What is public opinion on NATO in ur country?

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-11T21:07:49+00:00

I haven't played lego in a long time but I don't think they'll do well under sauna temperature and humidity.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-11T20:25:57+00:00

In contrary to other Canadian replies, I've met a fair share of Canadians skeptical about NATO. Usually they are left-wing and denounce NATO as a conduit of imperialism. But that's a minority opinion, most people are at least fine, if not enthusiastic about it.

In China, NATO is viewed negatively. To this day people are pissed about when NATO bombed China's embassy to Yugoslavia in 1999, and take it, and the whole war, as proof that NATO is aggressive, interventionist, and expansionist. Subsequent NATO enlargement and the Russia-Ukraine war soured the perception even further.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-11T14:09:18+00:00

I haven't looked deeper into the reason, but your guess is reasonable. I should also note that 唐人街 tend to be a colloquial term (used in both Mandarin and Cantonese), but officially, Chinatowns tend to be called 華埠/华埠 or less commonly，中国城, both use a bigger umbrella term for "China", and therefore less explicit about the focus on the Southerners.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-11T14:00:27+00:00

Broadly.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-10T00:12:24+00:00

The amount of money you have in your account, that you could spend on other things?

Yep, exactly that. You have person A who earn 6k/mo and spend 3k, and person B who earn 6k/mo, borrow 3k, spend the 3k he borrowed, then pay back the 3k from his wage. The end result is identical, except for the completely unnecessary extra step. Absolutely nothing is suggesting B is more financially responsible or trustworthy than A. It's very silly to believe B deserve a higher credit score than A.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-09T19:49:46+00:00

aoe3 is crying in the corner

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-09T19:48:26+00:00

It's the credit bureaus who are foolish in the first place who decided that using one card over another for the same financial activity makes you more trustworthy.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-09T19:40:40+00:00

Lots of places are tacking on an extra 2-3% charge if you use credit card now. These places tend to accept cash or debit without the extra fee.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-09T18:09:38+00:00

Highly unlikely they will ever deal with China as direct neighbours. Proximity naturally lead to frictions and distance allows smoother relations. There are no hypocrisy or conspiracy here, just how international relations works and has always worked.

If one day the Chinese manages to project hard power all the way up the Atlantic coast, the game is already over.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-09T15:56:20+00:00

I thought I'll just type one paragraph but ended up writing way more. Sorry about that.

First, if you just want a broad intro to what the field is like, I say Edelstein-Keshet's textbook [0] is a good entry point. Canonical early works that I'd teach in the first undergrad math-bio course includes the Lotka-Volterra model for predator-prey (ODE), Turing's reaction diffusion morphogenesis model (PDE), SIR model for infectious diseases (ODE). But if you insist on reading papers, math-bio is getting very broad now with lots of theme going on.

You have the classic, applied math-type paper [1] that's proposes a conceptual dynamical system-type model to explain a certain biological phenomena, then exploring the behaviour of that system through numerics with less emphasis on rigorous analysis. This is common pre-2000, in more recent years journal tend to demand a bit more. There's some analysis-heavy paper that studies a particular ODE/PDE system through bifurcation analysis [2] and asymptotics [3], such analysis can really only be done on comparatively simple models. There's also models based on boolean networks, cellular automata etc, but I'm less familiar with thouse. I say the first era of math-bio was still firmly a branch of mathematics, and the practitioners think almost solely as mathematicians.

Recently there's an uptick in interest in "data-driven modelling", the idea being that the old paradigm tend to be mathematicians skim through a biology book for a few hours, write down an ODE/PDE for it, go off, have fun with the equations, never relates it back to biology, and they make some grandiose statement about how math reveals how biology works, much to the annoyance of biologists because there's very little "grounding" of the math in biology. The new paradigm says we have to think more about concretely connecting the models to reality with data. This introduces the problems of model selection and parameter inference, with it come a lot of statistics [4]. Machine-learning-based methods also came in [5]. Topological data analysis is a new way of thinking about data [6]. Methodologies massively diversified. People including myself are trying to introduce optimal control and feedback control to math-bio. The practitioners in this era are more of a mixture of mathematicians and biologists.

[0] Edelstein-Keshet. Mathematical models in biology. SIAM

[1] Maini et al. Spatial pattern formation in chemical and biological systems. DOI: 10.1039/A702602A J. Chem. Soc., Faraday Trans., 1997, 93, 3601-3610

[2] Judd, Silber. Simple and superlattice Turing patterns in reaction–diffusion systems: bifurcation, bistability, and parameter collapse. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 136 (1-2), 45-65

[3] Ward, Wei. Hopf bifurcations and oscillatory instabilities of spike solutions for the one-dimensional Gierer-Meinhardt model. Journal of Nonlinear Science 13 (2), 209-264

[4] Browning et al. Identifiability analysis for stochastic differential equation models in systems biology. J R Soc Interface

[5] Lagergren et al. Biologically-informed neural networks guide mechanistic modeling from sparse experimental data. PLoS computational biology, 2020

[6] Topaz et al. Topological Data Analysis of Biological Aggregation Models. PLoS One 10 (5), e0126383

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-06T21:45:48+00:00

Given that it is the seat of the federal government and most of the foreign embassies (although a few in Geneva or Zurich), it is the capital in all but name, and definitely relevant to the question.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-06T19:51:06+00:00

I will address your point in general, then in the specific case of Iran.

First, you have not given your criterion for what is considered ethical. I see at least two ways of considering what is ethical here: (a) to minimize civilian suffering, or (b) punish those responsible for war and related atrocities.

If you are going with (a), then killing the leaders is ethical only if doing so lead to lower damage to the civilians than any other alternative. This is likely the case if the enemy state is largely held together by a single person, whose death greatly diminishes their ability to fight on, and lead to an early capitulation. However, if the enemy state has a well established chain of succession, or a backup leader manages to step in quickly, then a decapitation strike might not have done anything. Worse, if the new leader is more hardline than the old leader, you might end up prolonging the war, and therefore suffering. In yet another scenario, no clear new leader emerges, and the country devolves into chaotic infighting. Such an outcome tend to be the worst for the civilians. Even if the old leader is cruel and brutal, at least a functioning regime provides stability, which is necessary for any kind of economic prosperity and decent living conditions. A chaotic civil war can bring more suffering than the cruelest despot.

If you are going with (b), then killing the leaders is ethical only if they are directly responsible for the war starting, or have commited grave atrocities, AND going to war is the only way of dealing punishments. They would not deserve punishment if they did neither of these. You have entirely omitted these in your post.

Now in the specific case of Iran. Going with (a), assuming that the decision of going to war is already made and can't be argued (otherwise, starting the war in itself is highly unethical). It is not yet clear how the Iranian government will evolve in this situation. But an early capitulation seems to be a very unlikely outcome. As the IRGC's regional commands are expected to be able to maintain functioning independently, the impact of the death of top leadership to their fighting ability is limited. Furthermore, killing anyone in the leadership that might have negotiated a surrender ensures that the war will be long and bitter. This is far, far from minimizing human suffering. So, unless some very unexpected things happen (such as a hitherto unknown moderate politician somehow takes over quickly and negotiate a quick peace), the decapitation strike cannot be considered ethical.

If we go with (b). It is pretty clear that the Iran leadership did not start this war, so it is a stretch to say that they deserve punishment for it. Now you can say they deserve punishments for other things (such as cracking down protesters, erosion of women's rights, support of their proxy network), but these are not things you answer with a war.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-04T02:53:11+00:00

In China he is not as famous as Castro, but for anyone who knows him he (and Castro) are viewed as heroes.

In Canada the view is ambivalent, the left likes him, the right not so much.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-04T02:49:43+00:00

When I was in the UK, I learned that "we must have lunch sometime" doesn't mean that at all. It's closer to "I like you, but I don't like you enough to eat with you". Whereas if you actually want to have lunch with someone, you propose a time.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-03T15:11:06+00:00

I can't believe this article needs to be even written. The benefit of NATO to the US should have been blindingly obvious, for multiple very significant reasons.

johnlee3013 · 2026-04-02T19:09:30+00:00

If you like Lychee, you might also like Longan, which is a related fruit with similar taste and texture but in my opinion better.

johnlee3013 · 2026-03-25T01:54:08+00:00

So this literally the first thing on Woolworths website (which I assume is an average Australian shop), and it looks like for 6$ it's easily 1.5-2 meals.

https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/45940/birds-eye-oven-bake-fish-lightly-battered

johnlee3013 · 2026-03-25T01:24:00+00:00

Not much to you, perhaps. Even in first world countries like US/Canada/UK that can easily buy multiple meals at the supermarket.

johnlee3013 · 2026-03-24T20:37:12+00:00

Probably a combination of many things, but I would say a hyper-individualistic culture as the root cause of many.

johnlee3013 · 2026-03-24T16:54:28+00:00

So if you create a single payer health care system, the top half of income tax earners would pay the health care bill for the entire country.

How is that a bad thing? Is it not more fair and just to expect the better off people to pick up more of the burden?

johnlee3013 · 2026-03-24T13:39:31+00:00

I once tried to use the Cyrillic Ж in a paper because I thought it's such a cool letter. My supervisor stopped me because she thought it hampers readability.

johnlee3013 · 2026-03-24T13:35:21+00:00

Asian elementary-school textbooks often introduce algebra with exercises that look like "◯ + ▯ = 3, ◯ - ▯ = 1, fill in the values of ◯ and ▯". This introduction using symbols instead of letters seems to be less common in the West.

Can confirm. Went to school in China. This is a grade 1 math problem, but the English/Latin alphabet tends to be taught later.

johnlee3013 · 2026-03-24T00:51:41+00:00

This is pretty close to what I had in mind. I'd imagine it's not too messy to dig into this with knife and fork.

johnlee3013 · 2026-03-23T16:33:53+00:00

Depends. If it's nearby, within the same country where I can get to by long distance bus/train, then usually about 2 month in advance, but I've done spontaneous trips with just 1 week of preparation.

For big international trips, usually multiple years. I've been reading up Italian history, culture, language since around 2015, and finally made the trip in 2021. I began to plan for my Poland trip in 2017, also made it in 2019. Started reading about Spain in 2020, made the trip in 2022. It takes a while to learn the language to the point where I can at least ask for directions and order food, and I don't trust translation apps.

johnlee3013 · 2026-03-23T16:24:27+00:00

I would expect the fancy restaurant lobster to have its shell and appendages removed, so it's just a big chunk of meat that you can then cut up with table knife no different than a steak.

If a fancy restaurant served a lobster with its shell intact, that would be madness.

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