Particularly relevant to HN is that Bobby's primary writing partner for decades was John Perry Barlow, cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
by John Perry Barlow
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,
I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I
ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You
have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address
you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always
speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally
independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.
Many of Bobby Weir's best-known songs had lyrics penned by Barlow. The world is a brighter place because of their partnership, and a little more grey in their absence.
While predation by rats is curious news, much more common (here in the US at least) is predation by raccoons.
Conservation-minded management practice is often to build a "bat friendly" gate at the entrance of a significant bat cave or an abandoned mine portal. These gates are the ideal perch for hungry raccoons to pluck bats right out of the air. Bats emerge from entrances like this near the ceiling, when possible, specifically to avoid predators. Poorly designed gates are the opposite of "bat friendly" and turn the safe entrances into buffets for raccoons.
Why do we care about protecting bats? They're the #1 predator for night-flying insects, which are often crop destroying pests. Every bat we lose equals more chemical pesticide that farmers must use to efficiently grow crops.
This website is a useless exercise, but the idea in the submission title "using fewer syllables to express numbers" has utility.
As a musician, I frequently need to count to a rhythm, and the pesky number seven's two syllables throws my cadence off. So I count a bar of 8 like this:
> one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight
Occasionally I'll need to count up to as high as 16, which is especially tricky. It'd be easiest to do it in hexadecimal-style, but somehow I can't bring myself to count a part out as:
> one, two, three, four, five, six, sev, eight, nine, a, b, c, d, e, f, g
If only I could convince musicians to use zero-based indexing instead of one-based.
I’ve settled on “sen” for seven when I want it short.
Zero could also do with being a monosyllable, but at least we have “oh” and “nil” for that.
Then there are letters. 25 of them are monosyllables (though a few like “aitch” and “kyoo” cut it fine), then w (double you) is three syllables, and not even right, it’s double vee.
Unfortunately, once I mysteriously manage to right these two wrongs, power will go to my head, and I’ll go ahead with other spelling reforms and abolishing a few stupid letters like c and x and replacing them with others for all those poor fricatives that have been loaded onto -h digraphs.
And while all that’s going on, I’ll be learning Telugu better, and it will laugh at me with its average of 2.5 syllables per digit.
Omg! I had just been thinking about this and had written up a proposal but hadn't published it. We could organically make common usage accept a single-syllable 7. Here's the writeup:
MAKE 7 MONOSYLLABIC
There is a lot of research that, in languages where the numbers have more syllables, native speakers have a harder time remembering sequences of numbers, because your brain has to store the cognitive load of saying it. So native Chinese speakers are much better at it than Spanish.
English is fortunate in in that all the digits are one syllable ... except for seven. If we could fix that, then we could cause a massive amount of good, when summed over all the times people have to remember numbers.
The good news is that we can promote this in a backward-compatible way, without having to coordinate in advance. Just commit to pronouncing 7 as "sen" (pretend you clipped the word as se--n), and eventually it will be the accepted pronunciation and codified as standard. As long as the listener is expecting a number there, they will automatically fill in the missing sounds and parse it as a 7.
Try it out some time! "Oh, there weren't very many, just six or sen."
That runs into the issue I was talking about in the proposal, where it's not backward-compatible and requires people to be informed of and sympathetic to the renaming. "Sen" will already be accepted as referring to 7, without such coordination, so long as it has enough context to be parsed as a number.
I doubt anyone would associate 'sen' with seven: 'sev' would be much more obvious. Whereas 'sept' is already used as a prefix within English to mean seven such as September (Roman seventh month), septuplets (seven children in a single birth) and septuagenarian (a 70 year old).
Anyhow, this discussion is moot as nobody is going to follow any proposal.
The whole point is that you don't need to get anyone to consciously follow any proposal, you just push common usage in the direction of saying "sen" to the point that it becomes correct, and you can take action now to assist it, without having to coordinate, and without breaking your existing communication.
With respect, your comments read as ignoring all the points I brought up in in order to show off knowledge you're proud to have.
I was in orchestra and band for about 10 years growing up. I never had a problem with seven (when we occasionally counted that high), it just gets two half-duration notes compared to the others. NBD
Going up to 16 would be pretty challenging though. OTOH, what's wrong with one and two and three and four and ...? I think we would did one eee and uh two eee and uh for 4-way subdivision, but I forget the triplet division.
The drummers all seemed to have a common syntax for different note length patterns without numbers, which you could probably drop in between numbered beats too.
That reminds me of this music track(1) I'd added to my "flowstate" playlist(2) that has an insistent, driving beat with polyrhythms that caught my ear. I tried counting along and realized the primary beat is in 7/8, and in confirming it found myself counting, "one, two, three, four, five, six, sen, one,...".
In my father's accent/dialect (South Wales), the number seven is monosyllabic: it sounds more like "sevn" (with the v pronounced quite softly). The number "eleven" is similarly monosyllabic, and sounds more like "levn". I often use this when counting to a rhythm. Shame the numbers from thirteen onwards do have more than one syllable.
I'm having a hard time thinking of a good time signature that accents on a subdivision smaller than an eighth. Can you give an example?
I also don't know any musicians that would count everything. I usually hear "and", "and" "uh", "ee" "and" "uh", etc. between the downbeats and numbers are typically used to count whole notes.
Personally I prefer to use non-numerical word phrases (especially in odd meters) with the right number of syllables instead. If you want to you can even place accents where they're supposed to be with right words.
In French, all numbers between 10 and 15 except 14 are monosyllabic! So, you just might say "dix, onze, douze" and so on. (Quatorze will have to become 'torze or something.)
It helps to count from a as either zero or one (use “o” as zero then) rather than a as ten. Won’t help you with hexadecimal compatibility if you take the former but it should overcome the brain obstacle, and scales up to x/26ths at least.
Given all of music's esoteric conventions and historical vestiges, I'm surprised they don't zero index. Octaves divided into thirds and fifths, who decided that was ok?
Have you considered that it's used as a unit to represent capacity of our power grid?
As in, we have now have the energy capacity for 300,000 fewer homes given this operating data center.
So not only is it a relatable unit, but it's an incredibly meaningful unit for those who care about ensuring that energy availability actually support something of value (families) rather than something wasteful (crypto mining).
They are another somewhat closed ecosystem and becoming more closed over time. Better than a TV that runs Linux, (so far still) better than Android, worse than any "real" Linux distribution.
They are mostly on the wrong side in the war on general-purpose computing.
Honestly we could consider Chromebook just as Android. Yes technically they run on Linux kernel but there is so much going wrong. It's far from what everyone think when saying Linux desktop.
ChromOS is Linux in the way that Android is linux. Technically it has a Linux kernel, but that's it. It is not a Linux desktop under your control. It's a strictly proprietary OS you have very little control of. It's not Linux in the way that literally everyone else means the word.
As pointed out downthread this isn't true. It is under your control. All modern chromebooks let you enable developer mode which gives you root access, at which point is is a linux desktop in the way literally everyone means the word.
PS: Someone changed the title of this submission after my comment. It was originally something like "By my count, Linux has over 11% of the desktop market." This statistic is obviously clickbait and false, even if you count ChromeBooks, though ChromeBooks are not what people mean when they say "Linux desktop".
Google has been working on Fuchsia, a new open source OS which in theory can replace Linux as the base of ChromeOS and Android
But it is unclear how committed they still are to this. Some suggest it was just a “keep our options open” project or a “stop smart people from doing it for our competitors” project. They are actually using it in anger on their Nest Hub devices, but we don’t know if they still plan to take it any further than that
It's a fascinating thought experiment to consider a desert island populated with newborn babies, growing up to be individuals, forming a societal structure, forming culture, without any pre-existing human input.
Obviously there's a "chicken and egg problem" that human babies require human adults.
Raising chickens, however, doesn't have this "chicken and egg problem". You can hatch baby chicks from eggs, and despite them having never seen an adult chicken before, they're pre-programmed to behave exactly like chickens. Every newborn chick is fully programmed from birth.
What would humanity look like after a "hard reboot"?
(Obviously the way to answer this question is that we must send a rocket full of babies to Mars and live-stream their evolution.)
Not exactly the same, but there was the case in Fiji of 'Fiji chicken boy' - when his mom passed way, his dad abandoned him in a chicken coop, and he was basically living with the chickens. When he was later discovered, he was behaving like a chicken, making clucking sounds and pecking at his food.
It could be the case that society is responding to overpopulation in many strange ways that serve to reduce/reverse the growth of a stressed population.
Perhaps not making as many babies is the longterm solution.
Funny that Hack #1 compares list versus set value lookup, but the timer doesn't include the time to copy the list into a set. Hack #2 warns against unnecessary copying, and the time for copying the list is almost the same as the performance gain in Hack #1.
In fact, creating a set takes longer than copying a list since it requires hash insertion, so it's actually much faster to do the opposite of what they suggest for #1 (in the case of a single lookup, for this test case).
Here's the results with `big_set = set(big_list)` inside the timing block for the set case:
I'm surprised that this was not the first complaint. It's pretty clear "Hack" #1 isn't going to work.
import random
import time
def timeit(func, _list, n=1000):
start = time.time()
for _ in range(n):
func(_list=_list )
end = time.time()
print(f"Took {end-start} s")
return
def lstsearch(_list):
sf = random.randint(0,len(_list))
if sf in _list:
return
return
def setsearch(_list):
sf = random.randint(0, len(_list))
if sf in set(_list):
return
return
mylist = list(range(100000))
timeit(lstsearch, mylist)
timeit(setsearch, mylist)
----
Took 0.23349690437316895 s
Took 0.8901607990264893 s
There is an enormous push to build and power data centers in the DC / Northern Virginia region, and there's legislation in West Virginia right now requiring all coal-fired power plants to operate at at least 69% capacity at all times to support it.
> “West Virginia has numerous coal plants that have powered this country for decades. We need these plants to remain operational,” [WV Governor] Morrisey said. “… We will never turn our backs on our existing coal plants and we will work with the federal government to pursue new coal-fired generation.”
The only way new coal plants get built from today on is with massive lifetime subsidies, because they are uncompetitive. Ie, if they get built it’s for dumb politics not economics
https://www.eff.org/john-perry-barlow
https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence#main-contentMany of Bobby Weir's best-known songs had lyrics penned by Barlow. The world is a brighter place because of their partnership, and a little more grey in their absence.
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