The utility locating industry sponsors an annual Locate Rodeo in which contestants compete to see who can map buried utilites with the greatest speed and accuracy. (Via Tom Whitwell)
Video of a useless Lego machine that combines 20 different mechanical linkages. Amazing, the strange things people do.
Via Scott Siskind, a company that promises to replace your mouth bacteria with a mutant strain that doesn't cause tooth decay.
With Bitcoin soaring again, Tyler Cowen explains why he thinks crypto is not just a fraud.
Nicholas Kristoff offers turning multi-bedroom houses into rooming houses as a solution to America's affordable housing crisis; after all, we have millions of bedrooms in which nobody is sleeping. (NY Times) I foresee that parking could become a major flash point.
A paper arguing that the balance between offense and defense in war and security has remained roughly stable over time despite vast technological changes: "The main thing is that the clean distinction between attackers and defenders . . . does not exist in practice."
Kevin Drum says there is no sudden crisis of boys or men, we're just less willing to tolerate the way boys and men have always acted. Specifically, colleges used to admit boys with worse records than girls, but find it harder to do that these days.
Amazing hand-drawn world map by Anton Thomas, with no national borders but over a thousand animals.
If you're curious about Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), a utopia in which scientists appear to be angels, this article seems like a good summary and analysis.
Fervo's new-style geothermal energy plant is up and running in Nevada.
Lead curse tablet in the classical form found in a German medieval site.
Update on the finds from the Saxon bed burial excavated last year near Harpole in Northamptonshire, England.
Brief account of Fruitlands, an anarchist commune found by Louisa May Alcott's parents.
Kevin Drum says there is no sudden crisis of boys or men, we're just less willing to tolerate the way boys and men have always acted. Specifically, colleges used to admit boys with worse records than girls, but find it harder to do that these days.
ReplyDeleteI think he's hit the nail on the head. "Boys will be boys" was the old mentality, and the double standard has been eroding steadily for generations - thank goodness.
A paper arguing that the balance between offense and defense in war and security has remained roughly stable over time despite vast technological changes: "The main thing is that the clean distinction between attackers and defenders . . . does not exist in practice."
ReplyDeleteSkimmed through it, wasn't impressed. Starting off talking about cybersecurity as if it relates to warfare made me skeptical. Following that up with a truly bizarre graph that is overloaded with data amalgamations that don't make sense and which operates on a logarithmic scale, and then drawing questionable conclusions which the graph itself doesn't actually seem to support was a further blow.
I finally just stopped reading when the author claimed the following:
"The main thing is that the clean distinction between attackers and defenders in the theory of the offense-defense balance does not exist in practice. All attackers are also defenders and vice-versa. Invader countries have to defend their conquests and hackers need to have strong information security."
This almost feels intentionally disingenuous, but as the saying goes, never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance.
No - not all attackers are also defenders, and vice versa. This is shown countless times in history, where armies attack into a region with no regard for holding territory once taken, because that's not their military objective. Sherman's March to Sea. Mao's Long March. Hannibal's Crossing of The Alps. Et cetera. It is not at all uncommon for an attacking force to punch through a line, and then simply KEEP MOVING, because A) their goal is not to hold that particularly territory and B) if they tried, and began acting as defenders, they would be destroyed.
Likewise, not all defenders are attackers. There are plenty of defensive wars that have been won without the defenders ever setting foot on the soil of the aggressors - lopsided wars of attrition, where a small defending force has no chance of actually taking the fight to the enemy in enemy terrain, but where they can hold their own (pre-fortified) land long enough that the cost for the attacker to continue fighting becomes too high, and they abandon the conflict. Many conflicts in history boiled down to extended sieges which became too costly to continue, and then the war ended once the attackers left.
Regardless, I'm not going to waste any more time on this nonsense - the author clearly doesn't know what they're talking about.