For me, it actually seems fairly plausible. I was a fairly untrained 70kg forty-something when I went to the gym and very quickly found that as I did a bit of hiking, I could max out the standing calf raise machine at 155kg. This involves having a very padded 155kg on your shoulders while in a standing position. It felt to me like that was the most my shoulders and back could cope with, and it's more than double body weight.

Agreed. Most of the time the cost of driving out of your way exceeds the saving you would make. However, there's a fuel station near me that is 19.8% cheaper than one only 1.6 miles away from it, and that's a thing that is worth knowing.

https://xkcd.com/951/

However this is only really good for slow connections. If your connection is faster than about 50MB/s then the delta calculation mechanism becomes the bottleneck. On fast connections you should use the -W option for rsync which switches the delta algorithm off.

Saving on transmitted bandwidth costs is more important to me than speed of transmission for my use cases which I feel are likely to be common use cases.

I still want my /var/log/messages back. The new system just doesn't seem to work correctly.

That's not strictly true. The very simplest of DC LED drivers flicker, such as the classic single-transistor battery saver circuit, but a slightly more complex DC LED driver circuit will not. One of the best ways to drive an LED is with a constant current source, which typically involves putting an inductor in series with the LED and switching the supply to that at a reasonably high frequency, which would mean the LED does not flicker at all.

A while back I wrote a piece of (academic) software. A couple of years ago I was asked to review a paper prior to publication, and it was about a piece of software that did the same-ish thing as mine, where they had benchmarked against a set of older software, including mine, and of course they found that theirs was the best. However, their testing methodology was fundamentally flawed, not least because there is no "true" answer that the software's output can be compared to. So they had used a different process to produce a "truth", then trained their software (machine learning, of course) to produce results that match this (very flawed) "truth", and then of course their software was the best because it was the one that produced results closest to the "truth", whereas the other software might have been closer to the actual truth.

I recommended that the journal not publish the paper, and gave them a good list of improvements to give to the authors that should be made before re-submitting. The journal agreed with me, and rejected the paper.

A couple of months later, I saw it had been published unchanged in a different journal. It wasn't even a lower-quality journal, if I recall the impact factor was actually higher than the original one.

I despair of the scientific process.

If it makes you feel any better, the problem you’re describing is as old as peer review. The authors of a paper only have to get accepted once, and they have a lot more incentive to do so than you do to reject their work as an editor or reviewer.

This is one of the reasons you should never accept a single publication at face value. But this isn’t a bug — it’s part of the algorithm. It’s just that most muggles don’t know how science actually works. Once you read enough papers in an area, you have a good sense of what’s in the norm of the distribution of knowledge, and if some flashy new result comes over the transom, you might be curious, but you’re not going to accept it without a lot more evidence.

This situation is different, because it’s a case where an extremely popular bit of accepted wisdom is both wrong, and the system itself appears to be unwilling to acknowledge the error.

Back when I listened to NPR, I shook my fist at the radio every time Shankar Vidantim came on to explain the latest scientific paper. Whatever was being celebrated, it was surely brand new. It's presentation on Morning Edition gave it the imprimature of "Proofed Science", and I imagined it getting repeated at every office lunch and cocktail party. I never heard a retraction.

It seems that the failure of the scientific process is 'profit'.

Schools should be using these kinds of examples in order to teach critical thinking. Unfortunately the other side of the lesson is how easy it is to push an agenda when you've got a little bit of private backing.

Many people do not know that Impact Factor is gameable. Unethical publications have gamed it. Therefore a higher IF may or may not indicate higher prominence. Use Scimago journal rankings for non-gameable scores.

Science and Nature are mol-bio journals that publish the occasional physics paper with a title you'd expect on the front page of The Weekly World News.

The lower case "k" vs upper case "K" is an abomination. The official notation is lower case "k" for 1000 and lower case "ki" for 1024. It's an abomination too, but it's the correct abomination.

That's a newer representation, mostly because storage companies always (mis)represented their storage... I don't think any ISPs really misrepresent k/K in kilo bits/bytes

They're checking to see whether any of the links they put in the emails are being fetched from their servers. It's stupid, but it works for most people.

I had a similar situation with SMS messages that were being sent to me with links informing me of status updates. These texts were useful, and I would go over to my real computer to check the web site. Then after a few days the text messages said "It looks like these messages aren't getting through to you, so we'll stop sending them." Which is also stupid, but it works for most people that load the web site on their phone from the SMS link. God help you if you have a dumb-phone.

You don't need the recipient to actually click on any visible link. Tracking pixels are the oldest trick in the book.

Only if people naively automatically load remote content. My inbox receives the bits that actually come in the email and nothing else. If you send an empty email with all images, you sent an empty email...

Though I do not know the way.

I certainly use the word "exciting" in ways that that might be non-standard, like for instance describing when everything has gone catastrophically wrong.

It is almost as good as when Sir Humphrey told the minister his idea was 'courageous', meaning an enormous risk.