avancil

Another thing you need to calibrate on is context.

There are different cultural approaches to punctuality that can be divided into "Cold Climate" and "Warm Climate" categories, or roughly, being more oriented toward time and efficiency, or toward relationships and going with the flow. "Meet me at 10" might mean showing up at 10, or it might mean you start getting ready to go at 10, and if you meet a friend along the way, you might be later.

Even in our "Cold Climate" time-oriented culture, there are different definitions of "on time".

• If the bus leaves at 3

One reason missing from your "couldn’t get it on their own" scenario: They couldn't justify spending the extra money on the "fancy" version of something, or never would have thought to. If that something was relatively cheap, you can get the deluxe version without breaking the bank.

I had a crummy little basic stapler that would jam. Someone got me a fancy Swingline. They spent like, $12.99, and years later, every time I staple something (maybe only a few times a year, but still...) I feel gratitude. I could easily have bought a better stapler, but never th... (read more)

I've always held that, since "fewer" refers to discrete quantities and "less" refers to continuous quantities, but the integers are a subset of the reals, using "less" when the grammar police would call for "fewer", is less precise, but not wrong. Going the other way doesn't work, though.

Getting to Mars is a big jump compared with going to the moon, since you're traveling 500-1000x farther on any efficient route, and have to do much more to keep the astronauts from getting irradiated, or hopelessly weakened by the lack of gravity. Getting to Pluto is 100x farther than that, so you would need to do some special things to, e.g., not have your astronauts die of old age on the trip.

This is all true, but these jumps in difficulty are nothing compared with the jump in difficulty of getting to the moon (or even LEO), versus getting between any two points on Earth.

This is an interesting piece, thought provoking, but the core premise is unconvincing. As you've presented things, maybe in this case, I have to accept that there is some super-powerful being that will do really bad things to me if I don't kowtow, or do really good stuff for me if I do, but that's not the same as truly accepting that this being is the fundamental reference for right and wrong, and that aligning with what this being says is ultimately good, and not aligning with it is evil. There's a fundamental difference between believing, "According to G... (read more)

Most of your examples seem more like "prerequisites" or basic skills that you build on. But scaffolding is a thing you build up to get something else done, then get rid of afterwards. So, a scaffolding skill would be a skill that enables you to learn how to do something you actually want to learn, but once you have learned how to do that thing, you no longer need the scaffolding skill.

Algebraic notation can still be useful to a chess player. Knowing basics like how to properly cut things is integral to cooking. Debugging is an essential skill for programmi... (read more)

There are conventions pertaining to the style a letter is written in. You might have a as an arbitrary element in set A, while a₁, a₂, etc., are a sequence of elements in A, while fancy-boldface A or fancy-script A (I don't know how to render those here) could represent the class of A-like sets. Also, a′ would be another case of a, or maybe the derivative of a, while a″ would be a third case, or maybe the second derivative. Sometimes superscripts or backscripts are used, when subscripts are not enough. Sometime... (read more)

There is a related problem where many browser-based productivity tools follow design principles from websites that are trying to get clicks. For example, I commonly run into DB interfaces at work that will return, say, 10 (or 25, or other small number) results per page. Now, it's good design to not let a query that returns, say, a million results, crash the browser. But, if a few hundred, or even a few thousand, results will display within milliseconds, why make me page dozens (or hundreds) of times? (I'm looking at you, GitHub commit history!)

Another exam... (read more)

It seems to me this is an example of you and Kaj talking past each other. To you, B's perspective is "eminently reasonable" and needs no further explanation. To Kaj, B's perspective was a bit unusual, and to fully inhabit that perspective, Kaj wanted a bit more context to understand why B was holding that principle higher than other things (enjoying the social collaboration, the satisfaction of optimally solving a problem, etc.).

Except there's more at play than just winning the election. If you're a voter in a swing state, the candidates are paying more attention to you, and making more promises catering to you. The parties are picking candidates they think will appeal to you. Even if your odds of winning stay the same, the prize for winning gets bigger.

It was exiting a few elections ago when Colorado was in play by both parties. We even got to host the Democratic convention in Denver. Now, they just ignore us.

One thing you touched on, but didn't delve into, is that the various "pay" components will having varying marginal utility at different levels.

For example, if you're literally starving, "coolness" won't matter much, you need enough money to buy food! But if you have enough money, you start caring about other things.

Perhaps having some social interaction is important, and you would sacrifice other things to have at least some of that in your job. But, beyond a certain point, the value diminishes, and would likely go negative, as the constant socializing get... (read more)

The OCD in me objects to the colors not being in chromatic order. On the other hand, if you wanted to maximize visual contrast between adjacent colors, then a sensible order would be black, red, green, purple, orange, blue.

As a former teacher, I firmly believe that if we want to reform schools, we must reform the teaching profession and school management structures. At least, we should address the things that are most insane:

• A school district is a big operation, with many having thousands of employees, and budgets running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. And it is usually run by literal amateurs. As in, the school board is a group of unpaid volunteers.
• As tough as it is to be a teacher, consider what it's like to be a principal: You get the most odious parts of be

Ironic that "Maybe" seems to have one of the narrower ranges of probabilities...

The cell borders example is misleading. The readability issue is not the cell borders themselves, the issue is that the borders are heavier weight than the text, and there's no difference between the borders separating the row and column headers, and the borders separating the data rows and columns.

If your only choices for gridlines are "off" and "obnoxious", "off" seems like a good choice. And for small tables, no borders works well. But for larger tables, finer lines (maybe in a lighter color or shade) can really improve the readability.

In multiplayer games, one balancing factor is that other players can gang up on the person who is ahead. Depending on the game dynamic, this can even things out a lot. In some games, this even creates the dynamic where you don't want to look too strong, so that others don't focus their attention on you.

Playing games against my kids when they were young, rather than just slack off and let them win, it was more fun for me to figure out the best way to handicap myself: What algorithm for sub-optimal play would keep the game close? Solving that puzzle effectively became my victory condition, rather than the game's victory condition, and I was effectively competing against myself, a more balanced opponent.

The question of what IS happening versus what SHOULD happen with population growth are certainly two different things. My point is that arguments for growth ultimately need to address the questions of how big should we grow, and what happens when we reach that point. If our economy depends on continued growth, that's going to stop working at some point.

While the physical limits of the universe are a long ways off, there are other limits that we could hit much sooner. Underlying your pro-growth arguments, there is an assumption that collective intelligence ... (read more)

The fundamental problem with these anti-Malthusian arguments is they ignore the fundamental reality that exponential growth is unsustainable. There are physical limits to the universe, whether you believe the earth can support 10 billion or 100 trillion, or if we can expand through the universe and achieve a billion billion times more than that, it won't take that long, with exponential growth, to get there. At a certain point, the entire mass of the universe has been converted to human flesh. Some point before that, we either stabilize, or collapse.

Maybe ... (read more)

Where I live, I don't see many people going 15 over. I see most people going within -3 to +9 of the speed limit. They're following the law -- maybe not strictly as written, but as socially understood. There are a few people breaking the law -- and they get ticketed, etc. There are places where the speed limit is unreasonably low, and gets ignored (e.g. speed limit drops from 75 to 55 for construction zone, but no construction activity is visible), but in general, people around here follow the speed limit -- as socially understood.

The social definition is t... (read more)

Yes, when it comes to ordinary driving situations, there's only so good you can get, if you can get from A to B without trouble, without annoying and/or scaring your passengers or other people on the road, it's hard to do noticeably better. It's hard to get too much above the median; the 80th percentile driver won't seem that different from the 50th percentile driver. But, you can be really bad and drag the average down. Thus, the average is below the median, ergo most people (most drivers, anyway) are above average drivers. (Even assuming we are using some identical, objective scale, which, as jefftk points out, is not going to be the case.)