistyped e-mail address. Avoiding the wrong address benefits people who use an address registered at Gravatar.com. There are a handful of people on the internet who actually recognize my stupid picture of a transistor as a sort-of credential. That feature doesn't benefit me personally; I have code running in my browser that auto-fills the name and e-mail fields at the few sites where I comment regularly.
Someone should write a post about the pros and cons of concealing your identity.
I maintain a piece of code at another site that provides a comment-centric view of what's going on. One of the features is a paged, time-ordered list of all the comments associated with a particular name, either for a single post, or across all posts. While I am seldom interested in looking at a history of my own comments, it is occasionally useful to look at part of the history of a specific user's comments. Eg, if I know GftNC made a comment I've been thinking about, but I don't remember exactly which post it was attached to.
Kind of interesting that in the 20 years since this was originally posted, in the case of a pandemic we (the OECD countries) have developed the ability to formulate a vaccine and manufacture a billion doses in under a year.
...what justification is there for its presence anyway?
One possibility: there are two major global shipping choke points in the region (Hormuz and Mandeb). The US is the only country with enough military power projection to force them open in the event someone tries to close them. Having a staging point for large air transport efforts related to that seems like a necessity. But this is a very complicated question.
What are your thoughts about the unilateral defense agreement with Qatar?
Is there an alternative? No one else will lease us enough space for the air base we operate there. Parking a carrier in the Persian Gulf is at least impractical, and may not be able to fly everything we fly out of Qatar. Iran has already launched missiles at Qatar once because of our presence. That one was face-saving, but if you were Qatar, wouldn't you want a "we've got your back" guarantee in the event of real attack? Even more pressing, perhaps, since Iran signed security agreements with Pakistan, who has nukes and ballistic delivery systems that can reach Qatar.
Give me a shiny plane and I’ll let you build a base in Idaho.
The request for a training facility was made in 2017, shortly after the Obama administration approved selling current versions of the F-15 Strike Eagle to Qatar. Like most military base construction, there's a ton of hoops to jump through. Not long ago the final environmental impact statement was finished, so they announced the training facility. Badly. Horribly. Using terms that don't describe things accurately.
Singapore already has a training facility at the same air base for their F-15 pilots and mechanics. And a facility at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona for their F-16 pilots and mechanics. Both planes are supersonic; neither Singapore nor Qatar are big enough (in square miles) to support a supersonic practice range. Mountain Home is close to the Utah Test and Training Range, and Luke to the Nevada Test Site, where low-level supersonic flights are allowed. And it's easier to house a few of the exact planes you're buying in the US than try to ferry some in over great distances.
Every other President in my lifetime has represented himself as serving in the interests of all Americans: this one is for his people only.
He's not even doing that, at least if equate "his people" with people who voted for him. His tariff war is seriously damaging for a variety of farmers. Cutting the ACA market subsidies will do particular damage in red states that haven't expanded Medicaid. The Medicaid cuts are going to exacerbate the financial problems facing rural hospitals.
When I was on the budget staff for my state's legislature, from time to time I heard members from rural areas say, "The Front Range urban corridor has declared war on rural Colorado." My job was understanding the state's cash flows. I was always tempted to say, "No, they haven't. You'll know they've declared war when the subsidies for your schools, roads, health care, electricity, and phone service stop."
@GftNC, your long comment went into the spam folder. I'll leave it up to the real editors to fish it out.
The initial "awaiting approval" is because there are more than two links. Why WordPress classifies something as spam is a mystery, they don't reveal how it works.
The Nobel committee is generally swayed by the peaceful delivery of increased individual rights. In addition to his personal antipathy to that idea, Trump is laboring under the handicap of a Supreme Court that is determined to reduce individual rights, not expand them.
@nous, it would be interesting to see the conductor during the actual performance. My impression of the rehearsal is that he's focusing more on individual bits, sort of "remember what I want here" to a particular section of the orchestra. During an actual concert, the conductor is performing for the audience more than directing the musicians.
@wonkie, I forget who said it but, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." :^)
"Ride of the Valkyries" is excellent for the soundtrack of certain sorts of movie scenes, and has been used often for that purpose, probably most famously for the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. (Or perhaps for the Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", often referred to as "Kill the Wabbit".) But it's only five minutes out of a five-hour opera. And even in five minutes it suffers from repeated cases of "Oh, yes, there's supposed to be a melody here someplace, isn't there?"
Personally, I think Wagner could have been brilliant writing movie scores where the running time constraint was imposed on him. Think John Williams' score for the original Star Wars, very much in the Wagner mold, and often cited as the best movie score ever written.
As an observation, for 80 years the pattern has been that from time to time Israel expands its borders somewhat, and from time to time it expels some of the non-Jewish population (for various values of expel). It seems to me unlikely that this is going to suddenly change.
Less power if you've got an OLED (or other emissive) display. If you've got older/cheaper tech, black pixels and white pixels all consume the same amount of power.
Before that, it has been Italians, and before that the Irish. At our nation’s founding the boogie man was the Germans.... I won’t be astounded if, down the road, South Asians replace Hispanics as the outsiders of choice.
I went to high school just west of South Omaha. The sequence of ethnic groups there that became, or are becoming "white" was Irish, Italian, Central/Eastern European, and now Hispanic. Blacks overlapped those at first, but were basically pushed out to the north side of Omaha proper.
My guess is that South Asians don't become outsiders because there are a lot of them already here in high-skill positions -- engineering, medicine, etc. Maybe if there's a "flood" of poor climate refugees. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are 1.9B people in an area that will experience* early climate disasters.
* Arguably, Pakistan already is experiencing them, in the form of now-regular catastrophic monsoon flooding.
I suppose because of the Japanese cars that hit the US market at about the time I reached the car buying stage.
My first car was a used 1969 Toyota Corolla. My second car was a 1979 Datsun 300ZX (pre corporate name change to Nissan). The improvement in build quality over that ten years should have absolutely terrified Detroit.
I was in college in the early 1970s when Japanese brands became serious contenders in high-end audio equipment.
Consumer video recording put an end to the belief that while Japanese companies could copy American and European engineering, they couldn't innovate.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Return of the Boat Hook”
I believe Michael Cain has also been known to talk to (or taunt) computers….
More threaten than taunt. Most famously, in a hotel ballroom in midtown Manhattan at 2:00 in the morning. Did it work? All the demos worked for the new board of directors later the same day, in significant part because the computer I threatened did all of its jobs properly :^)
On “Weekend music thread #02 Bad Bunny”
or for (as my students tell me) “vibing” to as they chill or do other things. Breaks in pattern and variations distract from the vibe and demand attention.
When I was in college I had what my housemates called "Mike's math tape". Everything on it was loud, 4/4 time, muddled lyrics. I dug it out and put on the headphones when I had to do math proofs or work through complicated bits of code. Reputedly, the housemate who had taken it upon himself to manage my social life once told a female friend of mine on the phone, "No, you can't talk to him. He's in there with the math tape on, covering page after page in that cramped little handwriting. You could parade through naked and he wouldn't notice."
On “Opinions on settings”
I’d love to get rid of the current avatar images though. I usually use a photo of this old bronze head in other places.
WordPress is all in on Gravatar. Subscribers can specify their own profile photo, but I believe that WordPress uses that photo and the subscriber's e-mail to create a minimal Gravatar profile on their behalf.
"
Here's an odd request, and I have no idea if the current comment plugin supports it. I'd like to have a "reply" button at the bottom of each comment. Say, on the same line as the -0+ rating thing, but over against the right border. When the button is clicked, the comment box should move to be directly below the comment where reply was clicked. No scrolling up or down to find the box.
"
A small complaint about the current comment plugin... When I post a comment, it appears at the top of the comment list, but any comments that have been submitted since I loaded the page and the time my comment is posted do not appear. I have to refresh the page in order to see them.
"
1) My opinion is that three links are okay, more are not. Something with more than three links generally deserves to be a top-level post with its own discussion, not a comment.
2) 14 days seems too short. 30? I believe that long open periods don't stimulate additional discussion because very late comments are almost invisible. The post has long-since scrolled off the front page, and the comment will quickly scroll off the recent-comments list.
3) The most useful feature is probably not having to type your name or e-mail each time, with possible mistyped e-mail address. Avoiding the wrong address benefits people who use an address registered at Gravatar.com. There are a handful of people on the internet who actually recognize my stupid picture of a transistor as a sort-of credential. That feature doesn't benefit me personally; I have code running in my browser that auto-fills the name and e-mail fields at the few sites where I comment regularly.
Someone should write a post about the pros and cons of concealing your identity.
I maintain a piece of code at another site that provides a comment-centric view of what's going on. One of the features is a paged, time-ordered list of all the comments associated with a particular name, either for a single post, or across all posts. While I am seldom interested in looking at a history of my own comments, it is occasionally useful to look at part of the history of a specific user's comments. Eg, if I know GftNC made a comment I've been thinking about, but I don't remember exactly which post it was attached to.
On “From the archive: hilzoy on Avian Flu (9 Oct 2005)”
Kind of interesting that in the 20 years since this was originally posted, in the case of a pandemic we (the OECD countries) have developed the ability to formulate a vaccine and manufacture a billion doses in under a year.
On “The Qatar that plays like butter”
...what justification is there for its presence anyway?
One possibility: there are two major global shipping choke points in the region (Hormuz and Mandeb). The US is the only country with enough military power projection to force them open in the event someone tries to close them. Having a staging point for large air transport efforts related to that seems like a necessity. But this is a very complicated question.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
What are your thoughts about the unilateral defense agreement with Qatar?
Is there an alternative? No one else will lease us enough space for the air base we operate there. Parking a carrier in the Persian Gulf is at least impractical, and may not be able to fly everything we fly out of Qatar. Iran has already launched missiles at Qatar once because of our presence. That one was face-saving, but if you were Qatar, wouldn't you want a "we've got your back" guarantee in the event of real attack? Even more pressing, perhaps, since Iran signed security agreements with Pakistan, who has nukes and ballistic delivery systems that can reach Qatar.
"
Give me a shiny plane and I’ll let you build a base in Idaho.
The request for a training facility was made in 2017, shortly after the Obama administration approved selling current versions of the F-15 Strike Eagle to Qatar. Like most military base construction, there's a ton of hoops to jump through. Not long ago the final environmental impact statement was finished, so they announced the training facility. Badly. Horribly. Using terms that don't describe things accurately.
Singapore already has a training facility at the same air base for their F-15 pilots and mechanics. And a facility at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona for their F-16 pilots and mechanics. Both planes are supersonic; neither Singapore nor Qatar are big enough (in square miles) to support a supersonic practice range. Mountain Home is close to the Utah Test and Training Range, and Luke to the Nevada Test Site, where low-level supersonic flights are allowed. And it's easier to house a few of the exact planes you're buying in the US than try to ferry some in over great distances.
"
Every other President in my lifetime has represented himself as serving in the interests of all Americans: this one is for his people only.
He's not even doing that, at least if equate "his people" with people who voted for him. His tariff war is seriously damaging for a variety of farmers. Cutting the ACA market subsidies will do particular damage in red states that haven't expanded Medicaid. The Medicaid cuts are going to exacerbate the financial problems facing rural hospitals.
When I was on the budget staff for my state's legislature, from time to time I heard members from rural areas say, "The Front Range urban corridor has declared war on rural Colorado." My job was understanding the state's cash flows. I was always tempted to say, "No, they haven't. You'll know they've declared war when the subsidies for your schools, roads, health care, electricity, and phone service stop."
"
@GftNC, your long comment went into the spam folder. I'll leave it up to the real editors to fish it out.
The initial "awaiting approval" is because there are more than two links. Why WordPress classifies something as spam is a mystery, they don't reveal how it works.
On “…..”
The Nobel committee is generally swayed by the peaceful delivery of increased individual rights. In addition to his personal antipathy to that idea, Trump is laboring under the handicap of a Supreme Court that is determined to reduce individual rights, not expand them.
On “Weekend music thread #1”
@nous, it would be interesting to see the conductor during the actual performance. My impression of the rehearsal is that he's focusing more on individual bits, sort of "remember what I want here" to a particular section of the orchestra. During an actual concert, the conductor is performing for the audience more than directing the musicians.
"
@wonkie, I forget who said it but, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." :^)
"Ride of the Valkyries" is excellent for the soundtrack of certain sorts of movie scenes, and has been used often for that purpose, probably most famously for the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. (Or perhaps for the Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", often referred to as "Kill the Wabbit".) But it's only five minutes out of a five-hour opera. And even in five minutes it suffers from repeated cases of "Oh, yes, there's supposed to be a melody here someplace, isn't there?"
Personally, I think Wagner could have been brilliant writing movie scores where the running time constraint was imposed on him. Think John Williams' score for the original Star Wars, very much in the Wagner mold, and often cited as the best movie score ever written.
"
Wagner: orchestration without melodies.
On “…..”
As an observation, for 80 years the pattern has been that from time to time Israel expands its borders somewhat, and from time to time it expels some of the non-Jewish population (for various values of expel). It seems to me unlikely that this is going to suddenly change.
On “Excelsior 2.1”
Less power if you've got an OLED (or other emissive) display. If you've got older/cheaper tech, black pixels and white pixels all consume the same amount of power.
"
We've done dark writing on light media since at least the ancient Egyptians. For a variety of reasons, including how the human vision system works.
"
<em>Alternate test of various ways</em> to do <strong>emphasis.</strong>
"
You have to use the tools along the bottom edge of the comment edit
window."
Darker type in these comments, please. Middlin' gray doesn't cut it for these old eyes.
"
Just an observation that you have to have JavaScript enabled in order to leave comments now.
Testing the attach-an-image comment feature:
On “The DIY party”
Before that, it has been Italians, and before that the Irish. At our nation’s founding the boogie man was the Germans.... I won’t be astounded if, down the road, South Asians replace Hispanics as the outsiders of choice.
I went to high school just west of South Omaha. The sequence of ethnic groups there that became, or are becoming "white" was Irish, Italian, Central/Eastern European, and now Hispanic. Blacks overlapped those at first, but were basically pushed out to the north side of Omaha proper.
My guess is that South Asians don't become outsiders because there are a lot of them already here in high-skill positions -- engineering, medicine, etc. Maybe if there's a "flood" of poor climate refugees. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are 1.9B people in an area that will experience* early climate disasters.
* Arguably, Pakistan already is experiencing them, in the form of now-regular catastrophic monsoon flooding.
On “Japan unleashed”
I suppose because of the Japanese cars that hit the US market at about the time I reached the car buying stage.
My first car was a used 1969 Toyota Corolla. My second car was a 1979 Datsun 300ZX (pre corporate name change to Nissan). The improvement in build quality over that ten years should have absolutely terrified Detroit.
I was in college in the early 1970s when Japanese brands became serious contenders in high-end audio equipment.
Consumer video recording put an end to the belief that while Japanese companies could copy American and European engineering, they couldn't innovate.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.