Posts by Julian Bradfield 240 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jul 2008
There used to be (maybe still is) a "General Studies" A-level. No reputable school allowed pupils to take it. I told my school I wanted to see what happened if somebody walked into the exam and took it without preparation, and they agreed, even though it meant me coming in during half-term. I confess I cracked the night before and looked at a past paper to see what the format of the exam was, but that was all. Yes, I got an A. Amused a lot of people:)
A perfect opportunity to repost a comment from a few years ago:
A while ago I was at a conference on a Californian university campus, staying in shared dorms, the apartments of which had hotel style card door locks. Late at night, I went out to look for Perseids. As I shut the door, I realized I had the cafeteria card in my hand, not the door card. My roommates were all drinking the night away with their buddies in other rooms.
Just before resigning myself to a night on the doorstep, I thought, ok, why just try the old credit card trick. Five seconds with the nice flexible cafeteria card, and I was back in...
Can't imagine how any lock can yield to that these days!
There are plenty of people who use git without knowing how it works. We use it to store teaching materials, and although all of us are quite bright and also have all the training required to understand git in intimate detail, most of us can't be bothered. I know "git pull", "git add", and "git commit", which is all I need to get on with my actual job of teaching the students. In previous years, we even used it to collect student exercises, though thankfully that's gone, and I guarantee less than 10% of the students had any idea of what was going on. Git is used by inexpert git-users any time somebody in position of either power or enthuisiasm decides to use git for a project/job.
Churchill certainly didn't say that, as he spoke English. He might have said "A lie goes halfway round the world before the truth gets its boots on", but there's no evidence he ever did.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
seems a fairly comprehensive investigation.
And as Churchill was an enthusiatic and skilled user of both true and false propaganda, and massive deceptions, I'm sure he would have embraced the opportunities offered by social media in wartime (and probably peacetime too - he was never a nice person).
I don't know which coward you are, but if you're the same one I was replying to, you said that those who never speak of it are the ones who kill themselves. Of course nobody speaks of specific plans if they actually intend suicide; but in the case at hand, Turing never gave anybody any reason to suppose he was unhappy, and he was actively working on the theory of morphogenesis.
He *may* have been like that. But the notion that "The people who cry out that they'll do it never will; it is the quiet ones, the ones that never speak of it, that will do it" is a tempting myth (especially when someone expresses suicidal thoughts to you). In reality, some do, some don't. Amongst the thankfully small handful of people I have known, or known of well enough to hear from friends or relatives, who killed themselves, none was completely out the blue. Curiously, it's hard to find actual statistics - somebody should surely have gone through inquest findings to get an estimate. There is some evidence that a majority of attempted suicides are impulsive rather than planned; but of course we don't know for the ones who succeeded, except when they leave notes.
Take-home: if somebody expresses suicidal ideations to you, don't dismiss it because "those who cry out never will".
Turing was not "sentenced to chemical castration shortly before he took his own life". Firstly, the sentence (more than two years before his death) was the jail sentence usual at the time, with the alternative of probation if he took part in the hormone treatment experiment; secondly, this had finished a year before his death; thirdly, the claim that he killed himself is highly contentious. His nearest and dearest (one of whom told me so, and of course it's on the record in many places) reported that he had not been particularly disturbed either the the trial, "treatment" or after, and had been in good spirits for a long time before his death. Owing to the screwup in the investigation, we can never be sure; but (unless you're a homophobic coroner who thought that homosexuals were by definition mentally disturbed) there was never any good evidence for suicide rather than accident.
Turing was a great mathematician and scientist who suffered like every other careless homosexual man at the time (having a relationship with a crook was not a smart move - that's what led to the arrest); he doesn't need to turned into more a martyr than he was, thank you, he stands by himself.
Even vanilla LLMs have their uses. I watched a talk the other day by Terry Tao, who said that he'd got useful assistance with a proof from ChatGPT - it makes up nonsense, but it suggested a line of attack he hadn't thought of, which worked. When one of the smartest people alive thinks LLMs will be useful, it's probably time to consider more carefully the kneejerk reaction. And when they're combined with things that *can* reason, they could be seriously useful. A combination of LLM and deductive reasoning solves International Maths Olympiad geometry problems better than most competitors.
"dived" is correct in proper English. Historically "dive" had both weak and strong past tenses (Old English déaf, dyfde, Middle English def, defde), but only the weak survived. "dove" is probably a modern reinvention of a strong past tense.
"speeded" has been around for a while.
"lighted" is also a weak past going all the way back to Old English (from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles: "Me lihtede candles to æten bi.")
"shined" as a weak past goes back to Middle English, but it didn't survive after 1800 (as intransitive) in modern British English.
I grew up on MVS, as filtered and made manageable by Cambridge Computer Lab. If other old farts haven't yet noticed, you can now sign up to IBM Zxplore, and get to learn the real thing on real z/OS systems! Of course, these days, you can do it under Linux if you don't want to use proper MVS.
Despite the patent fact that he had committed (high) treason by compassing the death of the Sovereign, he was not actually charged with treason. He was charged with the lesser offence of attempting to injure or alarm the Sovereign, from the Treason Act 1842. Whether the motivation for introducing this offence was as you say, I don't know - but it appears the policy you describe is still being followed. Had he been charged with treason, he'd have been liable for life imprisonment.
Cav - psychopaths have distinctive brain characteristics. So do taxi-drivers (at least in places where they have to have the Knowledge). Detecting differences in brain structures tells you nothing about whether the difference should be called a mental disturbance - that's a social judgement.
Depends how much you like using your resources to slow people down. Me, I blacklist (with DROP) the IP address on one failed login to my mail server, for 24 hours. I typically have 8k banned addresses at any one time; that's quite a lot of log-in attempts being blocked (and not filling up my log file). And with a bit of luck, they spend some time trying to establish a connection before giving up.
I'm fascinated by what you mean by "do some actual research". Could you explain?
Yes, of course the world has been much warmer in the past. There's a difference between temperature shifts taking millions of years (or even thousands of years), and those taking a few decades.
You used to be right, but over time we've slowly abandoned more and more of the in-house stuff and moved to using central university systems. It makes sense, really, provided the central systems have most of the functionality of in-house and the increased workload is not too high.
As for advising the centre on how to procure and install a large complex system...they don't want to know.
Payroll *was* run in parallel for three months, and there haven't (as far as I know) been problems with staff pay.
However, our PhD students are not staff - they are, god help us, "suppliers" of their research, and their stipends are paid under the procurement part of the system, which is the one that has gone catastrophically wrong (as opposed to the HR part, which merely went infuriatingly and wastefully wrong).
As far as I understand it, yes. The old system (which also had our 2021/2 P60s on it!) was switched off in July, and we started (supposedly) being able to use the new system some time in September (I forget when, it's all a blur, and thankfully I don't buy things). In the interim there was a manual process for urgent purchases.
Not only have lab suppliers and stationers stopped supplying us, we can't even order pizza for student welcome parties, because no pizza company in Edinburgh will deal with us.
The "internet" doesn't see or think anything. A small number of *people* think about it, the vast majority of *people* read the content, whether it's in British, American, Indian, Canadian or international (which used to be mainly British in spelling outside South America, and is now a random hodge-podge depending on the country and even individual school of the E2L speaker).
I remember a friend's (parents') number from the 1980s, whom I only called once, I think. I remember it because it was the old days when we used to say the number on picking up, and for some reason "Aberystwyth tri pedwar chwech pedwar" stuck firmly in my brain ... (I speak no Welsh, but know a little about it.)
Depends what you mean by validate. From what I see in my logs, this usually means (a) seeing if a RCPT command passes (luckily they seem to be ok with 4xx replies, since I greylist), and (b) checking that a RCPT with random local-part is rejected. That is some form of validation.
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