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Are Water Worlds Habitable?
Rehash of this article. But here is a detail that may have been overlooked:
Take the fifth planet within the TRAPPIST-1 system as an example. Cayman Unterborn, an exogeologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, and his colleagues think that the liquid water here extends down about 200 kilometers—roughly 20 times deeper than Earth’s Mariana Trench. That much water would create a large ice layer at the bottom of the ocean which would seal the ocean from the land and effectively shut down a geochemical cycle that plays a crucial role in Earth’s habitability.
WD Black/SanDisk Extreme Pro NVMe SSDs
The Western Digital WD Black 3D NAND SSD Review: EVO Meets Its Match
Very fast sequential speeds and high IOPS. Endurance could be problematic (600 TB for the 1 TB model, calculated as 0.3 DWPD). I wonder what that ratio will be for QLC 3D NAND SSDs.
Western Digital bought SanDisk in 2016.
Mommy Shaming
Could we expose journals to search engines?
That inconvenience got me thinking. I've never seen a journal or journal post in a search result. So it appears to me that we're blocking the web crawlers from accessing journals. Now some sort of protection needs to be in place to keep SEO spammers from taking over the journal section. I grant that. But cool stuff ends up in the journals. We should show it to the world and maybe pull the world in a little in response.
So my first argument is that allowing most journals to be searchable would make them just as convenient to find as regular posts. Second, there's the cool stuff argument. For example, cafebabe or MDC (hey, even aristarchus carries his part of the load) come up with some crazy/cool stuff. It'll pull in people who would never care about the high comment stories.
Third, this has actually worked before. Way back when, Kuro5hin.org was yet another Slashdot replacement which had a similar layout and journals (called "diaries"). Several Soylentils such as myself, MDC, and mcgrew, have posted diary entries there which in turn were exposed to the world. Sometimes the degree of exposure got crazy. For example, my most cited academic paper is a diary on a defunct Department of Defense betting market that was killed off by political ignorance. The amusing thing is that the above article is occasionally cited by my user name "khallow" instead of by my real name.
Then there is the epic Fuck Natalee Holloway story by author, gbd. It had 1420 comments on it. That's because there was this peculiar, overwhelming obsession in the media and public with a missing, white, female tourist from a Caribbean island with this Kuro5hin.org journal being one of the scarce pieces of dissent at the time. This voice crying out in the wilderness got a lot of attention as a result.
So anyway, journal articles can contribute to the visibility and culture of SN in a useful way, if they're exposed to search engines.
Moving on, I grant that we'll need to have some sort of modest restrictions just so we don't get spam crowding out the good stuff. There are two ways spam can sneak/surge into journal articles. First, spammers can create their own journals, we've already had problems with that. Maybe put a robot.txt block on new journals from posters without a certain level of karma?
Second, spammers can dump posts into ancient journal articles (since comments on most journals stay open indefinitely, right?). Imagine a spammer who posts their penis enlargement ads into year old journal articles. Who would notice? Only the search engines would, which would be the point. If we can manage to make journals more visible without turning the section into a spam factory, it'd be greatly beneficial overall. Journals should be an essential part of our community and putting them in as near equal with regular articles in the search engines would go a long way to making that happen. They also can provide a draw to interests that aren't being covered by mere news.
Murder for Popularity
Crazed girls flood Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz with fan mail
Mass murderer Nikolas Cruz is getting stacks of fan mail and love letters sent to the Broward County jail, along with hundreds of dollars in contributions to his commissary account.
Teenage girls, women and even older men are writing to the Parkland school shooter and sending photographs — some suggestive — tucked inside cute greeting cards and attached to notebook paper with offers of friendship and encouragement. Groupies also are joining Facebook communities to talk about how to help the killer.
The South Florida Sun Sentinel obtained copies of some of the letters showing that Cruz, who had few friends in the outside world, is now being showered with attention.
Galaxy found containing no dark matter: the snark side
So a galaxy has been found that contains NO dark matter (all the matter seen is all the matter it needs).
"The astronomers realised something about DF2 was amiss when telescope observations revealed that 10 clusters of stars within it were moving far slower than would normally be expected."
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/distant-galaxy-dark-matter-universe-understanding-theories-wrong-space-yale-a8277951.html
Could it not need 'dark matter' because the stars aren't rotating fast enough for inertial effects to kick in?
http://physicsfromtheedge.blogspot.ca/2014/01/mihsc-101.html
Dark matter is dead. Please leave the corpse alone.
Close snark.
End-To-End Encrypted Social Networks
Tresorit Launches Campaign To Build An End-To-End Encrypted Social Network
The new technology that aspires to #DeleteFacebook for good (Mastodon)
At the end of these charts, you can see a small spike in Diaspora users.
It might all be in the name. People/"dumb fucks" will sign up for a "Facebook", but "Prevaat"?
std::map<optimism, chagrin> disaster;
I have been at the C++ again. After a few years I have been slowly managing to persuade people that directly testing (using TDD) the C++ code is a good idea.
Also, I have tried to put my C smugness and arrogance away in the spirit of doing things "the right way" i.e. in C++ and the way the earnest and eternally vigilant members of the C++ Inquisition would recommend.
A couple of weekends ago I was on a fairly long train journey so for entertainment I reacquainted myself with the C++ Frequently Questioned Answers and laughed out loud a couple of times much to the bemusement of Mrs Turgid.
I had been asked to supervise a much younger and inexperienced member of the team. He had too much to do and so I was asked to pick up some work he had started. Young people today... So I extracted some of his code into independent methods and put them under test with CPPUNIT which involved hacking on some nasty ANT build scripts (don't get me started...) just to add a few .so files to the linker command line. The build scripts are so bad that it takes upwards of 45 seconds to compile, link and run the unit tests (200 lines of code).
Now to the fun, std::map. Why oh why oh why? Well, because the STL and these are "algorithms" and they've been developed by people much cleverer than you and so they won't have bugs like the ones you would write yourself and they have performance criteria and they use templates so you get type checking at compile time and blah blah blah...
Yes, well, nobody expects the C++ Inquisition. Their main weapon is type safety and code reuse. OK, their two main weapons are type safety, code reuse and generics. Hang on, that's three. I'll come in again. Nobody expects the C++ Inquisition. Amongst their weapons are type safety, code reuse, generics, multiple inheritance, virtual methods, references, the STL... You get the idea.
And what was std::map being used for? To store pairs of strings and integers (hex) read out of an ASCII configuration file. How was the file parsed? sscanf()? No, some fancy stream object with operator<<. And what were the ASCII strings? Names of parameters. And there was a third column in the file that specified a width and was summarily ignored by the parser. And what about the names of the parameters? Well, they were looked up in the map at run time, hard-coded, to pull the values out of the map and put into internal variables with all kinds of shifts and shuffles on byte order. And what if the user changed the names of any of the parameters in the file? Yes, what indeed. The user will be editing this file.
Now I do need to use some sort of dynamic data structure myself in this project. I need to map strings to integers, but with integers as the keys this time. My table needs to be populated with the names of files read from a directory and the files sorted in order. If I were doing this in a sane language like C it would be relatively straight forward. Anyway, we're in C++ land now and the C++ Inquisition are in attendance. So I thought I'd take a leaf out of their book and use std::map<uint32_t, std::string> table or something (note the code is infected with stds all over the place, another cool feature) so I decided I'd better read the documentation. I thought I might use the insert() method and check for duplicate keys in the map. Nope, template error. It seems one must use operator[] but that doesn't check for existing keys, it just overwrites them. The suggested remedy? Ah, scan the entire map from the beginning each time to make sure the key isn't already there. Doesn't it throw one of these pesky exception things? I thought they were the Modern Way(TM)?
::iterator is fun. Try to iterate over an empty map, or to an entry that isn't there. How do you detect it? Well, ::iterator is some kind of pointer (you get at the data with ->first or ->second) so you might compare with NULL (sorry, 0 nowadays) but no way because operator== is not defined. The best advice is not to try to iterate over an empty map or to dereference an iterator that doesn't point to anything.
I could have read my file names into a (sorted) linked list checking for duplicates along the way. It would have been less than 50 lines of C, and I could have written it and tested it in the time it took me to get angry about C++ all over again.
The word is chagrin. I have wasted very precious time and haven't even got any working code.
Edited 20180328 to use proper escape codes for angle brackets.
Trump's Stormy Shark Week
Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump, and Shark Week: ‘He made me sit and watch’ (archive)
Clickbait? Sure. But reading about the history of "Shark Week" in that context really makes something click.
Stormy Daniels describes her alleged affair with Donald Trump (w/ transcript)
"Wow, you-- you are special. You remind me of my daughter."
Trump Signs $1.3 Trillion Spending Bill
Reversing his veto threat, Trump signs the $1.3 Trillion dollar spending bill.
National Review says it's the Biggest Spending Increase Since 2009.
Trump briefly threatened to veto it. Mostly because it didn't spend enough: “... the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded,”
Spending wouldn't be such a problem except for the fact they also cut revenue by a over a $trillion with the tax bill.
I'm no mathematician but that seems to put a bit of crimp in his promise to eliminate the national debt in eight years.
