It means it's a made-up problem. "Climate change is causing wildfires" is a red-herring: a lot of wildlife depends on fires to survive. Some tree seeds don't grow if they're not set fire to first; and the growth and spread of various species of underbrush rely on underbrush clearing every few years, historically done by wildfires.

We have fewer wildfires now due to suppression efforts, which we've scaled back massively because we realized suppressing wildfires is a really fucking bad idea. Global Wargarbling isn't causing wildfires, isn't increasing the amount of wildfire pollution in the air, and isn't threatening people by mechanisms spawned from wildfires.

This kind of spouting makes the President sound dangerously uneducated. We're lead to question more things: what is this lengthening of the allergy season, and how is it different from living in the South? Are we only concerned about half of the United States?

Oh it's hard work alright, you don't get away that easy; but you can drag a rock up a hill, or you can put it on wheels and tow it. If you tow it, you're still going to expend a lot of effort and build a lot of muscle, but you're also going to move a shitload more rocks on the way.

Ericsson's studies point to deliberate practice: rather than simply exercising a skill, you have to deliberately exercise technical skills. Practice must be technical-goal-oriented and provide constant and immediate feedback; you can't just sit down and repeatedly play songs, draw pictures, or write programs and expect to get much better.

Think about body builders. If you just sat down and lifted weights, 30 pound weights giving 30 repetitions in 5 sets per day, would you get any stronger? Yes, a little; but not nearly as much as if you set goals to increase the repetitions, to add more weight, and so forth. You'll work somewhat harder at it that way, but you'll invest much less time becoming much stronger than the guy who just shows up to do the same routine every day.

The same goes for all skills. If you want to draw better, you must examine your drawings and look for your mistakes, and then identify why they are mistakes, and specifically work on that skill en masse instead of drawing things that incorporate that skill. Drawing scenes with people, and your anatomy sucks? Don't just draw more scenes with two or three people; you'll just waste 15 hours drawing a scene in which you spend 90 minutes drawing people. Sit down and draw people, again and again, for 15 hours instead. The face is wrong? Focus on the face; hell, just draw faces. Something in the gait, the way the legs are done? Do hasty sketches of the upper bodies, and work entirely on the lower body detail work, then draw new people. All the while, examine your work, cross-reference any technical documentation or reference material you have, look for deviations from what you would consider perfect, and make those corrections.

A pianter friend of mine once remarked that he had trouble with darker tones. Once you've used a darker tone, it's hard to lighten up; and placing darker tones in a scene is difficult from an artistic perspective, in the same way selecting any pallet is difficult. He could never use darker tones appropriately. One day, he decided he'd sit down and start painting rough scenes, incorporating darker tones intentionally, and focusing most of his effort on using dark tones effectively. Every time he painted a scene, he put the majority of attention on his use of dark tones, on how he would use them; he cast out his acquired artistic instincts and focused his analytic mind on his actions, used all of his artistic knowledge and applied it to the effort at hand.

This painter made note of what did and didn't work well, of what mistakes he made, and of where his blunders were of obvious technical failure--why they didn't work well--until those blunders started to go away and his pallet utilization became more effective. Now he is a much better painter, able to paint scenes of all types, because he spent a short time and a concentrated effort on correcting a single technical skill, instead of just painting complete works and trying to incorporate dark tones into them. A problem which would have taken years to improve on by sheer bulk experience was corrected in weeks by deliberate practice.

It is said in some industries that a man who works in an unchanging environment using the same tools to solve a variety of problems in the same way for 20 years does not have 20 years of experience; he has 1 year of experience 20 times. This statement is nonsense when you discount the value of experience, and at the same time it itself discounts the value of experience by example.

No, it's the method of practice that's important.

If you were to sit at a piano every day for 20 years and play songs, you wouldn't be any better than I would be after 12 months--maybe 6 months, but that's a stretch. Playing across an entire piece will get you tripping up on things, which eventually get worked out; then you play more difficult and complex pieces; and then the next piece is, again, a mess. After 20 years of this, you're still stumbling over new songs in Bach's or Lizts's repertoire, even though you've played plenty of each.

Instead, sit down and run through a song, and then identify where you make mistakes. Analyze these, and determine what specific problem you're having: problems with the scale, with particular chords or transitions, with dynamics control? Once you've identified that technical skill, you drill on that skill with an affixed goal. Every mistake gives immediate feedback, and you quickly polish that skill to perfection.

This method of practice has two major effects. First, you clear the hurdle for the particular piece in question immediately, investing much less time practicing before you can play that song. Second, you firmly develop the technical skill in question, and thus don't stumble over the same problem in the next song, and the next after that. You'll quickly move up to more-advanced pieces which make higher demands on your technical skills, instead of slowly through less-advanced pieces which only combine those skills in unfamiliar ways.

Is also a myth. Maksim Mrvica was born with the same pianistic abilities I possess; he simply practiced in the way I describe, and I didn't. He *still* practices in the way I describe; he doesn't just sit around playing songs all day.

The deliberate practice method is the method all top experts in all fields have used, from programmers to gardeners to musicians. It was discovered through research on thousands of experts, learning how the best and fastest learners practice, and coming to understand human expertise as a scientific concept. Psychologists also discovered why many people never get better at a skill they use constantly (the "Okay Plateau"), which explains why some second-year secretaries can type at 105WPM while other 20-year veterans can only type at 65: they simply don't want it badly enough.

Yes, and you can look at the Catholic church and its vast reach across the globe to conclude that Jehovah exists and is the benevolent creator of all.

The appeal to the masses and appeal to wealth here don't actually form a solid, logical argument. I know, scientifically, that experience correlates more weakly to expertise than all other factors of expertise: Lehmann and Ericsson have done a lot of study in the field of expertise, and learned many things. They've learned of deliberate practice, the only practical conclusion I really care about; they've also learned that experts have greater retention and understanding of field knowledge, rather than just *more* knowledge; and they've learned that experts develop the skills to acquire and understand new knowledge efficiently. All of these things they've learned are side-effects of expertise gained from deliberate practice, and so are of less practical importance to me than deliberate practice itself. These are all well-researched scientific topics that hold greater weight than "hiring managers think years of expertise is worth more".

Ah, this myth again. No, time does not equate to expertise. According to hundreds of scientific studies, time spent engaged in the exercise of a skill is the least correlated factor with expertise: people who play piano a lot, who program a lot, who have spent tens of thousands of hours drawing, are not automatically fantastically skilled, and in fact time spent exercising a skill is horribly unrelated to development of the skill.

That's because most people believe in mastery, and thus immediately believe they're advanced at everything they're pretty confident with. They think you can master something, that you can be at the ultimate progression, know all there is to know; thus they think that being an expert, being able to do things and get results, makes them near-mastery. They think a black belt in Karate makes them the Ultimate Warrior, and so imagine getting a few belts makes them some super-advanced fighting machine.

I believe in expertise; I'm aware of the writings of K Anders Ericsson on the subject, and on what they conclude, and find it agreeable.

I put myself as "Intermediate" because I'm not a professional programmer, I don't do a whole hell of a lot of programming by any stretch, yet I look at professional programmers and I see so much wrongness. 15 year veterans writing enormous bodies of code, no functions, 300 column SQL tables, no planning, bad architecture, it just keeps coming.

When I started writing games in Unity, I bashed my head on C# and complained about not knowing the absolute best way to use various overlapping language features, until people told me about conventions, and I read Microsoft's documentation and O'Reilly's books. I'm still not an expert, but I'm not doing it so horribly wrong as these college grads and veteran programmers who don't know what the fuck they're doing. How do jaws drop in amazement when I reveal a movement controller that offers an API for actions to be taken, and a character controller that provides the AI or player input and calls the movement API to decide how to do that precisely? "I just put if(some_buttons_pushed = True) { self.gameObject.velocity.y += 200; } in FixedUpdate()! Then you can jump!"

There are so many bad programmers.

No energy is required to keep ME moving--for a while. I have momentum when I take ONE STEP.

You're making a distinction between "it rolls for a while once you push it" and "it only rolls like, half an inch." In both of these situations, the thing stops; it requires additional energy to keep moving. To state that a pendulum doesn't need additional energy to keep moving is to state that a pendulum will carry its full swing FOREVER, not FOR A LITTLE WHILE or FOR A THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE FINALLY WEARING DOWN. If it ceases to move, ever, by any mechanism other than mechanical breakdown, then it needs additional energy to keep moving; that doesn't change just because it keeps moving for a long time instead of for just a fraction of a second.

In theory, you can set up a set of mechanical levers and springs so that the human legs place the feet flatly on the ground one after the other in the same way that a wheel places rubber on the ground in front of rubber, albeit in wide steps instead of a continuous roll; but the legs would be attached to a rotational system, such that the energy delivery is done like a wheel.

Think like a bicycle with shoes tied to the wheels. Then think like a system that abstracts that away, using the wheels to power a system of springs and levers that just places shoes on the ground as the wheels turn. Then think of a system that converts reciprocating energy into rotational energy to power that--walking is reciprocating--and then attach that to the legs, and bam: you've got something substantially close to a bicycle, except you're going trot trot trot.

Springs can be replaced by elastic ligaments, which the human body uses.

You're telling me that the statement was that a center of mass continues to move forever when walking and requires no energy to keep it moving? That a person with more weight strapped to him--50 pounds strapped to his chest--won't have to work any harder to walk down the street than a person who has nothing attached? That's what the statement indicated?

... it did apparently indicate that yes; just like it indicated that a pendulum, once set in motion, continues to rise and fall with no external power. No energy is required to keep a pendulum moving.

Energy must come from somewhere to keep a pendulum moving. Pendulums that move forever are gaining their momentum from the rotation of the earth.

There's more actual energy in a nuclear pile than in a lump of coal. You should, in theory, be able to get just as much energy out of an 1100 degree coal furnace deriving 500kW of chemical energy from the coal as you can out of an 1100 degree nuclear reactor deriving 500kW of nuclear energy from the fuel.

Again: we know we use as much energy to bicycle some distance as we use to walk some shorter distance in a longer time. That tells us walking is inefficient, and thus that the mechanism of walking has systemic losses, and thus that there are systemic losses to target. Bicycling and walking are not greatly different: bicycling suspends a mass on a frame supported by a rotating surface, laying ground contact surface in front of ground contact surface by rotation; walking suspends a mass on a frame supported by a moving part, but still relies on moving that frame forward by placing material more forward, albeit in a reciprocating instead of a rotating manner. You're, thus, looking at reciprocation losses, losses in friction, and so forth, which means mechanisms such as flywheels and springs should make your energy consumption substantially similar to that of bicycling.

The power stack is the same in both. We're not arguing about the efficiency of the power stack; we're arguing about the efficiency of transferring the power. The only differences are the rigid frame suspension and the movement of the frame itself; a bicycle and your legs are both acting as the vertical support. The theoretical difference is, thus, the difference in loss between converting between gravity (i.e. bouncing on a spring versus sitting atop a rigid steel frame) and in the mechanical differences (levers and hinges versus axles and bearings).

You'll notice a bicycle suffers spring loss in suspensions, while humans suffer complete loss when they allow their legs to flex and lower their weight--they need to expend energy to lift, rather than use an elastic ligament (a spring) to store that potential energy. You'll notice wheels rotate with forward momentum, while a human's gait may cause braking--we know Nike's original theory of running faster by cushioning heel strike was a mistake, and now runners try to land on the balls of their feet to prevent the braking effect. You'll notice many things which are similar, but suffer various improvable forms of mechanical loss. You'll also, undoubtedly, notice the only real difference is what holds up the human's weight and what provides the ground surface contact for propulsion.

We're not comparing a diesel versus an otto engine; the engine is the same. We're comparing wheels versus reciprocating pods at the ground contact point.

The original discussion was on the claim that a pendulum swings forever without input energy, which is only true for certain pendulums, and so these are the pendulums being discussed.

The pendulum is carried by the rotation of the Earth; it's not in a fixed location, swinging in the same spot while the Earth moves under it. It changes its trajectory because the Earth passes some of its momentum to the pendulum.

Am I going to have to get Randall Monroe on this?

Of course there is. If it's less efficient than cycling, then energy is lost somewhere in the system. Walking carries a stop effect that brings a mass to rest by dissipating the motion energy from heat; it carries friction and deformation effects from elastic pressure on joints and tendons; it carries loss in the form of inelastic muscle movements, pulling one way and then the other; it even carries a loss from fighting against gravity to lift the leg, and then not storing the gravitational potential when dropping the leg (e.g. in a spring system or elastic tendon). All of these offer potential efficiency improvements.