xkcd

Mambrino

At least 130,000 people in northern California have been told to evacuate their homes after an overflow channel at the tallest dam in the US was weakened by heavy rainfall

Lesson in morbid curiosity: will the dam collapse or not?

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Differential equations, complex analysis, and abstract algebra. ...why? Okay, i can see differential equations as a motivation for calculus (we even had a couple of very simple one-dimensional examples in our calculus books in high school: "this stuff does have applications! see, dynamic model...

Mambrino

Gambia's ex-president Jammeh agrees to step down after negotiations.

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Nate's the Guy Who Can Predict The Election Because Science. That's the big claim to fame of the website. If he is wrong, then it's a bit cheap to point at everyone else who was also wrong. is it better to be right by accident instead of coming up on the wrong end of a probabilistic prediction? Lik...

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And remember, there's that proverb (or is it an adage?) about imitation and flattery.

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Car drives into a crowd in Melbourne

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One those confusing names. As a kid I was a history geek, so of course I did know everything about DDR a.k.a. East Germany. One day I was very confused for a brief moment, when suddenly all the other kids in the class knew everything about DDR too ... and were "it's so awesome!" Awesome? I...

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The discussion is getting out of the topic ("News in brief"), but it would be awfully late to get started on calculus for the first time not until you are a freshman in uni. Of course, the focus on practicing mechanical integration / derivation rules might be misplaced. Maybe it would be b...

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The Chinese state newspaper says the US risks a “large-scale war” with China if it attempts to blockade islands in the South China Sea

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And for some weird reason they recommend me to use toothbrush twice a day with fluorine toothpaste, not eat stuff that's bad for teeth, and give other advice that is bad for their business if patients do as told.

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And if I recall correctly, in ep I, the queen personally thanks the droid for saving the ship. So it's not like R2 units are treated as simple tools. On the other hand, a few minutes before that Obi Wan was incredibly blasé about the fact that R2 units were being obliterated by the handful. Of cour...

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Forgetting of course the fact that R2 could have told Luke at any point in the original trilogy that Vader was his father... (I don't doubt that perhaps someone among you who knows Star Wars better than I may prove me wrong, but...) I never really thought R2-D2 (or any astromech droid) was really t...

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Japanese insurance firm lays off 34 staff, replaces them with an AI based on IBM's Watson

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Sorry for double(triple) post, but this is totally different news so I suppose it's better to make a new post than edit the old... BBC: Facebook Live attack: Four held in Chicago Four people have been arrested in the US city of Chicago over a video live-streamed on Facebook, in which a bound and gag...

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Turkey government suspects foreign intelligence services behind the recent terror attack.

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Is this still the general US politics thread, too? Though this could go to the "future" thread:

BBC: Republicans drop a proposal to gut a congressional ethics watchdog after a critical Donald Trump tweet

That is the unaltered sub-headline. Welcome to 2017.

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To the surprise of no one, Leaked papers reveal that as Luxembourg’s PM, the European commission president [Juncker] obstructed the bloc’s tax reforms efforts (The Guardian)

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Well, this year, I started to take different forms of Doomsday argument a tiny bit more seriously. The form of the argument that I've found slightly unnerving: what is the chance that the world population distribution over time will resemble a) sigmoid until eternity, b) exponential until fast colla...

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Lovers: I just could not see it there. I thought it was a classic comrades-in-arms-friendship thing all the way through until I finally started reading this thread, really. Also, they were a weird cyber-crystal monk and armed guard to the temple of said monks; there might even be enforcing a celibac...

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You thought the Free World won the Cold War? Turns out, you were mistaken. It's only the somewhat less autocratic one.

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Someone on another forum already blamed Disney for Carrie Fisher's death: extreme dieting isn't too good for your heart, especially elderly people.

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So, was I the only one expecting the plot to be: You find out at the end that this whole world and mad scheme was a fantasy world made up by the gemstone which explained why no one recognised him, why no one noticed all the people with massive scars over their faces and why the journalist woman app...

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In my experience, there's still no royal route to understanding mathematics. Especially if the understanding is what you desire, you have to study the material, within the framework of formal courses at university or not. Most of the advanced ML stuff is more or less math-heavy graduate level, so th...

Mambrino

Meanwhile, Erdogan informs the world that the assassination was carried over by Gulenists. What on Earth Gulen would achieve with this? How about all those n+1 Islamists rebel factions that have been bombed in Aleppo by Russians, when the gunman even told he was carrying over a revenge over Aleppo? ...

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I finally got around to reading Andy Weir's The Martian... and it was okay. The science part of the science certainly was there, but on the other hand I was a bit disappointed in it as a novel. It's mostly just a log of the protagonist solving different problems, and while the engineer-in-me certain...

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...vampires?

edit. Well, we don't have much from this trailer, but I'm more hopeful about this sequel than the other Hollywood-rehashing-cyberpunk-classics thing (GitS remake).

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Images of the lorry show it was registered in neighbouring Poland and Polish media are suggesting it may have been stolen earlier on Monday. It is being reported that the dead passenger in the lorry was Polish while the nationality of the suspect under arrest has yet to be confirmed. Earlier, the o...

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PeteP wrote:I am pretty sure CU was applying that to the side of the company not the employees?

That... was not obvious to me, but the comment does make slightly more sense that way.

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Well, I do think the analogy is silly. The power imbalance and frankly, the whole nature of the relationship between employer and employee is fundamentally different than between partners in a romantic relationship. Especially when the discussion started with a news article about prof who thinks she...

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I'm still too attached to NoScript+uBlockO to change even to marginally better browser. No, I will not load a shitton of JS if the site actually works quite well without it. Also, to be frank, I like to have vague idea what is happening when I type stuff to address bar and know when I'm doing a sear...

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Jobs are like girlfriends/boyfriends. Interviews are dating. If people keep quitting you, the problem is you, not them. It's quite rare nowadays that you are dependent on your spouse's monies to eat and have a roof over your head, and that's a situation which creates a possibility for terrible rela...

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Let's just call it laziness, because why not? Using words sloppily results in dilution. Look at superlatives. How often, when someone uses the word awesome, do you believe they are actually struck with awe? When everyone's racist, nobody is. I don't believe this dilution thing. Racism is a very pow...

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I'm counting on the Chinese not being stupid, and retaliating only on appropriate scale (Trump says stern words about China, mainly as posturing aimed for his voters, they'll respond with stern words, mainly aimed to convince their populace that Chinese leaders are not weak). I mean, Trump didn't sa...

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Is that kind relativistic view of culture and moral workable in when "the other culture" is not some distant place but next door and you need to establish legal standards and the school nurse or maternity ward need some procedures to follow? For reasons like I don't believe idea of "s...

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Saw it, was a good film. Didn't know about the short story before, will try to get my hands on it now too. Very spoilery discussion: It certainly was a good science fiction film. But as a film, there was too many things I disliked to call it great. The physicist person felt more like a cardboard fig...

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Hollande won't seek re-election . Putin addressed the nation in a yearly speech Avoiding anti-Western rhetoric - by Sarah Rainsford in Moscow: This was a speech short on slogans and snappy soundbites. If there was a theme, then it was one of unity. It was a call to Russians to pull together as patr...

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The traditional Swedish giant Christmas goat in Gävle burned down in record time. The goat made of straw was destroyed in less than 24 hours after presented to the public. (Burning the goat is also a tradition, but not an officially sanctioned one.)

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France: the conservative presidential candidate is Francois Fillon He is proposing dramatic economic reforms that include slashing 500,000 public jobs, ending the 35-hour week, raising the retirement age and scrapping the wealth tax. Aren't French unions still a considerable force? This might turn ...

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How does Germany do it? They make propaganda detection part of their educational system. ...you have slightly rose-tinted glasses on. The next German parliamentary elections are scheduled next year, and AfD looks like it's improving on polls . I think the main reason why Germany is still OK-ish is ...

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Trump in NYTimes interview After a chat with a Marine corps general he is now convinced that waterboarding isn't that useful so there is not point in reinstating it, and also condemned at least one alt-right / white nationalist group but on the other hand defended Breitbart as a "conservative&...

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