*quality

Mildly terrifying too, but this is the future people.

genetic algorithm *engineering

Dude, I really owe you for promoting Mother. I was really just mildly interested in it, but both times you promoted it, I had to watch it again. Then I just -had- to watch all her other videos here. Now I'm just wondering how in the hell I've managed to miss this treasure for so long.

Thanks!

Was just watching the old Mythbusters where they took an actual driving road test while intoxicated or talking on a cell phone. But, being actual driving, they legally had to stay under the .08 BAC limit even though it was on a closed course.

Really cool to see this place, where they can test things at mild/moderate/high levels of impairment, other types of intoxication, etc.

However, I did have one minor complaint, sort of the same as in the Mythbusters episode: it would be nice to see additional tests where the driver isn't ever expected to look at a video camera and/or respond correctly to questions. Ie., what if you're talking to somebody on the phone hands free, or talking to a passenger in the car, but you're not expected to devote a lot of attention to that ALL the time. In a real scenario, you can keep your eyes on the road and pay attention to driving while also listening to someone or even talking to them a little bit. If you see something in the road that requires your full attention, it seems like your brain should be able to do a reasonable job of prioritizing the driving (more important) over paying attention to the conversation (less important).

I'd wager that on average, people in that sort of scenario are slightly impaired compared to drivers putting 100% of their attention on driving, but not by a big margin. Probably lower than a lot of other distractions, some of which we deem acceptable (hard to legislate things like "driving while preoccupied" angry/sad/whatever).

Eh, this is just not that funny. It's mildly amusing at best, and in that sense, it is classic SNL.

I'm mildly uncomfortable that the younger girl was there to witness this. Still, *quality idea.

Nutria don't die off every winter, so the weevils are likely to be less of a problem. There was actually a small scale trial before they built the weevil greenhouses, which didn't uncover any major issues with them.

See https://features.texasmonthly.com/editorial/creature-green-lagoon/ for many more details including the lack of frost tolerance:

Still, their campaign faced a significant obstacle: Caddo’s unfortunate latitude. The bug, like the plant it craves, is tropical. Problem is, weevils are felled by frost, while salvinia can stand slightly lower temperatures. This has proven to be Caddo’s curse, said Julie Nachtrieb, a biologist who raises and studies salvinia weevils at the Lewisville Aquatic Ecosystem Research Facility, part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In places with mild or even nonexistent winters, weevils can be released a few times and then “you can walk away and let nature take its course,” she said. But at Caddo, the weevil populations must be reconstituted every spring, giving salvinia a running start.

There's really only two arguments against SSM.

1: "I think the institution of marriage is pointless". Great, then don't get married, but kindly fuck off and don't tell the rest of us how to live our lives.

2: "Gay people are icky". Not actually an argument, but at least you're being honest.

On the plus side, there's every chance that this insane waste of money will actually bring an end to the current Australian government. Literally everyone I've talked to in Australia (been there for work recently) thinks this postal vote is a massive waste of taxpayer money. The vast majority are perfectly fine with SSM, and even those against SSM know that this is pointless.

OTOH, if Australia does decide that it really does decide that it wants to continue being a backward, homophobic, rock-on-fire-that-no-one-should-live-in*, well that's just more tourist dollars for NZ!

* just kidding... there are some parts of Australia that are only mildly racist!

I actually agree with you mostly, but you're not gonna like it.

One thing I will point out though - "I just don't connect gun regulations as an effective solution to mass murder."

We have data on this. Take Australia. In the 21 years leading up to Port Arthur and that massacre itself, which triggered the nation into heavily regulating guns, there were 16 mass murders of four or more people, totaling 137 murders. Since then, there have been 12, with a total of 76 murders. This despite there being population growth.

Violent crime rate has dropped from 1996 to now, mainly from reductions in robbery and a small drop in homicide rates.

There is very clear evidence that if most guns are removed from circulation, there are very real and likely benefits when it comes to reducing violent crime in general and murder.

I'm a political moderate and pragmatic. I go with what works. Don't care how liberal or conservative the solution is. I'm never in favor of regulation that is ineffective at solving problems.

And to that end, I'm against most gun control measures. I'm on board with banning assault weapons, fully automatic weapons, armor piercing bullets, but most gun control things like psychiatric evaluations, universal background checks? No.
Why? Because societal models we know that provided real progress on problems seemed to suggest one thing - it's the prevalence of guns that is the problem. If you make it marginally harder to buy guns by things like...

Three day waiting periods
Universal background checks
Psychiatric evaluations

They don't work. Banning guns works, though. It's worked time and time again. Australia, Britain, over and over and over, if guns lose prevalence, violence, murder, etc. decrease significantly.

At some point, society has to decide that giving up guns is worth it. But until that time, "common sense" gun control is a waste of time, and I quite frankly think it might do real effective gun control measures harm because when nothing gets better from these mild measures, they're going to point that out.

This is a flat out weird situation. The service animal cannot leave and there is always a good chance you would encounter one out in public.

The allergy shot probably wouldn't be an epi pen. That is for dire emergencies and if she had that she would be carrying it. It is most likely some other kind of injectable antihistamine. My wife and I have mild allergies and carry pills for when we travel.

On the other hand, I understand her panic as she is being separated from her father who is having surgery. That would sure a hell make me not think clearly.

I used to have pongy arm pits but then read about aggressive soap disrupting the flora of the armpit to favour smelly bacteria. So now just clean daily with warm water and avoid under arm deodorants completely and now i have a mild 'nice smelling' armpits - assuming my GF doesn't have olfactory dysfunction.

Interesting that Maher thanked / congratulated Jillette for voting for Hillary, but didn't note that he outspokenly did so as a "vote swap" thing where he (in an "important state" re Electoral College) voted for Hillary in return for a friend (in a meaningless / foregone conclusion state) voting for Gary Johnson.

I think that is a fine way to mildly game the system, which is more than mildly broken with the idiotic Electoral College. On the other hand, I think it is fine (honorable even?) to vote your conscious and vote for a third party candidate that has no actual chance of winning, even if you're in a tightly contested swing state.

But my favorite bit is Jillette talking about potential benefits of the Trump presidency. "Trump as a cautionary tale" is actually a very real thing, that will actually have long-term benefits. Whether or not those long-term benefits outweigh the short-term disaster definitely remains to be seen.

So good. I think this video is a pretty great argument for giving the crazy alt-right types plenty of leash to exercise 1st amendment rights -- give them a little and they'll find a way to hang themselves with it.

With that said, comments / (mild) rebuttals to your post @newtboy:
(my thoughts in italics inline with the quoted post:)

Things scurvy is worse than:
I. Death
II. When you open one of those ring-pull beers and it comes off but doesn't open the beer
III. Roman numerals being used unnecessarily
IV. Your boss saying. "Can I have a word with you?" and you know you're fucked but you're not sure why
V. The emoji movie

This is from a frame or so at 3:44, but I thought I'd trick you into thinking I was mildly funny until just now.

I am mildly horrified, and you're absolutely right I wouldn't hire you as a coder.

I am, however, in awe of your excel hackery.

I got distracted by all the blinking lights. Where is he... the Death Star control room? Frankly, I'm mildly jealous that my work place does not look as awesome as that.

As to the test itself, it's way too basic. I would expect any beginning programmer to be able to write that with only a few hours training. You could make it slightly more challenging by adding some arbitrary restrictions like "don't use a for loop" (i.e. use recursion) but those are pointless academic wankery.

I actually wrote tests and hired a coder earlier this year. This test wouldn't have got you an interview, never mind a job.

You want to impress me? Start out by writing a test that verifies the output. I don't care if it works, I want to know you can PROVE it works. While you're at it, if I see a console.log or a printf or a cout or any kind of output in your algorithm (unless it's just there for debugging)... instant fail. Learn to separate presentation from logic.

Finally, if you REALLY want to impress me, make it scale. 100 numbers? Meaningless. 1 million? 194ms on my machine.
Write me a version that can do several billion and take advantage of whatever threads/cores are available,