Another similar “shortcut” I’ve heard about was that a system that analyzed job performance determined that the two key factors were being named “Jared” and playing lacrosse in high school.
And, these are the easy-to-figure-out ones we know about.
If the bias is more complicated, it might never be spotted.
Yes, “Bias Automation” is always an issue with the training data, and it’s always harder to resolve than anyone thinks.
I love that article. There are also ones about dates and times. The more you deal with dates and times, the more you realize how messed up they are.
It was Internet Explorer. But, what was probably confusing about it was that anything that required Internet access would start up the program that dialed the modem and connected to the Internet. So, clicking on the icon would eventually launch the browser, but first it would launch the dial-up program, which would take about 30s to connect.
As an aside, it really grates to see how Microsoft called their browser “The Internet”. And that’s the least dastardly thing they did that let them use their monopoly on operating systems to destroy Netscape.
Was it Jen? She was entrusted to take care of the Internet by Roy and Moss, and she did a piss-poor job of it.
My favourite story about aircraft design about some of the design mistakes on the F-16 fighter.
The F-16 was the first fly-by-wire fighter. They didn’t have much experience with it, and tried out some new things. One was that instead of having a stick between the legs of the pilot they used a side stick. And, since everything was fly-by-wire they didn’t need the stick to mechanically move. They decided they’d just use a solid stick with pressure transducers, since it was simpler and more reliable than a stick that moved.
The trouble was that the pilots couldn’t estimate how much pressure they were using. This led to the pilots over-rotating on take-off (pulling back too hard). Even funnier was that at early airshows, when the pilots were doing a high-speed roll, you could see the control surfaces twitching with the heartbeat of the pilots as they shoved the stick as hard as they could to get maximum roll.
That led to them adding a small amount of give to the stick, essentially giving the pilots feedback on how hard they were pushing the control surfaces.
Another more subtle issue with the design was that originally the stick was set up for forward, back, left and right aligned with the axes of the plane itself. But, they discovered that when pilots pulled back on the stick, they were pulling slightly towards themselves, causing the plane to also roll. So, they realigned it so that “pulling back” is slightly pulling towards the pilot’s body, rather than directly along the forward / backward axis of the plane.
There was a listener question on a science podcast recently that asked about how the temperature changed on the moon during the recent solar eclipse.
They almost got what a solar eclipse was, but not quite. During a solar eclipse, the moon gets between the sun and the earth, blocking the light getting to the earth and casting a shadow on the earth. The side of the moon facing the earth is completely dark because the thing that normally lights it up (the sun) is completely behind it. But, the back side of the moon is getting full sun and just as hot as normal.
I think part of the problem with understanding all this is that the sun is just so insanely bright. Like, it’s a bit hard to believe that the full moon is so bright just because it’s reflecting sunlight. It’s also amazing that the “wandering stars” (planets) look like stars when they’re just blobs of rocks or gases that are reflecting the insanely bright light of the sun.
It’s amazing if you think about it. Light comes out of the sun in every possible direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the surface of Mercury, and only some of that light is reflected back out. The light reflected from Mercury goes in almost every direction. A tiny fraction of it hits the earth. But, even with that indirect bounce, it’s bright enough to see with the naked eye.
Yeah, sometimes they’re unavoidable, Shogun is ok, but I still think everything would be better without them. I wonder if there’s a version of Shogun without subtitles for people (not me) who understand both English and Japanese.
On the subject of Shogun, one thing that’s hilarious: the English is supposedly Portuguese. It took me a while to figure that one out. Like, when they’re speaking Japanese it’s Japanese, but when they’re speaking English, it’s supposed to be Portuguese. At least, I think? Although there were some scenes early on that I think where they were speaking English. I guess there’s no way you could get away with a TV show where the two actual spoken languages were Portuguese and Japanese, with everything subtitled for English speakers. But, the way they did it is really weird. Like, the actual Portuguese speakers sometimes speak English with a Portuguese accent, and the Spanish speakers speak Spanish-accented English, which is maybe supposed to be Spanish-accented Portuguese, but the main character speaks a variant of British English, but it’s supposed to be accentless(?) Portuguese?
See, at the end? What you’re describing is timezones with a different name, and more fine grained so we have more of them. This makes it harder.
No, timezones are intended for people who live in them to be in a time that’s roughly coordinated with other people living in the same area. I’m saying that’s unnecessary. There’s no reason that 12:00PM should be close to the time that the sun is at its peak. That already isn’t true for people in the west of China. For them it’s normal to think that 3PM is when the sun is at its peak. What I’m suggesting is that that be applied worldwide.
If, for some reason, you want to know where the sun is relative to someone else on the planet, there are plenty of ways of doing that. I suggested some. That doesn’t mean that you need time zones.
Business hours are correlated to where the sun is
There’s a correlation, sure. But that isn’t enough information to know if a business is open, especially if it’s a business in another country which has different cultural ideas about when things should be open. Business hours are no reason to stick with clunky time zones.
People communicate with people in parts of the planet where everyone would say it’s a different time because the sun is in a different part of the sky.
No, they say that because it’s what they’re used to. If they were used to using UTC they’d say it’s the same time. They already do that for some things, because time is understood to be related to causality. As in, “Did that happen before or after the bridge collapsed?” People in different time zones will agree that in that sense, time is the same for everyone, even if they’re using a different time zone for historical reasons.
Again, we already have UTC. People use it where it makes sense.
And don’t use it where it would also make sense for historic reasons. People also use US customary units not because “they make sense”, but because of historic reasons.
Like I said, people who use Celsius know when to wear a coat.
So do people who use Fahrenheit.
But if we’re maintaining that 0 and 100 are special numbers, then Fahrenheit maps hazardous conditions more neatly to those numbers.
I completely disagree. 0 Fahrenheit is very cold, but there’s nothing special about that temperature. You need to start dressing for cold conditions long before it gets that cold, and if you dress for cold conditions you can easily handle temperatures well below 0F. 100F is also nothing useful. Yes, it’s very hot, but you start needing to take precautions for heat long before it hits 100F.
Basically the Fahrenheit scale has nothing particularly useful at 0 or 100F. The Celsius scale has useful things at 0C and 100C. 100C is not useful for weather, but 0C is very useful for weather because it tells you whether it’s likely to be icy out.
You can see how it detracts from the image though, can’t you?
Crude is approximately the same as water, about 0.8 to 0.9 g/mL. But, even if it were significantly less dense, like gasoline (0.74 g/mL) it’s still good for an order-of-magnitude calculation. Knowing that 1L has a mass of 1kg is especially useful since many of the liquids we commonly encounter are water-based.
I’m imagining a tank wearing a fez.
Below zero is when air temperature starts to get hazardous
Hazardous in what sense? If you’re not wearing proper clothing, lower than 10C can be hazardous. Many hikers who get lost get hypothermia even if it’s above zero because they were dressed for an energetic hike, not sitting around waiting for a rescue.
If you are properly dressed, -10C is no big deal. Many people do outdoor sports for hours when the temperature is well in the negatives.
IMO, if you’re within 10C of ideal room temperature, you may be uncomfortable but you’re probably not in danger. But, if the temperature is above 30C or below 10C you need to take precautions: shade and water in the case of hot weather, warm clothing in the case of cold weather. I don’t think there’s anything special about 0C for humans, except for the fact it’s when water turns to ice, rain turns to snow, etc. If you have the right gear, 5C, 0C, -10C and -20C are all survivable, possibly even comfortable. You just need more and more specialized gear as the temperature gets lower.
I gotta ask, do you use a thermometer to boil water?
No, but I use a thermometer (built into the electric kettle) to prepare tea. Greens want to be brewed at 75-80C. Whites are often about 70C. Oolongs are about 95C.
The numeric value associated with boiling water has no impact on cooking, because the boiling water doesn’t care.
But the human who is doing the cooking might care.
Tineszones exist because we have two uses for time
Not really. Time zones exist for 1 reason: it was too difficult for each town to have its own time, especially when it came to train schedules. So, they were organized into zones so that 6pm in Baltimore and 6pm in Philadelphia were the same. But, people were still used to having 12 pm being the time when the sun was at its peak, so NYC was put in a different zone from Los Angeles.
To communicate across wide stretches of the earth, you need a way to know where the sun is wherever the person you’re talking to is
You normally don’t need to know where the sun is, you need to know if it is normal business hours. Or, if it’s a friend, what their schedule is like and if this is a convenient time for them. You can search for the time in that other place and guess that maybe their business hours are 9 AM to 5 PM, but that isn’t always true across companies and especially across cultures. What you really need to know is something like “what are Dimitri’s business hours” which is easier if everyone uses UTC. If you ask “What are Dimitri’s business hours” and you get the answer 8h - 16h EET, now you need to figure out what “EET” means. But, if you get 6h - 14h UTC and you’re also using UTC, there’s no conversion needed.
is the man in Madrid likely asleep if I’m eating lunch?
If that’s what you need to know, what you really need are the current UTC offsets used to describe time zones. Just store those as “sun offsets” relative to cities and nuke the time zone aspect.
In Canada the scale goes higher and lower.
Then sometimes in summer:
Fahrenheit does coincidentally line up nicely for subjective weather scales
In what sense?
similar to how pint is a good cup size
Actually a pint is 2 cups.
People can spend hours outside at below 0C temperatures as long as they’re wearing the right gear. Some people even like doing sports outside when it’s -20C.
But, you’re right that most of the time people only care to the 5 degree range. It’s a bit different when it’s close to the ideal room temperature. If you personally like it at 22C and the room is set to 20C you will probably feel cold after a while. If it’s 24C you’ll probably feel overly warm. But, except for something like measuring a fever, people almost never care about fractional degrees.
The full scene if anyone’s interested.
Carl Weathers is an interesting contrast to Arnold. Arnold got his muscles by focusing on how he looked, on bodybuilding. Weathers developed his physique training for professional gridiron football. He played college football, then in the NFL (coached by John Madden) and CFL. Arnold used his unique physique as a way to get into movies without ever training as an actor. Weathers was studying theatre arts while playing college football, and finally finished the degree in 1974 just after retiring from pro football. He went on to get a master of theatre arts later.
Both of them pivoted extremely successfully to comedy later in their careers, with Weathers doing Happy Gilmore and Arrested Development, and Arnold doing his whole variety of comedy movies.
Also, good to know that Weathers loved this scene:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/baby-carl-weathers-has-a-stew-going