This reminds me of "trompe l'oeil foods"... dishes that appear to be one thing, but are another entirely. Or maybe optical illusions more generally.

Maybe the most fun, though, was just playing around and "picking up" paperclips and tiny screws by flicking my finger at them.

I wanted to actually build first-hand intuition on all of the choices around hyperparameter choices, activation functions, network architectures, etc. So I've been rigorously exploring them by training and testing models off of the mnist dataset.

Coming up soon: vision transformers, depth-of-architecture on CNNs, batch size investigations, and more.

Let me know if any of you have any suggestions of things to investigate next!

- Nagi, Japan. TFR: 2.95 (replacement rate is ~2.1). Astonishing. This is the only true success in the article.

- Nagareyama, Japan. TFR: 1.5. At this rate, the population will drop by ~25% every generation.

- South Tyrol, Italy. TFR: 1.64. Marginally better than Nagareyama. Noticeably better than the rest of Italy (TFR: 1.2), but still a population in strong decline.

- Czechia. TFR: 1.6 (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...). Better than the European median, but not exceptional. Roughly on a par with Lithuania (1.63), Belgium (1.59), and the UK (1.57). Noticeably behind France (1.79). None of these countries at such TFRs are even capable of maintaining their population at a stable level, and should all be regarded as undergoing some level of population collapse.

It's kinda sus that you leave the whole "rates" part out

- Japan (1.2) and Tokyo (.99) vs Nagareyama (1.5 considering it's in Chiba and Tokyo) & Nagi (2.95)

- Considering the Italian Birth Rate is in freefall whole South Tyrol is holding steady and above not just Italy's but also the UK.

- Czecha had a 1.8 until a drop to 1.6 during 2021 to 2022 according towards your dataset with Belgium, Lit. and the UK are now below

Considinder Czecha had a 1.1 in 2000, its only just makes it more impressive

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hus%C3%A1k%27s_Children

One thing that perplexes me about this topic is that people don't just pull up a historical birth rate chart, find the bit not that long ago when fertility rates were around 4, and then ask "why was it 4 then?".

Followed by asking "how can we restore those things?".

I really doubt it was because any of the popular reasons trotted out whenever this topic comes up, which usually blame money, despite us having much more money now than in days past when birthrates were way higher.

I wonder why it's so hard for people just to say simple things like "it's because everyone carefully uses contraception now, and treats sex as a consumption good, because they want it but not its result - a scenario most of them treat as on par with catching malaria".

Funny world we live in

https://www.population.fyi/t/family-research

There are a few other wilderness schools in the area, some of which may have similar activities, so I am not sure if that is the same one the GP was referring to.

For example, even the suitability to obtain a deep squat may be affected by things like hip joint geometry: https://www.otpbooks.com/stuart-mcgill-hip-anatomy/

It's my understanding that they've known the folks at Bantam for some time now, and that given how hard it can be to run a physical product company (especially one that does some in-house manufacturing for your own products!) in the bay area, that they're looking forward to having such niceties as 'pto'.

They're really excellent people, and made a huge difference to me when I first moved to the bay area, so while it's sad to see them leave, I understand it, and hope this leads to a better situation all around for them.

It doesn't make it any less sad, however. It's just... the end of an era, it feels like.

I also have issues with M&A practices to begin with. While I can't speak for this particular case, I do worry that in general the frequency of M&A is trending toward harmful to our society. That may be coloring my view.

I just hope they release the MOnSter 6502 someday. That thing is cool, and if I happened to have the money, I'd probably pay a grand to be able to hang one on my wall...

So, say you're on earth and you measure the speed of light... you find that it's c (~3x10^8 m/s).

Now you get on a spaceship and accelerate to 0.5c with respect to earth, and you measure the speed of light relative to your spaceship... still c!

In this way, you can't really define a reference frame with a speed "the same as the speed of light". And if you try, you'll run into nasty infinities in all your equations that will cause them to blow up and stop being useful.

How is there a speed limit at all, if that’s the case? You can accelerate to 0.5c and then toss an apple out the window and say you’re moving at the speed of an apple tossed out of the window, relative to the apple. You have all of c available as headroom again? You can accelerate up to 0.5c again, relative to the apple you tossed out the window?

I am imagining you will say that it will seem like this is what is happening to folks in the spaceship, but what’s really happening is that time is slowing for the spaceship and it’s passengers, and that they still can’t reach c. Fine. But c relative to what? There is no absolute c because there are no truly fixed points, so c relative to what?

> A comoving observer is the only observer who will perceive the universe, including the cosmic microwave background radiation, to be isotropic. Non-comoving observers will see regions of the sky systematically blue-shifted or red-shifted. Thus isotropy, particularly isotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation, defines a special local frame of reference called the comoving frame. The velocity of an observer relative to the local comoving frame is called the peculiar velocity of the observer.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comoving_and_proper_distances#...

Yes you can. You can even do it with 0.6c for both those speeds.

it's either "relative to any observer." or "relative to any inertial reference frame". no matter where you go (on the ship, on a planet you pass by, on another ship) you will never see the apple travel as fast as the photons coming out of your flashlight. Depending on where the observer is, they will see the apple accelerate to 0.5c (if they are aboard the ship) or they will see it gain mass (or rather, see you throw it more slowly as if it had gained mass), contract in the direction it's thrown, and slow down (due to time dilation...relative to the moving frame).

The case I don't know how to answer is two apples thrown at each other, each with a speed greater than 0.5c.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity-addition_formula

Suppose there is a starting point A from which your ship is moving away from. At the same time, a photon is shot out from A. You can take the distance traversed between A and the ship as D1, and the distance traversed by the photon as D2. Then your "percentage of C" is D1/D2.

How can you get the distance D2? I'm not sure. I guess we have to pretend it's also a ship that is traveling at C that can emit information to us (also at C :p )

  #! /bin/bash

  function todo {
   if [ $# -eq 0 ]
    then
     vim ~/Dropbox/todo/todo_list.txt
    else
     vim "$HOME/Dropbox/todo/todo_list_$1.txt"
   fi
  }

  todo

While, whenever I have a new project/etc come up, I can just

  todo new_project_name

   # Append a timestamped entry to the journal
   log() {
       printf "$(date +%Y-%m-%d--%H:%M)   %s\n" "$*" >> $journal
   }
   
   # Query the journal
   lquery() {
       grep -ni $1 $journal
   }
   
   # Show all journal entries from today
   ltoday() {
       clear
       grep -n $(date +%Y-%m-%d) $journal
   }
   
   # On a line identified by line number, switch @todo to @done
   ldo() {
       sed -i "$1 s/@todo/@done/" $journal
       sed -i "$1 s/$/ \[COMPLETED $(date +%Y-%m-%d--%H:%M)\]/" $journal
   }

Do you have a format in your text files to track when things are done, like a checklist?

In Org, you can give things states like "TODO", "INPROGRESS", "DONE", "CANCELLED", add checkboxes (like "[ ]" and "[x]"), have sub-tasks/lists, etc.

I have really gotten into Org, and I have found there are a few other checklist formats/programs in plain text. Just wondering how you do it.

$ cat << EOF > ~/.bash_profile

> alias lstd='ls ~/Dropbox/todo'

> EOF

    #compdef todo
    
    _todo() {
      _files -W $HOME/Dropbox/todo/
    }
    
    _todo "$@"