Posts by baseh 45 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jul 2013
You probably mean that you are a citizen of USA.
Yes you are also an American as are the Mexicans, Argentinians , Cubans and Canadians (and many others).
Almost anybody refers to USA citizens as Americans which is not strictly correct.
So to reiterate: GULF OF AMERICA is strictly referring to a gulf in the continents of America.
If you choose to understand that as Gulf of USA, that is your (and Trump's) loose interpretation
and compared the length of the shores of US and Mexico?
The answer is roughly 2000 km Mexican v/s 2500 km US.
According to that the gulf should be named Golf of USA so naming it America is actually generous.
Sure, the previous name may remind of some 200-old not so pleasant occurrences but this is the reality today.
"your AI realises too late that the patch of blue sky aheah is actually the side of a light-blue truck."
The Tesla accident with the white truck as with other "invisible" cars could be easily avoided by mandatory markings/GPS location, like reflective bands or rear reflectors are today (but adapted for autonomous viewing systems). This will go a looong way towards making autonomous driving easier and safer.
Come to think of it, pedestrians should also wear visible means, something that is sadly overlooked today in the name of fashion. When I see bicycle riders and pedestrians crossing in all black clothes at night in the rain I'm asking myself if they are intentionally suicidal or simply do not care to live.
Damn right it does - DART brings to the binary additional momentum and angular momentum so the system total changes and consequently its orbit around the sun changes! Maybe not by a lot but it is still a change. So either Tom Statler was misquoted or the word "significantly" was dropped.
I don't believe that a scientist can make such a high school physics mistake
Just a small point about Arrival. I read the story a few years before the film and that made readily understandable the whole film.
The film explained but not clearly and without emphasizing strongly enough the difference between the human and alien perceptions: humans view time as a linear stream advancing forever in the direction of the unknown future while the aliens view time as a fourth dimension that can be traveled at will in any direction as we travel in the three spatial dimensions so the future is known. This perception is mirrored in their writing which is circular and can be written and read in any order and has no beginning or end, it is a indivisible whole.
Studying and internalizing the alien language unwittingly shifts the protagonist perspective to the alien one and so she can visualize her whole life past-present-and-future as a whole and not as a linear story.
She performs all events in her personal life even after knowing the end because in the alien philosophy you do what you have to do - it is preordained and there is no choice really (Was edited to avoid spoilers)
The alien viewpoint vs the human one is the real kernel of the story and film and it is a pity that most people (including my wife and friends) did not get it - I see it as a fault of the film - it is "boring" to explain but really necessary.
And yes, as already commented here the worry is now how to ease the Easing quietly. The bonds are already crashing at the mere hint of rising interest rates and the volatility jumps. It is a real worry about the "solid" investments, pensions, mortgages, etc., where the big money of the ordinary people is.
Answer to Mike Bell's "I really do wish some of you numpties would pay attention. iMessage will default to SMS delivery on failure IF YOU FECKING WELL ENABLE THAT OPTION."
Sorry Mike Bell it is you who does not understand!
The average Apple customer is not tech-savy and expects from Apple a ready-for-use gadget with no fiddling.
All settings should be automatic. not requiring the user to configure etc! In worst case, the user should be informed of the problem and guided how to solve it.
Leaving the user in limbo because he didn't read his contract 5 years ago i s a kind of lock-up,
Basically referendums will be probably be the way of the future, the technology (internet/social nets) even today is easily able to support popular voting on everything, even on the most trivial subjects.
However there is a very dark side to that: the ease of voting can lead to short term, populist and shallow decisions.
This comes back to one of the points of the post: education, education, education; without having a very good knowledge of the subject to be voted upon, how can you choose the optimal option???
And that leads to another facet of the popular vote, maybe the hardest of all: you should learn all you can about the subject before voting and if you feel that you do not know enough d o n o t vote!!
Each one of the steps above is fraught with dangers and potential misuse, so making it viable is a real challenge.
Is it realistic?
that is kept secret by interested parties (mainly financial institutions and bodies) so that they may profit from it.
Not only that, but even misinformation is used to increase their gains.
So how can an honest economist or person unaffiliated to the big ones calculate and predict economic events if the data they have is missing or even right misleading?
And by the way, this weekend idea is great - it enables taking a step back and see and think the larger picture and rise to the more rarefied levels above the day-to-day gruel
History teaches that humans remain complacent until a crisis occurs. Then they try to patch the system in an "economical" way. They do it until a real catastrophe happens. Then the whole old system has to be ripped up and rebuilt from scratch.
All is well for a time until a crisis ....
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