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Is peer review failing?
There are a lot of problems with academic publishing and the peer review system of evaluating scientific research. I have found peer review very capricious. Rather too often, trash is accepted while good research is rejected. Partly, this is because doing a review is at heart an exercise in charity. Reviewers aren't paid, not even with reputation. Any peer facing the pressure of Publish or Perish is not going to want to devote time to doing reviews.
Another bad problem is that the system is clearly struggling to adapt to changing technology. Maybe last century and earlier, a delay of several months between submission and notification was acceptable. But today, no. Doubly so when one receives a poor quality review. That custom in combination with their jealous insistence on exclusivity means a paper can spend a lot of time in limbo. May have to miss submission deadline after deadline from other journals and conferences while waiting on a reply, and if the reply is a rejection, one has been denied the opportunity to try elsewhere. The least that serious authors deserve for putting up with that is a decent review.
What really is the reason for this lengthy peer review system? It made sense to screen research when publications were printed. And when there weren't that many. But now, no, it does not make sense. Cost and limited space are no longer real barriers. Now it's just the inertia of customary procedures. Interested members of the public should be able to look at raw, unpolished, and unreviewed research, and even review it themselves. Others who prefer their searches be restricted to prescreened, professionally reviewed material can still have that.
Of course, the problems with copyright are well known. It is an outrage that private publishers are allowed to paywall publicly funded research. Plan S, if successful, should take care of that.
So I am wondering where to go to escape this system. Arxiv? Sci-hub?
facebook sucks, again
So, someone who is moderately important to me is aging. As we age, we tend to fall apart. This person needed surgery on her knees. Nice, new knees, they say. I suppose that's all good and everything - but there is recovery to go through.
This woman spends much of her free time on Facebook, anyway, keeping up with kids, grandkids, etc - it's what women do since the advent of computers and Facebook.
Sadly, now that she's sitting around in pain, and suffering through the start of rehab, all she has to do is to post about recovery.
I'm starting to think there ought to be a law, or something. Me? When I was recovering, I resorted to the computer as well. I registered with an online game, and killed aliens and such. Hell, I didn't WANT people to know how much misery I was in. Can't dope yourself up, and stay unconscious for a couple months, right? So, I killed stuff.
I almost want to make a post to her Facebook page, tell her to STFU, and let us know how great she feels AFTER recovery. But, even an asocial asshole doesn't want to be THAT frigging rude. *sigh*
Let's just have Facebook make a new rule (they love making rules) that you can't post anything until you're off the painkillers. New national law says "You must notify all social media prior to undergoing surgery." Then, each of the platforms put your posts on hold, until you demonstrate that you've recovered. Six months after your surgery, you can sort through all the posts you made, and decide if you really, and truly, want to post ANY of that shit you wrote while you were in pain.
We've come to expect the youth to post every irrelevant detail of their lives to Facebook. I would expect more mature people to have more dignity.
Vax vs Anti-Vax
See this screen grab from the Hacker News site.
If you can't read it, it is page 3, containing two adjacent news items:
Coincidence that these items are adjacent?
Or some evil alien conspiracy?
Playing the long game
Well, just because you play chess, doesn't make you a grandmaster.
People are too soft today
When I was young, it was uphill both ways, and in plain ASCII, no GUI.
You had to memorize a stack of manuals -- that couldn't be removed from the computer room because they were bolted (literally) to the table. Young people learned to type properly, otherwise you would have to DUP the card you were punching up to the column where you made the mistake. There was no backspace -- the hole is punched into the card and can't be un-punched. And stand up straight. Pay attention. Don't drop your deck of cards on the floor -- that's a real mess to sort out.
Those Turkish F-35s
I just spent over an hour reading stories searched with 'Turkey F-35' and every single one of them has left me with the impression that the US still has an option to lock Turkey out of the program before anything is delivered to them.
This is just not true. Not only is Turkey one of the production partners, they have taken delivery of 2. It took some delving in local resources to find this, google seems to have delisted it, but here you go: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709222963/u-s-turkey-standoff-over-f-35-escalates-as-each-side-waits-for-the-other-to-blin
"Last year, two F-35s were symbolically delivered to Turkey by Lockheed Martin in a ceremony at its Fort Worth, Texas, F-35 assembly plant.
"At Lockheed Martin," Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson declared at the event, "our hope is that the F-35 will continue to strengthen the mission and the values of NATO, our relationship with Turkey and the cause of peace in the region and around the world."
But those two warplanes are still in the U.S., at Luke Air Force Base on the outskirts of Phoenix. Turkish pilots have been training there to fly the F-35s, which are slated to be taken to Turkey in November."
Those are the Turkish pilots your recent news hits will be referring to, who have been grounded, no longer allowed to fly the planes their air force owns, and about to be stuck on an airliner back home.
Now, the US can kick Turkey out of the F-35 program if they want to. They'll need to be refunding some significant amounts of money, in that case.
What they cannot lawfully do is seize the two F-35s that have already been delivered to the state of Turkey.
War? No, Turkey isn't about to declare war on the US immediately.
A generations long grudge, serving a brutal dictators interest, courtesy of our own malfeasance?
Check and check.
Also, why has no one in the US media even referenced the facts here, since this little note in the middle of a long article from a nearly dead source back in April?
It's not a matter of no one's writing about it. EVERYONE is writing about it. I still haven't seen anyone mention the fact the Turks already own 2 F-35s though.
Who are palindromes really for?
Are palindromes for people who like to end at the beginning?
Or for people who like to begin at the end?
Or for people who like to start in the middle?
Or for people who do only half the work and say they are done?
How an LED works
Giving in to their intense natural attraction, the electrons and the e-holes venture further and further towards each other from opposite sides of the P-N junction. Into the the semiconductor's forbidden zone of depletion they wander. Ignoring all inhibition to stop, their growing excitement causes the depletion zone to become smaller and smaller. Finally the depletion zone becomes so small it disappears. They are suddenly surprised and shocked by a climactic explosive rush of current. It can only be described as electric. The LED lights up brightly as current flows freely. The LED continues to glow brightly until the forward current blissfully subsides and the forward voltage drops below the threshold. The electrons stop flowing and go to sleep. The depletion zone once again grows in the P-N junction keeping them separated.
For those that prefer illegal links
Definitions are important.
Nonetheless; A bit for the other side of the brain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7lhMAOxLxw
I always hear "Money for Nothing" in the background watching this scene.
In particularly "the little faggot with the earrings and the makeup"
Yeah buddy, that faggot was my role model.
Movie scenes are rarely, if ever, perfect. If you can reply to this with a good cogent criticism of the fight choreography please do.
I spotted a few myself, but relatively minor, I consider it better than most films that came after it to say the least.
Why was Guthrie doomed in this fight? I can put it in a few words, a sentence fairly well, a few paragraphs with reasonable thoroughness surely; can you?
Music is notes in time.
What is it about music that captures the human heart?
Definitions are important.
Music is notes in time. Without notes, or without time, there is no music. Am I wrong?
I think I am right. And I think this is why this form of art is so powerful to us. Because...
Definitions are important.
Humans are naked apes who specialize in time-binding. From our most natural to our most artificial environments, this is one constant key to our success - and sometimes our fatal weakness. We do not exist only in the here and now. We remember deeply. We dream of the future. We remember the words of generations long ago turned to dust, and we dream of generations yet to come. Because of this, we could predict, and plan, and harvest nutrition our cousins could not. We expanded into climate change, as they shrank before it.
Anyway music is all about time-binding. Notes in time. You plot time on one dimension, and then you plot something else, usually pitch, or some approximation of pitch, on another axis, and you have music. You have a platform on which to imitate every distinctly human activity.
It's NOT "the universal language." It's not a language.
But it does share some pretty basic characteristics with every language.
Real abstraction is a hallmark of language, and music doesn't quite pull that off without language to supplement it. But our ears are (as befits a species with thin skin, little strength, no claws, and a poor sense of smell) actually very sophisticated, and we can appreciate a great deal of variation musically.
Harmonic scales, diatonic scales, pentatonic scales, a set of drums that don't really have any specific root pitch (but are nonetheless quite distinct to the ear) - all of those things are notes. But if you really want to push the definition of music to the limit, you play a single note for the whole track. Good luck with that. If you want to go one step further and prove I'm REALLY wrong? Play no notes.
Yeah, John Cage got me. Or I'm calling him out (well, sort of, if he were still alive and I ran into him I wouldn't 'call him out' I'd try to buy him a drink, but whatever.)
I think he was deliberately pushing things past the edge to show us where the edge is. Notes and time. That's where the edge is.
And time? Even that can be played with. For the most part, it's a convention so that multiple musicians can play together and not fall apart. If you're playing alone, or if your group is well rehearsed/tight knit, you can speed up and slow down at will.
But here's the important part. You, as a group or a solo performer, you project notes in time. You can bend your notes and you can bend your time - and the audience experiences that as a ride along with you.
Music is not a language, but it can be used to enhance and to *comment upon* language.
That last part is where it truly becomes transformative. Where the language says 'x' and the music says 'probably not x.'
Thoughts?
