Perhaps skywave propagation? (See also E-skip.) CB radio operators sometimes experience the right weather conditions for this to occur; using ionosphere propagation to communicate over long distances is known as "shooting skip"!
Thanks insomniasexx!
WHICH IS IT, MR. BROOKS? WHICH IS IT? You can't in one breath say "Trump destroyed the morals of (my favorite) party" and in the next breath say "criticizing the morals of people who voted for Trump is 'triablism'"! [Trump's election shows that] it doesn’t matter if your leader is a liar, a philanderer and a narcissist. It doesn’t matter if he is cruel to the weak and bigoted toward the outsider.
[Clinton self-righteously portrays the election as] us enlightened few against those racist many; us modern citizens against those backward gun-toting troglodytes.
Grace passed away last night. Bye, little friend.
Describing people protesting racism as a "lynch mob" is really something special.
Our chickens do fly. They definitely prefer to just run around but if one ends up far away from the flock they'll fly over to hang with their buddies. When our rooster gets away he'll fly when chased -- once I was chasing him through the woods and upon reaching a clearing he flew up about 15 feet high for...maybe 50 feet or so? Definitely far more than a 1 foot tall animal can jump. I think they figured this out around 16 weeks old; Pig (aptly named) attempted to fly from their brooder box to the kitchen table because we were eating pork chops and she wanted more.
I don't think she's arguing that you should be friends with weev -- you're right, neither of you are in the same tribe and neither of you want to be in a tribe with each other. She's arguing that since she's already in a tribe with weev that she's better off maintaining a relationship with him rather than trying to kick him out of their common tribe or, more likely, removing herself from the tribe, as that seems to be how that sort of thing typically ends up. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/conversion-via-twitter-westboro-baptist-church-megan-phelps-roper https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/the-white-flight-of-derek-black/2016/10/15/ed5f906a-8f3b-11e6-a6a3-d50061aa9fae_story.html Outliers? Maybe so. From a personal perspective, though, my views on most political and social things have changed completely over the past 10 years, and I'm disgusted by some of the positions I used to argue pretty strongly for. I can definitely say that I would not have been able to make that change if I wasn't around people who took other viewpoints and, often unintentionally, educated me on a lot of stuff. I dunno. I don't think I'd be friends with weev, but I do think that long-lasting social change has to include changing peoples' minds.Nowhere in this paean to St. Augustine is there argument or evidence that all this lovey-dovey changed anyone's opinions one iota.
Buffalo Trace is what I typically recommend to people who want to try bourbon. Elijah Craig and Bulleit are also good (albeit a bit pricier). Four Roses is a blend of whiskeys and has some really complex flavors, if that's what you're after. I don't drink a lot of Irish whiskey but I have a bottle of Bushmills that is quite nice. (Don't ask me about scotch; it's incompatible with a grad student salary.)
Birds Annie re-joined the flock on Sunday and moved back inside Monday. We thought it was just one bird (Pig, an apt name) pecking her, but it seems that at least a couple others are also guilty. (We brought Pig in when we took Annie out.) She was supposed to go back out again tomorrow with some Vick's on her head to keep the other birds from pecking her, but today when we got home she'd made an absolute mess of her cage and banged her head up again, poor thing. I think a mouse made its way into our basement/walls and the sound of its claws spooked her. So now she's sitting on the arm of the couch and eating bits of dorito out of my hand. (We spoil her when she's inside...) I know she misses her feathered friends, but I don't know if I want to risk her getting pecked up again before her new injuries heal completely... Life Things have felt off for whatever reason lately (probably a combination of stress, too much work, and trying to take care of the people and animals in my life). Today I finally regained my motivation for technical writing, so I'm trying to finish up Yet Another Floating Point Explainer for my students to read. Recently cracked open my Pictures for Sad Children archive and wow, that has just gotten better with age. I hope the author is doing well, wherever they are now... Edit Been thinking about my two project cars out in the barn (well, one project, one accident repair) and wondering when I'll have time to get them moved to the basement and fixed. I especially feel bad for the project car, as its body is in great shape but the previous owner made an absolute mess of the engine. Shame to see it sit and gather dust. Research I have an undergrad student assistant! I have no idea what I'm going to have them work on! I desperately need to take some time to do actual thinking about my work, but I doubt I'll be able to do that this week. It's frustrating to know exactly what I need to do next and to just not have time to do it. I spoke with my advisor about publishing on Arxiv.org and she liked the idea! Hopefully I'll be able to get my paper up there soon so people can finally read it.
R.E.M. - Electrolite: A friend gave me a CD copy of New Adventures in Hi-Fi the summer before I got married, and it ended up in my car's CD player for much of that summer. I was staying in his basement in Kansas City for an internship and my wife lived in St. Louis. I have a lot of fond memories of listening to that album turned up loud so I could hear it over the 4000 RPM drone of my car's engine on the 4+ hour drive between me and her. Reminds me of being in love with her, of the joy of driving my MR2, of the tired-and-empty-and-happy feeling of driving around KC's interstates at 2 AM when no one else is out.
I definitely feel that places like Hubski are still working hard to make the dream of Cyberspace come to fruition.
Absolutely! May tomorrow be better for you.
I think it's just general public speaking anxiety but I haven't thought too much about it since I usually am busy prepping right before and so long as I don't just sit there and think about my feelings I can keep calm. Sharing knowledge is absolutely a learned skill. If you can, get involved with tutoring as soon as possible, even if it's just informal hanging-out-in-a-department-lounge-and-talking-to-other-students tutoring. You get one-on-one time with students and most of them are comfortable saying that they have no idea what you mean by what you just said. It'll help you develop the ability to explain the same idea a bunch of different ways. I'm a grad student so I just teach college students, which has a couple of advantages: they're (slightly) more mature than teenagers, and they're in school to some extent because they want to be there. So, I can't speak to dealing with teenagers in particular. I mostly teach math and programming. I like to motivate material by introducing a question students don't have the tool to answer yet or by drawing analogy to something they already know about (e.g. when talking about rational expressions I'll start by talking about how polynomials kind of-sort of behave like integers, point out that we can make fractions from integers, and then get in to how rational expressions work). Another thing that's fun to do is to talk about the history around an idea -- who made it, what were they trying to do, why is it the way that it is, etc. People like stories and having a little narrative to go along with an idea helps them remember it better and might even help them see the bigger picture. Just about anyone can read Wikipedia and get factual knowledge on a topic -- it's your ability to provide context and build relationships with other ideas that is really valuable to students. Jokes and terrible puns are also great!
What kind of teaching do you aspire to do?
First time was pretty nervewracking, and I still get anxious before teaching, although once I get into the swing of things I calm down. My first day I learned an important lesson: performance anxiety is real. I was doing some basic probability analysis that I figured I could do off the top of my head and made an absolute mess of it and had to start over! So now I make sure that regardless of how much time I have to prep I make notes that feature fully-worked examples and exactly-worded definitions. (Much of the time my notes are just that and I can do the motivation and exposition bits off the cuff.) I was only a couple years older than most of my students when I started and I was concerned that they'd doubt my knowledge and argue about stupid stuff, but that turned out to be entirely wrong. I'd given plenty of presentations in classes before, so I was at least a little used to standing in front of a classroom, but teaching felt different because the students were really paying attention to what I was saying for a change. Definitely a sobering moment when you realize you could say just about anything and a room of 50 people would just take your word for it! A lot of my students have been very smart, and I really love the oddball questions they come up with, even if I don't always know how to answer them. Teaching takes a lot out of you--even though I don't feel tired while I'm in the classroom, I pretty much have to schedule a half hour or so after class to sit and drink coffee and do mindless tasks because I need a bit of time to mentally recover.
Too much to write in one comment, but in general, the best thing you can do is care about the topic and your students. They can tell if you care, and I find that being passionate helps motivate people to learn stuff they might otherwise not enjoy. Anything in particular you want advice/insight on? I'm happy to answer questions!
School Work on the textbook progresses inexorably...I'm just about done with the content, but then I have to edit, index, write a glossary, make a website, convert the book to HTML, polish up examples, and figure out details of publishing it. One step at a time, I suppose. Some friends and I developed a tool called Assigner for managing homework submissions. About 4 or 5 classes now use it! It's nice to realize that I've managed to effect long-discussed change in a department. (Less nice that it's not my department anymore, and frustrating to realize that it's not the faculty doing it.) Got a rejection on a conference paper I submitted. I was expecting a rejection, so it wasn't a surprise, but it's still kind of a bummer. One reviewer was very thorough, though, so I think things will be better for it. Have any of y'all put anything on Arxiv.org? I've got a journal paper that's been stuck in submission since 2015 and I'd really like to be able to drop a preprint somewhere without making IEEE mad at me. Chickens Last week Hank got sick and spent the day sitting on the couch with me. She's back to her normal self now, though! We've trained her to hop up on our arms and eat snacks and she's getting really good at it! Annie's got a cut on her head; she can't see well, so she might have banged it on something or maybe one of the other birds was bullying her. Either way, she's living inside now until it heals up. She seems to be enjoying her stay so far:
There's also http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/
The shop is still a mess from building the chicken coop this summer, if that gives you any idea how things have been lately.
I've been away for the past while, busy with research and personal/relationship growth. Some of the latter is going to take me years to get to where I want to be, but at least I know where I'm going, even if I'm not entirely sure how to get there yet. I finished a paper on my research, then cut it from 32 pages to 15 in half an hour to meet the conference page limit. I don't expect that paper to get accepted, but hopefully the reviewers will have some advice at least. I'm in an awkward spot where I'm not sure how to cut this into several papers, but a proper writeup with all the details and good examples needs about 40 pages. Maybe that's something worth publishing on the Arxiv as a supplement to a mch much shorter conference or journal paper. It's been pretty cold out lately; the chickens are not a huge fan of this but they seem to be doing alright. At night they fluff all their feathers out so they look like little potatoes with beaks!
Welcome! When I got married, sure there were difficulties, but we also had a really strong sense of "we're in this together" that encouraged us to sort those difficulties out. So, maybe you won't run across "first year blues" at all if you've got the right attitude going in to this whole marriage thing?
This whole tax thing is pissing me off. Big companies can evade billions in taxes, but if Trump's tax plan goes through, I'll have to pay taxes on my tuition waiver -- which by most estimates will double what I owe. Fuck. I was so happy to be finally making five figures...all I want is to be able to not lose money while I'm finishing up school.
You're right, predictive power is the wrong phrase -- I think I meant something like 'explanatory power'.
Oh, I'm not opposed to using computers as tools to expand human understanding...I'm just mad at the Hacker News commenter types that are all "exponential growth means soon we will have computers producing results humans will never understand".
Birds A friend made halloween costumes for our birds. The birds hated them but they were patient with us for a little while at least. My wife started a tumblr for our chickens: https://chick-it-out.tumblr.com/ Life Research progresses inexorably. I've given 4 variations of the "what is research/grad school" talk/conversation in the last week, which is always fun, although it's sometimes tricky to be honest without sounding too negative. Online dating is kinda weird. This is a good town if you're into single moms...
I don't think he does? Perhaps one could say that Lisp is less abstract than lambda calculus in the sense that it has primitive operations on integers and whatnot. I also don't think he's arguing that it's more abstract, just that the notation makes it easier for humans to reason about programs, much in the same way that arithmetic is easier with Arabic numbers than Roman numerals. Or how currying and partial function application is common in Haskell because the syntax makes those operations painless.
However, all of the vulnerabilities found in HTTPS have been fixed, and the TLS specs (the security layer of HTTPS) are regularly updated to remove insecure cryptographic algorithms and add new, improved algorithms. Don't get me wrong; internet security is still a shitshow in many ways, but you should be confident in the encryption provided by HTTPS.
If you haven't already, look up This Old Tony as well.