I think you could consider all of physics or even all of science to be made up of placeholders meant to keep things moving until a better explanation comes along.

I agree. I would add that intuition, common sense, and ideologies are also just placeholders in our journey to a better world.

Thank you!

I appreciate the comparison and analysis. I’ll keep it in my “maybe I’ll tackle it someday” list, but I’ve mostly moved away from writing that is hostile to the reader.

I don’t have a problem with complex concepts, even when they ultimately go over my head. I don’t even have a problem with stylistic weirdness in service of the message. I draw the line at writers who treat me like an imbecile, whether directly or through their own sense of superiority.

Actually, the long “Giving Tree” excerpt in one of the reviews reflects my own views. If that means we might already share opinions, then I for sure don’t need to suffer abuse along the way. 😀

An obvious problem with my attitude is that I then shut myself off from discussing the merits of a work.

I just read a description and a few reviews. I’ve decided that, for me, it’s unlikely to be worth the effort.

Do you think it was worth the effort for you?

At that point, I think pulling it out to an appendix is the right thing to do. Whenever I find a book with appendices, I do one of two things.

1. If an appendix looks like “prerequisite” material, I read it first.

2. If it looks like “further reading” or “deeper dive” material, I note where it’s referenced in the main text and return to it later.

The main reason I prefer footnotes to end notes is the separation of concerns. When a book has end notes, they are usually mixed with citations. I don’t mind managing 2 bookmarks or the eReader linking back and forth, but I really dislike following the reference to find that it just points at a whole other book.

Structurally, the most challenging book I’ve ever read was “The Message of THE QUR ĀN” by Muhammad Asad.

Start with the fact that the QUR ĀN itself is extremely non-linear. So much so that I think that this alone requires a great deal of study to address.

The text is 2 columns, the original Arabic adjacent to his English translation. There are copious and often long footnotes. The footnotes cross reference other footnotes, sometimes in chains. I read only the English.

I had to read it 4 times. Once just ignoring footnotes. Again, this time including just first-level footnotes. Again, following footnote chains back to their sources in the text. Finally, to reread just the text after pretending that I had everything figured out.

It took me a year to get through it to my satisfaction, although it was not the only reading, or even major project.

There is also the MRI intended to help kids understand what they will be going through.

Only if those people can also be infinitely packed into the distance the leading truck (the set of wheels) manages to travel.

Which, I guess is fair play in a thought experiment involving different sizes of infinities. :)

Thanks. This is the first time I’ve seen a jokey enough presentation to feel comfortable in treating it as a hypothetical reality rather than a moral/ethical exercise.

🤣

Don’t worry, the first body or two will take care of it!

Yes, or come to a halt. You’d be surprised at how little it takes to reduce the already low friction to nothing. A bit of blood and a bit of resistance will bring it to a halt pretty quickly.

It’s always better to gain a full understanding of the system when trying to make important decisions.

The trolley has two sets of wheels, leading and trailing, both of which must remain on the same set of tracks.

The switch is designed to enable the trolley to change course, moving from one set of tracks to the other.

Throwing the switch after the leading set has passed, but before the trailing set has reached the switch points will cause the two sets to attempt travel on separate tracks. The trolley will derail, rapidly coming to a halt. If the trolley is moving slowly enough to permit this action, nobody dies.

Source: former brakeman (one of the people responsible for throwing switches), section hand (one of the people responsible for installing switches), and railroad welder (one of the people responsible for field repairs of switches).

Interesting. One of the chemicals they reference is tetrachloroethylene. According to this Wikipedia article:

Perhaps the greatest use of TCE is as a degreaser for metal parts. It has been widely used in degreasing and cleaning since the 1920s because of its low cost, low flammability, low toxicity and high effectivity as a solvent. The demand for TCE as a degreaser began to decline in the 1950s in favor of the less toxic 1,1,1-trichloroethane. However, 1,1,1-trichloroethane production has been phased out in most of the world under the terms of the Montreal Protocol, and as a result, trichloroethylene has experienced some resurgence in use as a degreaser.[17]

My grandfather had Parkinson’s. I would imagine that he had plenty of exposure in his work as a mechanic from about 1925 on.

What took so long? If you think about the history and the talking points of the anti-abortion and anti-contraception movements, this outcome is guaranteed when letting them gain power.

If you believe that a new human, with all associated rights and freedoms, is created at the moment of conception, then this outcome is obvious.

The only way it could have gone any differently would be to declare that conception can only occur as a result of actual sexual intercourse. And that leads to the conclusion that these embryos are not and can never be human.

So is it merely a lame joke to compare this to two’s complement math or is there something fundamental to be learned?

Same as all the crap that gets sold today. Some scammer, recognizing the inherent gullibility or natural cognitive biases of people invents a product or service or story, claims expertise and success, and gains some combination of wealth, power, and fame.

For example Gwyneth Paltrow makes bank by selling all kinds of crap on her Goop website.

Humans are easy to fool because our brains don’t work the way we think they do and other humans exploit that for their own gain. Some, like Penn and Teller, do it honestly for entertainment, others, like Sylvia Browne, do it dishonestly by claiming powers they don’t have.

Isn’t it sad that certain negative outcomes can be easily predicted by anyone bothering to think things through, yet no effort ever seems to go to mitigation, only spin and crocodile tears after the fact.

I think of my username as being like a lock on the door. It’s not going to stop someone who is dedicated to fucking with me, but it keeps the opportunistic fuckery at bay.

I agree with everything you’ve said, but modern technologies aren’t the only issue. The fact is that many food crops are hybrids that don’t breed true, and it’s been like that for many decades. That is, you can save seeds, even legally, but within one or two generations the plants revert to form, losing their desired characteristics and “hybrid vigour”.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as a GMO wheat. Yet saving seed at scale hasn’t been viable since at least the 1960s.

There was a recent post asking what the self-taught among us feel we are missing from our knowledge base. For me, it’s being able to calculate stuff like that for making decisions. I feel like I can spot an equivalence to the travelling salesman problem or to the halting problem a mile away, but anything more subtle is beyond me.

Of course, in this situation, I’d probably just see if I could find a sufficiently large precalculation and just pretend :)

What you are describing is a failure of education. Maybe not at the university level, but somewhere. When I taught at an adult vocational school in the 1990s, every course started with the same material: how to use a keyboard and mouse, how to use the operating system, how to navigate and use network resources, and how to use foundational software like word processors, spreadsheets , and data entry systems. And how to set up email clients.

We ran our own email server out of the networking class. Yes, it could be a bit flaky, but that just exercised their backup and recovery skills and kept all the email users on their toes. :)