Interesting Links for 12-04-2023

[andrewducker]

1. How Nicola Sturgeon's departure has helped to open the floodgates for anti-trans policy in UK politics

(tags:politics uk transgender lgbt OhForFucksSake bigotry )

2. 'Alien Calculus' Could Save Particle Physics From Infinities

(tags:quantum mathematics )

3. Russia's civilian economy is down around 50% as the country shifts to a war economy

(tags:russia war economics )

4. Voters want more compassionate politicians, survey suggests amid Labour ad row

(tags:politics uk OhForFucksSake )

5. Wind turbine blades recycling breakthrough

(tags:windpower recycling GoodNews )

6. No, current AI is not the solution to healthcare

(tags:healthcare ai )

7. Europe and Ukraine have repulsed Russia's attempts to weaponize energy - so far.

(tags:energy russia europe ukraine war )

8. UK economy to shrink by 0.3% this year, the worst performance in the G7

(tags:uk economy doom )

9. Nearly three quarters of Conservative voters want the UK to build more social housing

(tags:UK housing conservatives polls )

10. Truck carrying 40,000 pounds of toxic soil from East Palestine train derailment site crashes on highway (if you made this up then nobody would believe you)

(tags:environment usa incompetence WTF pollution )

11. Why does Outlook map Ctrl+F to Forward instead of Find, like all right-thinking programs?

(tags:software ux )

12. Traffic police roll out new way to catch reckless motorists - drones

(tags:drone traffic driving safety police UK )

13. EVE Online player uses obscure rule to pull off the biggest heist in the game's history (by buying shares and voting themselves into management)

(tags:games crime mmorpg EveOnline )

Comments

11.

[rhythmaning]

Proof that the boss isn't always right. Just look at Musk.

[dewline]

1. Oh...shit.

3. The civilians of Russia are in trouble. :-(

4. How do we make sure that such are elected? In any country?

[andrewducker]

4) Better voting systems

[calimac]

1. The same thing is going on in Republican states in the US. Trans people are becoming the demons of the moment - to people who don't know any, I guess. Biden has been moving in some disturbing directions also, but US political parties are decentralized. The President can't make Congresspeople of his party adhere to his positions, and there's lots of Democratic Congress members who won't accept any anti-trans policies.

2. This is about as clear an explanation for lay readers as you'll get of a highly techy subject, but it's still more than I want to absorb. I knew that the three-body problem is too complex to solve, but giving up on stacked Feynman diagrams because it's too hard - isn't that what computers are for?

4. We're getting a lot of this in the US also - random abuse of politicians for supposedly wanting bad things - but it's mostly coming from Republicans.

8. Look on the bright side: the UK can't be the worst economy in the EU any more, because it's not in the EU any more. (g)

Less-than-zero-sum economics

[hairyears]

That 0.3% contraction is an aggregation across the whole economy, and it almost certainly conceals an increasing share of income going to the top decile and the top percentile.

Betcha living costs (especially rents) are rising steeply at the bottom of the market, for people who are least-able to afford it, and have no leverage to get a pay rise.

#10 Truck carrying 40,000 pounds

[darkoshi]

40,000 pounds = 20 tons/truck

"The rail operator said that as of April 10, nearly 20,000 tons of waste soil have been removed from that site, but according to the Ohio Emergency Management Agency, there is still more than 17,000 tons of soil that needs to be removed. "

20,000 tons = 1000 truckloads
So 1000 truckloads have already been removed and there are 850 more to go. I wonder where it is all being moved to.
At those numbers, it doesn't seem that unusual to me for there to have been a crash. But they should at least put covers on the tops of trucks carrying toxic soil.

[simont]

#11: I got confused by the title, because it made me think of emacs, which maps ^F to 'forward' in a different sense, namely 'go forward one character in the current buffer'. (Goes with ^B to go backwards, and Alt-F and Alt-B to move by a word instead of a character. Also imitated by GNU readline, and other line editing systems that imitate that in turn, such as gnuplot.)

[andrewducker]

Oh yeah, for lots of older software Ctrl-F was forward. But it definitely became Find over time in lots of UI software. There's probably a PhD in researching how that kind of thing changed over time.

3. Russia's civilian economy

[trailer_spot]

While I don't think the article backs up the headline in any meaningful way, the article itself is very interesting and provides a lot of data.
I think chances are very slim that there will be an uprising from within the country. But it's at least good to know that its citizens experience the consequences of the war.

Re: 3. Russia's civilian economy

[andrewducker]

Which headline?

Re: 3. Russia's civilian economy

[trailer_spot]

The one that shows up in your entry: "Russia's civilian economy is down around 50% as the country shifts to a war economy"
I'm also not sure where it comes from. The link first goes to the Russian version, but you can then switch to the English one. I was wondering if maybe the headline changed later. The article then provides a number of statistics. But I don't think it's fair to extrapolate from those numbers that a large part of the civilian economy is down by half.

Re: 3. Russia's civilian economy

[andrewducker]

Re-reading it, you're right - 20-30% would have been more accurate. That's what I get for writing headlines on the fly!