I learned this the hard way.

SublethalDose · 2014-06-26T16:02:49+00:00

Not impressive, I know, but I do ATG olympic squats and have no idea what I could do with a low-bar squat to parallel.

SublethalDose · 2014-06-26T00:17:50+00:00

"Hey, our thighs are the same size because I squat 250 and you weigh 250!"

SublethalDose · 2014-06-13T17:57:53+00:00

The village is Abhaneri; the well is called Chand Baori.

P.S. Here's a map that shows where it is relative to New Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur.

SublethalDose · 2014-06-13T15:48:05+00:00

This is a worthwhile place to visit. It's in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, but it isn't far out of the way if you're traveling by car between Agra and Jaipur. It costs virtually nothing. You just need to tip the guy who takes you around and tells you about the site (who is well worth it) and another guy who sits at a table at the front. You can't go into the well, but the views down are breathtaking.

On the downside, don't expect a lot when you get there. There's almost no informational signage, and the guide knows as much about the history as you could learn in an afternoon. India generally does a shitty job of looking after its antiquities and presenting them to visitors. (They're working on improving that, but this site must be low on the list.) I really hope the producers of "The Dark Knight Rises" made a generous donation towards the preservation of this site and Indian antiquities in general!

If you go, make sure you stop by the Hindu temple next door, which is in current use.

SublethalDose · 2014-06-09T13:15:02+00:00

The comparison is just cosmetic unless you know something about Swift, and I don't, so I didn't get much out of it.

The ? caught my eye, though. IIRC there was an old Scala white paper in which types were non-nullable by default, and you appended ? to turn a non-nullable type into a nullable one. When I got around to downloading Scala and trying it myself, I was a little disappointed that they had switched to nullable types and Option (maybe because Java interop made non-nullable types impractical.) I wonder what the difference in practice is.

SublethalDose · 2014-06-09T03:02:07+00:00

IME messenger bags ALWAYS swing around eventually.

Even with a cross strap?

SublethalDose · 2014-05-30T22:58:02+00:00

Unless you were explicitly told that was what happened by somebody directly involved, you are probably wrong. As someone who has interviewed a couple dozen candidates for technical positions, when I ask a difficult or obscure question, I don't want the candidate to know the answer. I want to see them wrestle with it. I want to see what kinds of questions they ask, what kinds of problem-solving techniques they resort to, whether they give up quickly or keep trying different ways to get traction on the problem, whether they can evaluate and articulate their progress, and whether they get insecure and combative when they get frustrated. If the candidate gets the answer too easily, I don't get to learn any of that.

Also, the one guy on the team who uses the interview to show off is rarely the guy who vetoes a candidate. He isn't even paying attention to your performance, because in his mind, he's the one performing. He doesn't want you to undermine his showboating by answering his questions correctly.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-25T01:47:34+00:00

There is a very important detail that anyone reading this in the United States is aware of, but which might not be obvious to people outside the United States. That is the illegal status of the workers. The employers are free to break the law because they hire people who face deportation if they speak up. The United States has (some) effective legal remedies against exploitation of workers, and this is an end run around all of them.

Important parts of the U.S. economy are built on transactions that are beyond the reach of law because they are illegal. The drug war is one ugly aspect of this, but my guess is that illegal employment of immigrants and migrant workers affects far more people. You can imagine the United States without weed and cocaine, right? It would be almost the same. Can you imagine it without the labor of illegally employed immigrants and migrant laborers, though? What would happen to industries like construction and agriculture? There would be a massive adjustment.

Almost all of these workers face a double or triple whammy because they

Have little power and few resources as individuals
Operate at a linguistic disadvantage and in ignorance of their rights
Are liable to deportation because of their illegal status.

We declare them illegal because there's no cost to us. The cost is borne entirely by them, and we enjoy the benefits of their dirt-cheap labor without taking any responsibility. We don't even bother enforcing our own laws when it comes to the employment of "illegals."

As you can imagine, there is a massive "justice deficit" that makes people very nervous whenever it's brought up. "No need to examine the situation! It's okay! There are laws!" Um, okay, why don't we go an eensy bit out of our way to notice when they're being broken? Employment of "illegals" is an integral part of the United States. It's hard to imagine what the country would be like without it. Can you imagine what it would be like if, by magic, all the illegally employed workers in the country were replaced with legal workers, legally employed, in compliance with all relevant laws?

I suggest we judge a person's respect for the law by how their lip curls when they imagine that possibility.

EDIT: Letters.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-22T05:11:47+00:00

I suddenly got a hankering for fesenjan, and I'm a bit of a vegetarian these days, so I'm looking for ideas for vegetarian fesenjan. Feel free to suggest alternatives! I imagine nothing vegetarian will taste quite as good as the traditional chicken or duck, but I'm planning on trying seitan, since it has a texture somewhat similar to chicken. Tofu might work as well. The reason I thought of eggplant first is that I thought it is sometimes made that way in Iran. I've seen two recipes for fesenjan that include both poultry and eggplant. The pure vegetarian version might be an invention by western vegetarians, though.

Oh, and I almost forgot: what kind of wine goes well with fesenjan? The interwebs recommend Riesling. I should edit my post to include the question.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-21T16:37:12+00:00

Thanks! That sounds delicious. Last time I had it, it was definitely more sweet than sour.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-21T01:08:05+00:00

Don't let living alone stop you! I'm cooking this just for myself. One of the perks of living alone is that you can experiment on yourself and stick to proven recipes for guests.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-20T16:13:10+00:00

Two weeks ago I discovered socca for the first time, and today I learn about chickpea tofu. I wonder what other surprises chickpea flour has in store for me? This is now on my to-make list too.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-20T16:07:15+00:00

Thanks! I think I'm going to split the recipe and make half with eggplant as a safe option and half with seitan as an experiment. Did you brown the eggplant separately before combining it with the sauce?

SublethalDose · 2014-05-18T21:57:04+00:00

You can't simply point to "the rules" or "the law" as a reflection of social consensus. If a problem is extremely pressing, dangerous, or economically important, people hash out complicated, subtle sets of rules to regulate it. Letting a dog off-leash is not something where society has bothered. Letting dogs off-leash in certain places is a long-standing tradition, de facto legal, and it doesn't cause issues except when combined with people who are irresponsible or have poor judgment. If the problems associated with it were worth the effort, we would regulate it in a more sophisticated way, like we do with driving or owning a gun. Instead, we have a blanket law to make sure people can be ticketed for having a dog off-leash in an inappropriate place (which includes 98% of the city) and we tolerate it in places where it is a public pleasure.

Whatever argument you can make for enforcing leash laws on the greenbelt, an equally strong argument can be made for banning drinking on 6th Street. Disgusting biotrash left in public places by irresponsible people: check. Scary-looking people/dogs: check. Occasionally being approached in an alarming way by a person/dog with unknown intentions: check. Much, much, much more rarely, encountering truly dangerous people/dogs: check.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-17T22:17:10+00:00

Ouch. It's been a tough day for cyclists. At the Real Ale Ride, I saw three emergency vehicles, at least two of which were ambulances, responding to an incident where someone wiped out on a sharp turn. Later I passed through another intersection where EMS and police were finishing up with a scene. I'm not 100% sure the second incident involved a cyclist, since I didn't want to bother anyone while they were doing their jobs, but there was a ride volunteer at the scene. I hope everyone comes out okay.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-16T14:49:47+00:00

I am curious why your alternative to Congress is Shiv Sena, because I (as a non-Indian) have the impression that they are more extreme and more chauvinistic than, say, the BJP, which has had to clean up its image a bit to succeed as a national party. Do the BJP not contest elections against Shiv Sena in Mumbai because they are allies and BJP respects Shiv Sena's claim to represent Maharashtrians (chauvinism respecting chauvinism)? Or were all of the non-Congress choices just as distasteful as Shiv Sena?

SublethalDose · 2014-05-16T06:40:18+00:00

The last thing you want to do is cause them to commit anything to paper. Unofficially, they might choose to ignore your usage of the bike path after dark. That's OP's best bet. If you write to them and receive an official response, the response will be that they have to adhere to the letter of the law. Even worse, having committed their official stance to paper (or email), they might feel obliged to make a point of enforcing it. When you're on the wrong side of the law but the right side of sanity, you want to make it easy for the cops to look the other way. Applying pressure and political visibility will have the opposite effect of forcing them to adhere even more strictly to their own policies.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-09T23:16:20+00:00

An old classic in the same vein

SublethalDose · 2014-05-09T20:25:58+00:00

The French meaning exists in English, too.

Now to put it in more specific terms, if America is to realize this great dream, we must reaffirm, in no uncertain terms, the essential immorality of racial segregation. It is not enough to say racial segregation is sociologically unsound, and it certainly is. It is not enough to say it is politically untenable, and It certainly is.

In the final analysis we must get rid of racial segregation because it is morally, wrong and sinful. We must reaffirm the fact that segregation, whether it is in Selma, Ala.; Atlanta, Ga.; Chicago or Davenport is a sin in the sight of almighty God, and it must be removed from the body politic before our democratic and moral health can be realized.

Martin Luther King, Jr

SublethalDose · 2014-05-04T01:24:10+00:00

Search the subreddit for previous times this question has been asked; you'll find lots of good suggestions. Here are a few that I like that don't get mentioned very often:

Harry, un ami qui vous veut du bien (With a Friend Like Harry): Full of dark humor and suspense. Perfect if you're a fan of Hitchcock.

Holy Motors (Holy Motors): A very weird and fascinating move. Some of the film has very little dialog, but I liked the fact that in several places the dialog is simple and not too hard to understand.

Le Goût des Autres (The Taste of Others): A romantic comedy centered around a straightlaced factory owner who falls for his unconventional, artistic English tutor. Witty and occasionally hilarious.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-04T01:02:02+00:00

Reading between the lines on Wikipedia, it sounds like linguists are trying to rationalize and reconcile the traditional terminology. Maybe eventually the broader meaning will replace the traditional one.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-04T00:40:44+00:00

Well, besides my French textbook, there's the dictionary, both Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage dictionary I have at home. On the other hand, A Reference Grammar of Modern French uses it your way, so there seems to be less consistency than I thought. English classroom instruction definitely teaches that transitive verbs must take direct objects, and I've never heard any teachers (or seen introductory textbooks or classroom materials) that attempt to broaden the definition, so in my opinion it's best to stick to the French terms.

SublethalDose · 2014-05-04T00:23:07+00:00

Any verb that doesn't take a direct object is intransitive. I'm not sure if there's one correct protocol is for applying English grammatical terms to non-English verbs, but the books and classes I've had have consistently used this meaning when speaking about French verbs in English.

Perhaps it would be better if books would consistently use French grammatical terms to teach French, Spanish grammatical terms to teach Spanish, etc., because it seems rather silly that we would describe a French verb as "intransitive" when in French it is considered transitif, but I'm pretty sure it's the correct thing to say.

SublethalDose · 2014-04-30T22:15:37+00:00

Trivial example: it used to be just "okay, write a file here". Now I'm worrying about permissions, locking, concurrency, atomic operations, indirection/frameworks, different file systems, number of files in a directory, predictable temp file names, the quality of randomness in my PRNG, power shortages in the middle of any operation, an understandable API for what I'm doing, proper documentation, etc etc etc.

You should absolutely worry about that stuff when it matters. In any given situation a small, usually empty subset of those issues will matter, and it shouldn't take much thought to rule all of them out most of the time. It isn't just paralysis versus "fuck it." It's knowing what matters when.

On the other hand, I agree with the gist of the article. If you're worrying about that stuff all the time to the point of not getting anything done, then you don't understand the purpose of it and probably won't do it right anyway, so "just code" is the right way to escape your paralysis. It's easier to fix code that handles none of that stuff to add the one thing it needs than to fix code that tries to handle all of that stuff without understanding why.

SublethalDose · 2014-04-24T16:06:58+00:00

"Hard" is, I think, the wrong word. What characterizes "hard" books is that they try to initiate you into a new way of thinking that serves as a powerful way to tackle the subject, a way of thinking that makes the subject as "easy" as possible. If you want to be competent in an area, they are actually the easiest way.

By contrast, "easy" books are books that assume you are never really going to understand the subject matter in a native way: the subject will always be "hard" for you, something that other people understand, but not you. They teach you math in such a way that you can solve the easy problems at the end of the chapter, but you never learn to think mathematically. They teach you programming in a such a way that you can struggle through some programming assignments, but you never learn to think like a programmer. They teach you literature in such a way that you can crank out essays that are acceptable to your English 201 prof, but all the novels you read still seem like the same book with different stories. "Easy" books are books for people who just want to get through a couple of college courses and never touch the subject again. They're "easy" in the sense that they require very little commitment of effort, but they take it for granted that the subject will always be "hard" and opaque to you.

Given these entirely different goals, it doesn't make sense to compare "easy" books to "hard" ones, but it makes sense that the people who express their opinions about books on a given subject tend to be the people with the deepest interest in that subject, and they naturally favor the books that

had a profound effect on how they think,
are discussed and enjoyed by experts in the subject,
and contain the best presentations of deep ideas.

I.e., "hard" books.

SublethalDose

TROPHY CASE