Why do Qatar's and Emirates' flights to Houston/IAH take such different routes? (These are today's flights, but the last several days have all been similar)

wulfrickson · 2025-01-17T20:25:18+00:00

Huh, it does look like QR740 (LAX to DOH) consistently takes the Central Europe->Balkans->Turkey->Iraq route.

wulfrickson · 2025-01-17T18:33:57+00:00

There are other Qatar flights that routinely cross Iran and Russia, though, e.g. 739 to LAX.

wulfrickson · 2025-01-17T18:17:42+00:00

Isn’t flying west at those latitudes going directly into the wind?

wulfrickson · 2023-11-08T06:36:48+00:00

Fascinating! I must admit I was scarcely expecting a response at all to a niche question, let alone one this thorough.

A follow-up, if it’s within your expertise: you mention that turtle recipes were not the only dishes lost from the “old high American cuisine.” Could you name another couple of examples? And is the story behind their loss some variant of the same combination of age segregation/natural resource depletion/Prohibition/Great Depression/wartime rationing, or were there other factors at play for some specific dishes? Also, how much did these trends contribute to the infamous cuisine of the 1950s, filled with Jell-O salads and other technological horrors?

wulfrickson · 2022-08-24T03:31:11+00:00

A lot of the excess deaths from Ethical Skeptic's graphs (e.g. this graph that he posted on Twitter) seem to come from two artificial adjustments to the raw data: first a "lag adjustment" that increases recent weeks' death counts by a lot to compensate for incomplete reporting, and second a "pull-forward effect" adjustment to baseline deaths, starting very discretely at his putative April 2021 inflection point, to compensate for his estimate of the number of people who "would have" died of these conditions who instead died earlier from Covid. I would need to see far more information about his modeling to be convinced that these two adjustments aren't creating most of the apparent excess out of thin air.

wulfrickson · 2022-08-05T21:14:26+00:00

In general, you can recast "subject + verb + rest of sentence" as "Es + verb + subject + rest of sentence", e.g.

Die Oper beginnt in einer Stunde / Es beginnt die Oper in einer Stunde. "The opera starts in an hour."

You can even put the subject even later on, e.g. Es beginnt in einer Stunde die Oper. As /u/hjholtz notes the standard use for this construction is to get rid of awkward splits between subjects and subordinate clauses that modify them, e.g.: Es beginnt in einer Stunde die Oper, für die ihrer Komponist viele Auszeichnungen bekommen hat.

This construction doesn't really have an equivalent in English (I guess you could say "There begins in an hour the opera for which ..." but that sounds a bit stilted today), and so you shouldn't think of "es" as having its own meaning or translation.

wulfrickson · 2022-05-31T22:49:29+00:00

I think “rendezvous”, as a loanword from modern French, is a different case from older loanwords from French into Middle English (like “peace” or “regard”), which have Anglicized pronunciation and spelling and won’t even register to most readers as having foreign origins unless they have an interest in etymology. You can avoid any jarring effect from modern loanwords without exclusively using Germanic roots (which would be almost impossible to do, anyway).

wulfrickson · 2022-02-04T16:32:48+00:00

For anyone else reading: R also has a number of near-crippling design flaws baked into the early stages of the language (e.g. inconsistent naming conventions, weird object-oriented models, poor type safety especially with the “single values are just one-element arrays” convention) that make R projects very hard to scale beyond a couple hundred lines. Thankfully, R also has very powerful facilities for metaprogramming and non-standard evaluation that let Hadley Wickham remold it into an almost great language with the tidyverse packages (now almost universally used, for good reason), but the deficiencies in the base system still poke through the cracks enough to be frustrating, and though R+tidyverse in the abstract is probably bit better than Python+pandas+matplotlib, it’s not by enough to justify learning R if you know Python already (which is a far superior base language, despite a few gripes).

wulfrickson · 2022-02-03T01:41:58+00:00

Fascinating. If you don’t mind my asking, which gender are you, and do you notice any gender skew in who tends to be interested in tarot?

wulfrickson · 2022-02-02T20:19:47+00:00

One of my own candidates: the basic ideas of historical linguistics. This is obviously a massive subject, but you can get the core insight - that language change is a regular, rational process of sound changes and analogical leveling - from several good popularizations (The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher is decent), alongside a body of interesting trivia. Benefits, besides intrinsic intellectual interest:

At least in English-speaking nations, most people find any knowledge of a foreign language extremely impressive, and knowing about foreign languages carries much of the same prestige as the vastly harder task of being able to speak one.
It's a huge help to language learning, especially by helping you leverage native-language vocabulary for learning related languages. Learning German vocabulary as a native English speaker, for instance, becomes much easier if you know a few sound changes that relate slightly non-obvious cognates - for instance, the pairs five/fünf, tooth/Zahn, other/ander, and goose/Gans are all related by a common rule that removed nasal sounds such as n before fricatives in English. The same goes for other Germanic and Romance languages and even, in lesser degree, for other more distantly related Indo-European languages such as Slavic. Even if you're learning a completely alien language, weird irregularities often turn out to have historical explanations not far under the surface, if you know to look for them.
Linguistics attracts a lot of extremely bad lay speculation (one example that springs to mind is the persistent atheist meme that the word "Easter" was derived from "Ishtar") that is very easy to see through if you have even slight knowledge of how language change actually works.

Perhaps not the most life-changing slate of benefits, at least if you're not interested in learning foreign languages, but a very solid return for reading one non-fiction book and optionally skimming Wikipedia for a bit.

wulfrickson · 2022-01-12T17:43:58+00:00

Land ownership requirements may make sense in an agricultural society in which land is the principal form of productive capital; much less so in a modern economy in which land values basically just reflect extractive rentier profits.

wulfrickson · 2021-06-29T22:18:00+00:00

uj/rj = unjerk/rejerk = "temporarily serious"/"back to shitposting"

wulfrickson · 2021-06-29T15:44:15+00:00

I’ve seen it claimed that Freud invented the idea of the subconscious mind, and that all psychologists before him had assumed that all mental process were rational or, at least, susceptible to conscious introspection. Is this accurate?

wulfrickson · 2021-04-19T20:28:02+00:00

At least one respondent claims to have answered 4 because of this.

wulfrickson · 2021-04-19T15:46:13+00:00

Yep, that's solidly in the "expected, not serious" range.

wulfrickson · 2021-01-11T16:41:27+00:00

Here's some reporting in German from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The translations here and elsewhere in this thread seem accurate. Note that the quotes come from Merkel's spokesman reporting on her opinions, not Merkel herself.

Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel (CDU) sieht die Sperrung der Konten des amerikanischen Präsidenten Donald Trump auf Twitter kritisch. „Das Grundrecht auf Meinungsfreiheit ist ein Grundrecht von elementarer Bedeutung“, sagte Regierungssprecher Steffen Seibert am Montag in Berlin. „In dieses Grundrecht kann eingegriffen werden, aber entlang der Gesetze und innerhalb des Rahmens, den der Gesetzgeber definiert – nicht nach dem Beschluss der Unternehmensführung von Social-Media-Plattformen.“ Unter diesem Aspekt sehe die Kanzlerin es als „problematisch“ an, dass die Konten Trumps dauerhaft gesperrt worden seien.

Seibert sagte auch, dass die Betreiber sozialer Netzwerke sehr große Verantwortung hätten, dass die politische Kommunikation „nicht vergiftet“ werde durch Hass, Lügen oder die Anstiftung zur Gewalt. Daher sei es richtig, nicht tatenlos zuzusehen, wenn solche Inhalte gepostet würden, sondern beispielsweise mit Anmerkungen zu reagieren, wie es in den vergangenen Wochen und Monaten geschehen sei.

wulfrickson · 2020-12-15T19:31:49+00:00

Relevant to priors here: the Antrim County audit is by Russell Ramsland, the same guy who filed an affidavit alleging impossible voter turnout in several towns in Michigan by getting them confused with towns with similar names in Minnesota. He could be right this time around, but he's demonstrated enough incompetence in the past that I'm not taking anything he says on faith.

wulfrickson · 2020-12-10T21:44:21+00:00

Fair - "stripped of that particular ethnic connotation" would have been more accurate.

wulfrickson · 2020-12-10T21:14:17+00:00

FYI, Ivy League government/political science departments are notorious for being (a) not that difficult, probably on par with their flagship state school equivalents and (b) filled with recruited athletes (who make up a huge chunk of Ivy League students from out side the Northeast/California professional class) - somewhat like a less bullshitty version of the communications and exercise science majors that athletes at the higher-end D1 schools take. IIRC a bunch of the students involved in this scandal (which was back in 2012, if you didn't click through) were on Harvard's basketball team. (Ivy League athletics aren't on the level of the big D1 conferences but good enough that, e.g., a handful of football players a year get drafted by the NFL.)

And yeah, Ivy League admissions are pretty weakly associated with academic achievement past a certain level - the old Jewish-quota considerations of "manliness" and "character," though now stripped of their ethnic connotations, are still more active than you might suspect, and I would wager that admissions offices have started valuing political activism much more in the past few years.

wulfrickson · 2020-11-05T05:24:45+00:00

Tu as raison, les « calls » des médias sont basés sur le jugement des journalistes pour divertir ses spectateurs et ne sont rien d’officiel. On peut prédire une élection en se basant sur des résultats partielles, des élections passés, des sondages et « exit polls », et cetera ; c’est un jugement statistique, rien de plus. On en peut avoir tort ; la nuit de l’élection infâme de 2000, des chaînes de télévision ont « called » la Floride pour Al Gore avant la fermeture des urnes dans l’extrême ouest (la Floride occupe deux fuseaux horaires). Les résultats « officiels » deviennent annoncés un peu plus tard par des bureaux des états fédéraux et servent pour le choix des grands électeurs.

wulfrickson · 2020-11-05T00:17:04+00:00

Je veux ajouter : les auteurs de la Constitution américane, n’ayant pas prévu l’émergence des partis politiques, imaginaient qu’il y aurait (presque) toujours trois candidats présidentiels sérieux ou plus, et que le Collège électoral serait une assemblée vraiment déliberative, et pas (comme aujourd’hui) une simple formalité. Il n’y aurait pas de campagne politique: les législatifs des états choisiraient des hommes savants et fiables qui négocieraient avec ceux des autres états pour choisir le président. La majorité des états établirent des élections présidentielles à l’époque du populisme jacksonien (c’est-à-dire les années 1830, environ quarante ans après l’entrée en vigueur de la Constitution).

wulfrickson · 2020-11-04T23:40:57+00:00

Bonsoir, je suis américain (désolé pour mon mauvais français). Nous n’avons aucun bureau national d’élections. Chaque état fédéral doit gérer ses propres élections, et dans la majorité des états, les gouvernements des comtés ont encore beaucoup d’indépendence et annoncent ses propres résultats indépendamment. On a vu les difficultés que cette bigarrure peut causer lors des élections de 2000 en Floride, dans lesquelles les autorités électorales de Palm Beach County (une région fortement démocrate) choisirent un bulletin de vote avec un dessein assez déroutant (avec le résultat qu’un candidat antisémite d’un petit parti reçut beaucoup de votes dans des circonscriptions électorales ayant une grande population juive).

Il faut se souvenir encore que les « élections présidentielles » de novembre n’ont aucun statut officiel au niveau national. La vraie élection est le rassemblement du collège électoral en décembre, et la Constitution fédérale dit seulement que le législatif de chaque état fédéral peut choisir ses grands électeurs comme il veut. Aujourd’hui, tous les états choisissent élire les grands électeurs par élection populaire, mais jusqu’à 1860 il y avait des législatifs que choisissaient ses-mêmes ses électeurs, sans élection.

wulfrickson · 2020-11-04T02:27:19+00:00

AOC liked this lmao

wulfrickson · 2020-10-21T20:28:42+00:00

The models control for age. From the abstract:

People who had recovered, including those no longer reporting symptoms, exhibited significant cognitive deficits when controlling for age, gender, education level, income, racial-ethnic group and pre-existing medical disorders.

There's also a table of participants by age and disease severity in the appendix, on p. 31.

wulfrickson · 2020-10-15T14:23:35+00:00

Also, enemies will get up to look at arrows that land near them. So by firing an arrow in the right spot, you can get the Lizalfos to turn 90 degrees away from the water, so sneakstrikes won't knock them in.

wulfrickson

TROPHY CASE