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escape your hodge duals fam


Ha that's funny. I'd been copying my notation from the parent post, and I assumed 'd' was just their notation. I didn't realise they meant to say

    *d*
(apparently HN doesn't let you escape asterisks).


> While locked down due to COVID-19, Joshua Greene and Andrew Lobb figured out how to prove a version of the “rectangular peg problem.”

Emphasis mine.


The text you quote is not even part of the article.

But it is related to text that precedes my quote:

> One of the problems the two friends looked at was a version of a century-old unsolved question in geometry.

> “The problem is so easy to state and so easy to understand, but it’s really hard,” said Elizabeth Denne of Washington and Lee University.

> It starts with a closed loop — any kind of curvy path that ends where it starts. The problem Greene and Lobb worked on predicts, basically, that every such path contains sets of four points that form the vertices of rectangles of any desired proportion.

Emphasis mine. The article explicitly describes the problem they solved, only to later point out that they actually solved a different problem.


Oh my god here, is the same qualification near the top of the article.

> One of the problems the two friends looked at was a version of a century-old unsolved question in geometry.

On every Quanta article there's always someone welching about some gotcha they think they've found that just demonstrates how trash Quanta's popularizations of mathematical topics is. But whenever I read the article in question it always turns out that the writers and editors over there somehow manage to thread the needle in making their material accessible without being mathematically inaccurate. Vague, yes, but that's why they link to the research in question because it's a pop article not a journal publication.

You edited your comment to add another objection. It is equally insubstantial unless you dug through the paper yourself and demonstrated that the transformation applied could not reasonably be called a rotation.


> Oh my god here, is the same qualification near the top of the article.

>> One of the problems the two friends looked at was a version of a century-old unsolved question in geometry.

Did you read past the first sentence of my comment?

> You edited your comment to add another objection. It is equally insubstantial unless you dug through the paper yourself and demonstrated that the transformation applied could not reasonably be called a rotation.

I disagree. The article strongly implies that the transformation applied could be called a rotation, and I see no particular reason to doubt that. ("The Möbius strip can be rotated by any angle between 0 and 360 degrees, and he proved that one-third of those rotations yield an intersection between the original and the rotated copy.")

But I very much object to the article's idea that I should help myself think about a rotation that only changes point values along a single dimension by visualizing an entirely unrelated transformation. How is that supposed to help?


>welching

Did you mean whinging?


My mind was in between whinging and kvetching.


I'm currently reading The Black Jacobins which is about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the revolution in Haiti. Even after having read accounts of the brutality of slavery multiple times before, it always seems to recede into an abstraction after a long time and the descriptions are as gruesome and horrifying as they ever were. And this is a book that spares the details, relatively speaking.

The wealth of the world is covered in blood.


>>The wealth of the world is covered in blood.

Slavery was not very productive. It existed globally from the beginning of organized human society to the 19th century.

In some regions it persisted into the 20th century, and these were all very undeveloped.

Productivity rose in accordance with the decline of slavery. The regions that eradicated slavery first, like Europe, saw the greatest productivity gains.

Labor from paid free individuals and industrialization produced much of wealth of the world.


>> Slavery was not very productive

Once we created mechanical slaves, it was not. But until then, it was.

Slavery was abandoned because productivity rose, not the opposite. Productivity is tied with energy consumption. That's why we won't ever be able to limit our greenhouse gaz production.


Europe itself didn't have slavery, and was by global standards, quite productive before it ever acquired colonies and slaves.

But I agree that it could have been rising productivity that led to the abolition of slavery, and not the other way around.


[flagged]


>>The bourgeoisie in Europe accumulated the capital required to start industrialization through their slave colonies. This isn't up for debate.

The trends leading to industrialization, like the steady accumulation of technology, and rise in productivity, started in Europe long before European states acquired colonies and engaged in the slave trade.

This is 100% up for debate. Please don't try to discourage debate.

>It is indeed the case that the British started supporting abolition when it became clear that they could exploit cheap free labor in their colonies more effectively than slave labor at that time in their development,

I've seen absolutely no evidence of that. There were orthogonal social forces leading to abolition, like the rising influence of the Quakers.


Unfortunately the rationalist community basically engages in sophistry centered around a naive and outdated positivism with Bayes' rule slapped on top.


https://imgur.com/a/NwwBiIo

I did this on a computer I don't usually use in an incognito tab.


Interesting. I suspect that the different results Google gives different people (even in incognito mode) are driving a lot of the divergence and even rancor between the two points of view.


I have no privileged information except one: my father dropped by and I could reproduce the last name appearing on his non-incognito account.

He is not "the target audience" for this sort of thing.


If one were to examine that subreddit at this moment it would appear that the mods are very strongly against Scott Alexander being doxxed by a reporter and are also handing out bans for anyone gloating about this.


It's not a good look to compare people to a virus.


The NYPD has a budget for spying on people in other countries. State power is weird.


For those curious who didn't know about this (like me):

>With offices in 11 foreign capitals and an unpublished budget, the ILP’s far-flung counterterrorism cops operate outside the authority of top U.S. officials abroad, including the American ambassador and the CIA station chief, who is the nominal head of U.S. intelligence in foreign countries.

>The ILP is supported by private donors through the New York Police Foundation, which won't say how much it has given the NYPD, beyond a sentence on its Web page that it sought to raise $1.5 million for the program in 2010. The NYPD itself won't say whether any of its annual $178 million budget for intelligence and counterterrorism goes to posting detectives in Paris, London, Madrid or other posh capitals.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/11/nypds_fore...


keep having to preface everything lately with "not a joke," but no joke the NYPD's International Liaison Program, which has a secret budget and operates in 13 foreign countries with no oversight, just showed up in an official NYPD cruiser for a pro-police demonstration in Paris

https://mobile.twitter.com/newyorkyearzero/status/1273754924...


So the NYPD privatized secret policing? Nice one!


Another weird thing about the NYPD is that each police officer gets 20 so-called "get out of jail free" cards to give to friends and family. The recipient can show the card to the police if pulled over and use the card to "wiggle out of minor trouble".

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42780382


That's a joke, right? Police aren't so stupid to have institutionalized petty corruption with an actual laminated pass, right?



It's not typically laminated, usually the cop is supposed to take it and call the person who handed it out (or tear it up).

This is very real, though.


Strictly speaking, that is not in their budget.

Comes from anonymous donors [1]. Nothing strange about that.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/nyregion/terrorism-nypd-i...


OK, that's weird. It doesn't entirely come as a surprise that they would have an international arm, since they are home to the UN and were the most visible target of the most prominent international terrorist attack. But having that money come anonymously... that's suspicious.


Still weird.

The FBI and the rest of our national security apparatus exist to deal with those issues.


The "anonymous donor overseas placement" system is clearly a means to launder bribe money into holidays for officers. Anonymous "donations" to police are so obviously corrupt they might as well hang up a sign.


I mean it wouldn't surprise me if the NYPD had a liaison directly with FBI field offices outside of the country, since the stakes are so high and tight integration could save lives. It would also be weird if the NYPD were operating much more directly than that.


Does it also seem weird to you that small countries have intelligence bureaus? Denmark and Finland are both less populous than New York City.


So then Walmart should have a spy agency because they're bigger than some countries?


Funny enough, I find this purposefully exaggerated example not exaggerated enough. It seems to me there is much more reason for Walmart have a spy agency than for NYPD. After all, if NYPD has a reason to be involved with a foreign entity, there are federal agencies (most prominently NSA and CIA) that supposedly should handle these matters (though what they really do nobody knows). NYPD exists only to serve NY, and NY is a part of USA.

Walmart, on the other hand, isn't exactly a part of USA, and if it needs to spy on somebody, it would have to rely on their own internal capacity.


Interestingly, wallmart has their own forensics lab[0]

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/csi-w...


Walmart is not an executive agency of an elected government, so no.


And New York is not a sovereign nation so...


No, because they're countries. Who deals with an international incident caused by the NYPD?


When the NYPD did a work slowdown, rates of crime according to their own data went down.


You are engaging in circular reasoning.


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