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I chalk it up to "complexity envy" If they have real problems why can't we?

source me: CS by edu, science geek by choice.


raccoons are not in the weasel family I don't think, closer to bears if I recall

but I have to run so no citation


Raccoons are actually closer to weasels and ferrets than to bears. Procyonidae, the family that includes raccoons, is a member of the superfamily Musteloidea, which also includes weasels and ferrets. Bears are members of another superfamily, Ursoidea.

Here's the family tree (scroll down for the diagram):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musteloidea


This neglects the cost of extraction. In particular, the most rare (and therefore precious) commodity in the solar system and indeed the universe is the 4 billion year old bioreactor we refer to as "topsoil".

Getting all the other elemental material we need without screwing that up will be a win for our descendants.


The topsoil lost from mining is miniscule compared to other causes. Most mines aren't even located in places that could be used as productive farmland.


Perhaps not productive farmland, but lots of forests have been cut down and have been proposed for deforestation to support mines


Far more forests were cut down to produce iron and steel, post-mining.

Thankfully, forests are self-renewing, and we no longer use charcoal as a carbon source.

Mines are also generally pretty small compared to forests.


Some points for you to consider:

Charcoal is very much in use around the world, forests are now small enough that entire forests are marked to make way for mines, and forests are not-self renewing on time nor does a mine convert back into a forest.


4,620,000 kg of raw wood to equip a standard Roman legion with iron/steel is a lot of wood.

Charcoal is no longer used as a primary heating source in the way it was in antiquity, given the global trade in oil, gas, and coal.

Furthermore, mines in civilized parts of the world generally do have reforestation requirements as part of their decommissioning.

We can certainly gripe about the legacy of toxic tailing ponds et al., but tree cover is usually handled decently.


We are then talking about different parts of the world. I am biased by what I see in India.


Indeed.

I would wager that over the last several decades BLAST (basic local alignment search tool) has done more to advance our knowledge of biology than any other algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLAST_(biotechnology)


BLAST isn't a dynamic programming algorithm. It's not guaranteed to find an optimal solution, unlike a DP algorithm. It has some elements of DP, but that's it.


"BLAST is a heuristic method which means that it is a dynamic programming algorithm..."

https://bioinformaticsreview.com/20210503/how-blast-works-co...

"The heart of many well-known programs is a dynamic programming algorithm, or a fast approximation of one, including sequence database search programs like BLAST..."

https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt0704-909


All DP algorithms guarantee an optimal result. It's a defining characteristic of DP. BLAST doesn't. I'm really surprised that you're attempting to debate this.


DDG disagrees.

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=%22%20heuristic%20dynamic...

I'm clearly not going to understand your motivation so I think I'll stop here.

(edit: There is absolutely nothing stopping heuristics and DP being combined; in fact they have to be in eg. database optimisation. A pure DP solution to query optimisation will be optimal, but will take unbounded (lthough finite) time, which is unacceptable. DP and heuristics are combined to both guide the DP search and bound it after a strict time (usually a couple of seconds CPU) by when it is hopefully 'good enough').


You're wrong, and I don't know why you're being stubborn about this. HDP is a different class of algorithms that uses DP, but it is not DP. A basic read of wikipedia of dynamic programming reveals the key pieces of DP:

There are two key attributes that a problem must have in order for dynamic programming to be applicable: optimal substructure and overlapping sub-problems. ... Optimal substructure means that the solution to a given optimization problem can be obtained by the combination of optimal solutions to its sub-problems.

See the words optimal and optimization?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming


That's not true. You can of course use DP for heuristic and approximation algorithms. There's an FPTAS for Knapsack using DP, for instance.


It is true. DP always deals with optimization. Just because my car has a radio, doesn't mean my car is a radio.


Well, perhaps you use different definitions than I do, but it should be obvious that it is possible to design an algorithm using dynamic programming that does not solve the problem optimally. By optimally here, I mean always output the optimal solution.

If you, by optimization mean that there's a function value you are maximizing or minimizing, than that's not true either, since Subset Sum and Hamiltonian path are canonical decision problems for which DP is used.

Heck, you can even take the standard TSP DP algorithm and, instead of looking at all possible "exit vertices" in linear time, look at a randomly chosen constant number of candidates, thereby reducing the running time by a factor n and getting a randomized heuristic function not guaranteed to give the optimal value.


Technically if you car is recent, it is a cell phone with wheels but I digress.

This reminds me of biologists bickering about what is or is not a gene, and endless snorefests of ontologists bickering about the semantics of a label on an edge in a graph.

It was not amusing then either.


Your employer may already be getting paid by a government for you to work, but that is above your pay grade.


View -> Message Body As -> Plain Text

Not your fault, but please always provide fall back text.


got it. plain text fall back is on our todo list.


be afraid.

methane hydrates;

strip mining ocean floors could keep fossil fuel consumption going at current rates for millennia.

but before that we could get we stuff in the permafrost

all terrible ideas ... so probable.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=methane+hydrates&t=lm&ia=web


And don't forget IRIs for when you have really dirty data and can't be bothered to clean it up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_Resource_Ide...


That's a very misleading statement. IRIs are for the majority of people in the world whose language isn't written exclusively with the Latin script - more specifically, the ASCII version of the Latin script, which doesn't even include diacritical marks. The IRI https://example.com/menu/pâtés is a lot better than the best equivalent URI: https://example.com/menu/p%C3%A2t%C3%A9s


Granted.

My only exposure was folks using it to gloss over what could have been expressed in 7 bit clean ascii if you knew the codepage it had been encoded with.

I apologize for the mischaracterization of legitimate use.


"The only way it would have "benefited" would be that the web would only be developed by lisp programmers."

Considering the state of the web I do not think this is making the argument you intend.


Total bike and trailer builder and believer of yore here.

One can fail to appreciate the additional breaking forces and shifts in balance a loaded trailer introduces to the bicycle.

Where the trailer attaches should be as close to the center of gravity of the bike & rider as possible so the trailer's resultant forces have the least leverage.

The trailer hitch should be rotationaly neutral which is a gentler way of saying if the trailer flips over it should not take the bike down with it.

If the trailer has its own breaks they should slightly and lightly lead the bikes rear break.

Being careful helps, I never wrecked, but do see how the addition of electrical assist does up the concern as it could result in more mass moving fast.


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