marick

Here are some facts from my wife's life as a large animal veterinarian, specializing mostly in dairy cattle.

1. When she first started her internship (~1986) and was the doctor on call, clients would sometimes say they wanted "a real doctor." (By this, they meant a man.) She had to tell them she was what they got. (Clients got better, both as they came to know her and as female cow doctors became more common.)
2. People would ask her how a tiny woman like her could do the physical work of manhandling (sic) a cow. She had to explain that if an animal weighing ~2000 pounds (~1000 kg) wants to "move through you", it doesn't matter if you weigh 200 pounds or 120 pounds: the cow is going to move through you. Brute force isn't something that matters so much with such a huge disparity of strength and weight. What matters is understanding animal behavior and how to take advantage of it.
3. When she interviewed for a tenure-track job (1989 or 1990), two (male) interviewers asked if she planned to get pregnant. Sh

marick

I canceled our Washington Post subscription. A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that I should declare the causes which impel me to the separation.

1. I found Bezos’s justification unconvincing. He argues that the Post must both be unbiased and seem to be unbiased, and this is “a meaningful step in the right direction.”

   Is it? Does he argue that the Post is now more trusted? Reversing himself would have shown that he understands “those who fight reality lose” (pompous ass).

   He concedes “inadequate planning.” A step toward increasing trust would be to say why this decision was made so suddenly, flatfooting even the editorial board. OK, it wasn’t political pressure. Then what was it?

   To increase trust, he should withdraw the decision, have some real internal debate – not an arbitrary decision by God Emperor Bezos – and do it in the sensible between-elections way people have called for.

marick

In Nixon v. Fitzgerald¹, the Supreme Court wrote “While the separation of powers doctrine does not bar every exercise of jurisdiction over the President, a court, before exercising jurisdiction, must balance the constitutional weight of the interest to be served against the dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.”

The current court cited that thusly in Trump v United States²:

"At a minimum, the President must be immune from prosecution for an official act unless the Government can show that applying a criminal prohibition to that act would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch’.”

Fitzgerald described a balancing test between the public interest and the dangers of intrusion. Trump truncated the quote to turn it into a prohibition.

This Court is purely outcome-driven. In my mind, that makes it illegitimate. We might try returning to the original Constitutional order, in which it was recognized that all

marick

Comments on https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.222176

1. The study looks at how the use of a faked “AI assistant” affects the judgment of radiologists evaluating mammograms with a suspicious lesion, rating on a scale with these values: 2 -> benign; 3 -> probably benign; 4 -> suspicious; 5 -> highly suggestive of malignancy.

2. They extracted a set of 50 mammograms from a big archive. Either those mammograms had already been scored, or they had an experienced radiologist score them afresh (not sure which). I'm going to call this the pre-experiment score. In either case, the appropriateness of the score was confirmed. It's not clear, but I think it went like this: For "suspicious" and "highly suggestive", they only included mammograms for which a biopsy actually found a malignancy; for "benign" and "probably benign"; they only included mammograms if four years had since passed without otherwise discovering a problem.

3. The participants were shown the image, an AI score, and asked to produce

marick

A rant in re: Illinois v. Caballes

Facts

1. Dude is transferring 250,000 dollars of marijuana in the trunk of his car.
2. He’s stopped for going six miles over the speed limit(!¹)
3. When the stopping officer calls it in, another officer overhears it and offers to bring by his drug-sniffing dog and give it a spin. The dog alerts, the trunk is opened (without Caballes' consent), and the drugs are found.

The 4th Amendment

marick

It’s notoriously hard to identify the boundaries of fascism¹, but the following quote strikes me as capturing something important:

Now it is not enough to learn how to shoot. In the name of historical justice, in the name of life’s instinct, in the name of truth—we must shoot.²

Self-actualization through violence.

I’m fond of Edith Hamilton’s summary of the classical Greeks' definition of happiness:

The exercise of vital powers, along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope.

marick

The brain does not like to work. It's a lot of work to have a true picture of the world live inside the brain. So the brain doesn't do that as much as you (it) thinks.

Some of the ways the brain avoids work may give help to people who show computers how to do the work computers do. Here are the ways I will talk about:

• Have lots of little boxes of work. Each box looks for just one thing and knows how to do just one thing. It knows just enough to see the one thing and make the thing it knows how to do happen.

• Many boxes are looking at the same time. The brain is always ready to do something else.

• If two boxes both know the same thing or two, you can make another box to hold what's shared. But you only do that if it makes there be less work. Do that enough and you may get a true picture of part of the world. But most of the time you don't.

marick

For a very long time, large structures were made of masonry: brick and stone and concrete. Masonry is strong when you’re squeezing it (putting it under compression). It is not strong under when it’s being pulled (placed under tension). This is a problem for building roofs. Consider a horizontal beam made out of masonry. Gravity is pulling down on the whole beam, but the ends are supported. So the tendency would be for the middle to droop down – which puts the masonry under tension.

The arch is the one weird trick to solve that problem. The shape of the arch means the higher bricks (say) push on the lower bricks – which is the kind of compression bricks can take. At the legs of the arch, all that weight producews a force pushing down and to the side. If the arch is fastened to the something big, like the earth, that force won’t have an effect, because the earth can push back just as hard.

The roof of a cathedral is essentially a bunch of arches resting on walls. Those walls have to resist the downward force

marick

For linsen:

1. Rinse 1 bag lentils. Cover lentils with water in pot and boil for 30 minutes. Add water if needed.
2. Cook several strips of bacon. Save a little of the grease. Put bacon on paper towels until cooled, then crumble it.
3. Chop 1 onion and cook it in the bacon grease. Add a Tablespoon or so of flour, stir it in and cook about 30 seconds.
4. Add onions and bacon to the lentils.
5. Cut up 1 lb of hot dogs and add to pot. (This is excessive, but some hot dogs are traditional.)
6. Add about 1 Tablespoon of salt, a capful of white vinegar, and about a half teaspoon of pepper.
7. Cook til correct consistency. (Mushy)

For spaetzle:

marick

Writing Elixir tests for greater long-term value: tricks and tools

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Short summary: There are "tricks of the trade" for writing readable, maintainable tests that help produce a more coherent system. This talk shows some of them, with an emphasis on code you can use or copy today.

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Longer description: