My strategy with pretty much everything I can is to deeply research to find any Made In USA variant of whatever it is I’m trying to purchase, and buy whatever that is regardless of price. I’ve never had that fail me.
For backpacks, my Waterfield pack has held up fantastically across several years of regularly absolutely stuffing it with gear for my work travel.
So many people carry this dull heavy just in their pockets to fend off all attempts to revive the sense of wonder they buried deep in their childhood.
For me, just the very fact that there exist time, space, laws of physics, enormous complexity stemming from deceptive "simplicity", is absolutely awe-inspiring.
True, but among the minerals with cubic crystal structure it is not unusual for them to be found as crystals that are perfect regular or semiregular polyhedra, with a shape characteristic for the mineral, for instance octahedron (e.g. spinel, diamond), rhombic dodecahedron (e.g. garnet) or cube (e.g. pyrite).
I suppose that the crystals from the picture are of pyrite, which frequently looks like this.
In the antiquity, when what are now called diamonds (the Romans and the Greeks called them "Indian adamants", because they were first encountered by Europeans during the expedition in India of Alexander the Great; "adamant" meant something else in Europe) were very difficult to cut and polish, they were normally used as gems in their natural shape of regular octahedra.
Cutting diamonds from their natural octahedral shape into polyhedra with more facets, e.g. brilliant, was invented much later.
Regarding etymology, for many centuries the substances that are now called "sulfides" were called "pyrites", after the "iron pyrite" i.e. the iron (II) disulfide, which is the most abundant sulfide mineral.
At the end of the 18th century, Lavoisier together with a few other French chemists have created the modern systematic chemical nomenclature, so the old term "pyrite" was replaced by "sulfide" (like also "vitriol" was replaced with "sulfate").
For who does not know, "pyrite" comes from "fire", i.e. from the pronunciation in Ancient Greek of the corresponding word that was cognate with English "fire" (Ancient Greek or Latin "p" corresponds with English "f").
Striking pyrite produces sparks, which can be used to start a fire.
> Ancient Greek or Latin "p" corresponds with English "f"
Similarly, ancient Greek "p" corresponds with modern Greek "f", and ancient Greek "b" corresponds with modern Greek "v".
We may have done it first, but the sound change is pretty common. "B" -> "v" is arguably in process in Spanish. Something similar had already happened in Latin; compare Latin "frater" to English "brother" or Latin "fero" to Greek "phero".
Especially since it's an exception that breaks the rule that straight lines are not found in nature. Not only is it a straight line, but a cube. They just look unnatural. Very cool stuff
"don't work well for AI" is a hell of an understatement, the Application they are Specific to is literally just sha256(sha256(x)), what AI are you going to do with that?
GP probably didn't mean that hardware though, but rather the facility, electricity supply, cooling, etc.
The disappointing truth is that we simply don't know. Satoshi never explained it. For SHA-2 it can be used as a mitigation against length-extension attacks¹, and this seems like the most likely explanation, but it's just speculation.
You’d be surprised – take a Backgammon board to a table in at a cafe in a popular area and chances are someone will sit down to play with you. Can be a good way of meeting people in a new area. (or new people in an old area!)
It was a good way to while away the time at jury duty back in the days when you had to physically be there until you were called. I encountered a tournament player who beat me maybe 4 times out of 5. I also played in a chess tournament where my opponent was considerably stronger and faster and quickly put me in a position where I had to think long and hard to try to avoid disaster (fruitlessly in the end). She would make her move, wait a few seconds to see if I would reply, and then get up and disappear into a back room where, I found out later, she was playing backgammon. I looked her up and learned that she was a rapidly rising women's chess star but was better known as a semi-pro backgammon player.
Quite a lot. And I'd say that I process more info by typing than by simply reading. I typed the first edition and got the printed second edition too after.
I always searched videos of what he was exemplifying and found quite amazing material for many (enslaver ants, ants tickling aphids, honeycomb construction).
Was super impressed to hear about Darwin's peers which he calls out by name every time, how there were people specialised in breading races, judging what constitutes species.
Was kind of stunned to find out that people didn't know dogs were all the same species, how hard it was even for specialised breeders to identify that their pigeons were changing, since they were not really taking pictures.
How Darwin published a book that was approachable to common folks, how the book was built on mountains of hand-collected data.
There's so, so, so much more I could talk about (tree of life, organs, descendant resemblance happening at the same age, embryology weirdness) but biggest mind-fuck would be the anti-teleological stance he holds. Basically, out of nowhere (although I saw that he read Hume [0]), Darwin figures out that things don't happen 'for a reason'. Things don't live because they're 'better'. All the creatures we see today are simply the things that survived. There's no final goal, no 'ought to be' in the world. We're simply patterns that survive that resemble patterns that happened to survive.
Uninformed FUD, not a single dsp "trick" related to passive radar is ITAR controlled. The equivalence the OP mentioned is literally described in every undergraduate dsp textbook.
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