There doesn't seem to be a ton of information easily accessible about America Vespucci, but this [1] except from the Washington Democratic Review for February 1839 notes the following:
> The object for which she had specially come to America, was to obtain, if possible, a grant of land from the Congress of the United States, as a means of honourable and independent support and the failure of her application, as well as the grounds on which it was deemed necessary to decline compliance with the request, are fully and fairly stated in the following Report made to the Senate of the United States, by Mr. Walker, of Mississippi.
Where a report names that she seems to be worth of the name, but fails to mention any actual land grant, which I would assume is a nice way to say no.
> She feels that the name she bears is a prouder title than any that earthly monarchs can bestow; She asking us for a small corner of American soil, where she may pass the remainder of her days in this land of her adoption. She comes here as an exile, separated for ever from her family and friends; a stranger, without a country and without a home; expelled from her native Italy, for the avowal maintenance of opinions favourable to free institutions, and an ardent desire for the establishment of her country's freedom. That she indeed is worthy of the name of America —that her heart is indeed imbued with American principles, and fervent love for human liberty, is proved in her case, by toils, and perils, and sacrifices, worthy Of the proudest days of antiquity, when the Roman and the Spartan matrons were ever ready to surrender life in their country's service.
The Senate report that's referenced [1] is clear on the matter: they didn't give her anything.
Immediately after the quoted part, this follows:
"The petitioner desires the donation to her of a small tract of land by
Congress. With every feeling of respect and kindness for the memorialist, a majority of the committee deem it impossible for this Government to
make the grant. They think such a grant without a precedent, and that
it would violate the spirit of those compacts by which the public domain
was ceded to this Government. It is the unanimous and anxious desire
of the committee that the petitioner should receive all the benefits and recognition that this Government can bestow. What this Government cannot do is within the power of the American people. They feel at least an
equal pride and glory with us in the name of America. Throughout our
wide extended country, among all classes, this feeling is universal; and
in the humblest cottage the poorest American feels that this name, the name
of his beloved country, is a prouder title than any that adorns the monarch’s brow, and that if he has no other property, this name, with all its
great and glorious associations with the past and hopes for the future, is an
all-sufficient heritage to transmit to his children. This generous, patriotic,
and enlightened people will take into their own hands the case of America Vespucci. They will procure for her that home which she desires
among us. They will do ail that Congress is forbidden to do, and infinitely more than she asks or desires, and demonstrate to the world that the
name of America, our country’s name, is dear to us all, and shall be honored, respected, and cherished in the person of the interesting exile from whose ancestor we derive the great and glorious title."
"This generous, patriotic, and enlightened people will take into their own hands the case of America Vespucci. They will procure for her that home which she desires among us. They will do ail that Congress is forbidden to do, and infinitely more than she asks or desires, and demonstrate to the world that the name of America, our country’s name, is dear to us all, and shall be honored, respected, and cherished in the person of the interesting exile from whose ancestor we derive the great and glorious title."
I, personally, read into those final lines that she was, indeed, given land, but from private donors.
Found a rather odd site that seems to have a collection of references about her [1]. One account from The People's Almanac, Vol. 2. says:
> Another of her admirers was Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, who presented America's petition to the Senate on Jan. 29, 1839. "She is without a country, without fortune, and without protection," the Missourian pleaded. "She asks that we grant her a corner of the land which bears the name of her glorious forebear, and for the right of citizenship among those who call themselves Americans".
> Benton did his best, but two committees ruled against the exile. Sen. Robert J. Walker of Mississippi explained that her requests were without precedent. He advised that the lady should take her case to the American public. “This generous, patriotic and enlightened people will do all that Congress is forbidden to do,” he promised.
> His speech touched off a rousing demonstration of faith and affection for the outcast. Senators, representatives and Supreme Court justices contributed varying sums of money to launch a national campaign to help her purchase the “corner” of land she desired. The drive under way, she embarked on a tour that took her to Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, New Orleans, Cincinnati and Louisville. She was idolized everywhere. “Her path”, one report says, “was strewn with roses, open hands, and confiding hearts.” However, in the spring of 1840 she abruptly terminated her travels. She sailed for Europe, leaving behind the shocking announcement that she did not want the money raised for her because it was not “a national gift.”
So it seems that a group of political elites did privately raise money for her to purchase land, but she abruptly turned it down and returned to Europe for a year instead. Kind of an incredible story, really.
Wow that's super interesting. I'm glad that the MBTA is publishing more detailed stats so we can get super interesting visualisations like that. I'd be curious to see how the charts update as Boston fixes its recent delays.
That theanine has a beneficial effect on stress, via cortisol suppression, is a long-standing hypothesis. That it has other effects under the article's umbrella term of "emotional arousal" is one of the interesting novelties of the article for me.
Too late to edit the title now, but for the benefit of next time, I'm still interested in suggestions.
I would be curious to see how the author would respond to this fairly detailed criticism of his book: [1] One excerpt from this amazon review goes "If you are impressed by statistics, blips on fMRI screens, taking correlations as proof of causality and meta-analysis as equal to replication, then you might like this book. If you are interested in what wild speculations parapsychologists are coming up with these days, then this is the book for you. If you are looking for evidence that psi is explained by quantum physics, you'll be disappointed."
The other day I was riding the train and a guy called me an idiot. Are you also interested in knowing how I responded to his claim?
why did you choose to post that particular review out of all the others? why not, for example, this one?
"Consider the possibly that classical physics is not only wrong but way wrong."
"A wild ride through the data supporting psi. I was for many years a reductionist like Michael Shermer. However, after reading more and books like this, my mind has accepted the reality that we know very little about where we came from and what really drives our human..."
This looks very cool! I wonder how close it is to the method that Boston Dynamics uses to control the their version. Did they simply train a machine learning algorithm for way longer than a hobbyist can or is there a ton of manual tweaking?
Boston Dynamics (famously) does not use machine learning to control their robots. Maybe a little bit of computer vision, but all control is with more classical approaches.
Boston Dynamics probably does some form of force control. That is controlling the force applied to the ground by the legs in addition to just the position the leg is moving. The actuators here appear to be purely position controlled.
thanks! well, good question. I think it's a mix between ML (probably not just simulations but also directly learn from real-world experiences) and more classic approaches. There are some very interesting examples on the Google AI blog like this one (https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/exploring-nature-inspired-...)
I found that going to the last page showed a more realistic number for results. This would only be shown on that "last page" of results though. However, it does seem strange that there are only 447 results for a google search of "apple"[0] down from a whopping 4,070,000,000 results shown before that page. And that is with show omitted results. Seems like max result limiting for the 0.1% of users that want to look past page 10 of search results
It is actually plausible that there could be billions of pages with apple on the internet.
The 447 results you paged through are just the most relevant docs for your particular query ("apple" + country) and Google doesn't bother retrieving any further. Your use case of finding all the pages with the term "apple" is simply too rare and too expensive to support and they don't optimize for it.
If you try different query variants apple + something with different locales (&hl=) you'd get very different top NNN results.
Interesting that even apple apps with the strictest sandboxing by default still has over ten different methods of determining if a jailbreak exists. Now maybe these methods are only useful when a phone is jailbroken, but it seems that this just seems like another way of collecting information.
Many of these methods are probing for whether the sandbox exists and is in effect–on a normal device they will return errors (you tried to access something you shouldn't have) or predictable values (the libraries loaded should just be your own and Apple's) based on the app's execution. The point of such checks is that on a jailbroken device they will unexpectedly succeed due to relaxed policy enforcement or give away information that code execution is occuring. In my opinion most of these should not pass App Store Review. But Apple lets it through regardless…
It seems that this would be a much better way of funding research in a general sense, since that seems to be the general process of their problem solving. The only thing is that to apply this to other fields, the barrier for getting people that are equally motivated and intelligent about analyzing if the research is 'going' somewhere is high
> The object for which she had specially come to America, was to obtain, if possible, a grant of land from the Congress of the United States, as a means of honourable and independent support and the failure of her application, as well as the grounds on which it was deemed necessary to decline compliance with the request, are fully and fairly stated in the following Report made to the Senate of the United States, by Mr. Walker, of Mississippi.
Where a report names that she seems to be worth of the name, but fails to mention any actual land grant, which I would assume is a nice way to say no.
> She feels that the name she bears is a prouder title than any that earthly monarchs can bestow; She asking us for a small corner of American soil, where she may pass the remainder of her days in this land of her adoption. She comes here as an exile, separated for ever from her family and friends; a stranger, without a country and without a home; expelled from her native Italy, for the avowal maintenance of opinions favourable to free institutions, and an ardent desire for the establishment of her country's freedom. That she indeed is worthy of the name of America —that her heart is indeed imbued with American principles, and fervent love for human liberty, is proved in her case, by toils, and perils, and sacrifices, worthy Of the proudest days of antiquity, when the Roman and the Spartan matrons were ever ready to surrender life in their country's service.
[1] http://portraits.allenbrowne.info/Vespucci/Buckingham/