You need the full article -- the abstract at the very least -- to make any sense of a study. Press releases are written by PR flacks who dumb down the science to the point where it is meaningless, as in this case. What you need to make sense of an experiment are details and context, neither of which the PR release in question provide. This is the problem with PR -- it's not a discipline that's meant to help you grasp complexity; it's about coming away with a simple, carefully chosen message.

Even if you have a whole article you have to proceed with caution. Interesting science tends to be about open questions; cutting edge topics tend to produce a diversity of opinion and contradictory evidence. What you need to read if you want to go to the horse's mouth in science is to read some literature review papers, like this one, which summarize the current state of research and the open questions at the time of writing. In fact you should probably read a recent review paper before you try to make sense of any individual paper. Having skimmed the review paper, it looks like the experiment we're discussing is attempting to explain a long-known experimental effect in terms of gut biota, which is a hot research field right now.

If all you had to make dietary decisions was the press release, you'd probably think, "Well, I'd better cut down on fat and sugar in my diet." The problem I have with that is that "fat" is a vast category of chemicals with wildly different physiological effects. Avoiding all fat because of this study would be like avoiding all acids because of a study of aspirin poisoning -- acids including all proteins and most vitamins.

What makes more sense is to consider all the proposed mechanisms, namely: chronic oxidative stress, inflammation, insulin resistance, and now disturbed gut flora. It's feasible to devise a lifestyle and diet which reduces *all* these things, which in turn would also improve our chances against other things like diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and cardiovascular disease. But so far as I know nobody's really put all that together yet. Science deals mainly in diseases, leaving health to the quacks.

For renters it is pushing out people with lower incomes. Not everyone (due to rent control in areas), but still quite a lot of people are getting pushed out I think.

For existing lower-income homeowners it creates an opportunity to get a really good price for their home and then move to cheaper environs. (aka Gentrification).

The remaining pre-existing homeowners are not necessarily going anywhere. Prop 13 means that their property taxes are not changing radically and living costs are otherwise on a less steep ramp.

Gentrification is a two-edged sword, for sure, but I'm not sure that anything can really be done about it. The people protesting the changing nature of their neighborhoods are in the same economic class as many of the people selling and moving away. A person from group A can't really force a person from group B to not sell their home.

-Matt

Well, then doesn't that mean we ought to start looking past fossil fuels then? After all oil won't stay cheap forever. And as long as we're looking, why not put "clean" on the punch list?

"Cheap", by the way, is not an unambiguous term, because the market doesn't count externalities like pollution. In China air pollution from "cheap" energy contributes to as many as 1.2 million premature deaths a year (source).

China, as you may know, has immense and shockingly bad pollution problems. That's not a result of the Chinese leadership's shrewd thinking, it's the result of government and industry collusion and corruption. In China industry sets industrial and energy policy. The most powerful companies are state or military affiliated, but they act no differently than any other company that has succeeded at regulatory capture.

And we in the West have been down this dirty road too, but if you're under 50 "smog" is just word to you unless you live in LA. Here's what smog looked like in Manhattan in 1973. Note that this is in May, not in the summer when smog is at it's worst; nor is this an unusually bad example. Compare this to a recent shot of the same area taken in July. It shows a pretty bad pollution bad by modern standards but a very good day by 1970s standards.

Or you may have heard of London's famous "fog", but London is NOT a foggy place. The "fog" was pollution. In 1952 they had the "Great Smog", a four day event that, it is now estimated, killed twelve thousand people. Here is a picture of the Great Smog; note carefully: this is a daytime photo.

So, by all means lets talk China. The problem with China's air isn't economic progress; the problem with China's air is that China isn't a democracy. If it were then the people would force the government to do what governments in advanced democracies everywhere have been forced to do: regulate sources of pollution.

Well that's a start. After you've asked that question, the next question would be, "is there a single point of failure for your backup/restore plans?" For example if your backup plan is a storage array in the server room, then the server room itself is a single point of failure; a fire can destroy the original plus backup.

This applies to cloud services too. They typically employ more redundancy than most organizations can afford, but the service itself can be a single point of failure. It can go out of business, spin the service off to a company you don't want to deal with, or change the terms of service in ways you find unacceptable. This is not likely to happen overnight, but you do have to consider it happening faster than you're prepared to deal with. And of course cloud services can have outages; you may get some kind of rebate based on whatever your ToS are, but this might not compensate you for business costs.

I'd go so far as to say that if you can't imagine some circumstances in which your current backup system might fail, you probably haven't thought it through enough.

The question is how easy is it for you to avoid paying for disposal, and if you don't pay for it, who does?

People trying to get someone else to pay for their trash undermine every approach to deal with the problem of waste to some degree. If everyone complied with the rules you could just charge whatever rate recycling costs are and whatever the true costs of landfills are (as determined by our honest politicians). Then you'd rely upon rational economic behavior to guide consumers to an optimal choice.

But too many people would prefer to foist the cost of disposal off on their neighbors; and our politicians of course prefer to foist the costs of disposal onto their successors. As a practical matter this means any solution we choose will fall short of Utopia.

My non-utopian solution would be to tax virgin material content. Retailers would simply weigh an item plus packaging, multiply that by the fraction of virgin content and add that to the price of the item. The proceeds would then underwrite the purchase of raw, unprocessed recyclable materials. The rationale for this idea isn't that it's perfectly fair, or optimal; only that it'd work better than a solution that is perfectly fair and optimal provided practically everyone is perfectly honest.

Except experience with the "risk compensation effect" has been mixed. It turns out that sometimes taking away street markings and traffic control devices makes a place safer; in other cases it makes it more dangerous. Specifics matter, that's why it's called "traffic engineering".

If you look at places put forward as examples of "shared space" traffic design they look distinctly Old World -- they're in neighborhoods that are designed around pedestrian traffic. American Sun Belt cities aren't designed around the needs of people, they're organized to maximize the flow of cars. San Diego might well be the most pedestrian hostile urban environment in the world. It has residential neighborhoods without a single store or even playground within convenient walking distance of most of its residents. You need a car for everything, and everyone needs a car. Traffic everywhere is heavy and fast.

Here's one of the San Diego intersections in question, 4th and Broadway. Compare it to a Dutch shared space. Click a few times to move around both neighborhoods to see the difference. Yes, the Dutch city has a lot more bikes, but that's a result of the real difference, which is that the Dutch neighborhood is a destination; most of the people there are going places that are there. The San Diego intersection is a crossroads; almost everyone there is heading somewhere else.

Now you can put a fountain in the middle of the 4th and Broadway intersection; remove all the traffic signals and markings in the neighborhood and put up a four way stop sign, obliterate the distinction between sidewalk and roadway in the area. All these things would probably make this particular intersection safer. But it won't make the city as a whole safer because it doesn't address the underlying planning problem: San Diegans have to drive everywhere. The fast, heavy traffic will simply shift over a street or two on the grid. You'd have to make those same changes on all the possible alternate routes as well. This would make the city safer, at the expense of trapping many residents in commercially lifeless residential neighborhoods.

You can't make the city safer transforming a single intersection or even a handful of intersections into "shared spaces". To make that work you'd have to radically redesign the entire city to eliminate most of the driving people have to do. That's actually a really good idea, but good luck convincing San Diegans to pay to have their city transformed into Leeuwarden. In the meantime people will continue to be killed at the crossroads.

I usually buy direct in store. Shipping time zero. Prices have adjusted, at least around here, so that in-store prices aren't much different from the online ones.

Typically I'm browsing at a book store on the way home from work, and discover a book I might like. I could order it and get it a few days later, or walk out the store, book in hand. I'm an adult, with disposable income, so a hundred yen or two price difference doesn't matter to me. Being able to get the book right then does. Amazon is great for finding out what other people think about the book before I buy it.

Another example was my used oscilloscope. Buying second-hand things online is a gamble, and returning it is a major pain (get a cardboard box, arrange for the return and get and fill in a return label, be home to do the delivery). I went to a local shop instead. They hooked it up right in the shop to make sure it worked and to show me the basics of using it. And had there been a problem they would have come by in a car to pick it up directly. Much better. But Amazon did tell me which of the available models were better for me.

I'm happy to see improvements in the review system. I rarely buy anything from Amazon (shipping takes time, returns are a hassle), but I often use their pages to check reviews and compare items before I buy them.

Well, this applies to self-published books read through their Kindle Unlimited Program.

I agree with your sentiment, but having read a number of self-published books, it wouldn't be fair to the better self-published authors to pay them the same rate per free book download as the worst ones. While some self-published stuff is as good as most traditionally published fiction (albeit usually needing a bit more proof reading), there's a vast body of stuff that consists of unreadable manuscripts dumped on the ebook market.

Of course paying by page actually read is a crude measure of a story's value, paying a flat royalty per download is even cruder.

Personally I like a tightly plotted novels of 70-120 thousand words best, but we're living in the age of the endlessly sprawling epic.

That's certainly not the case for the arithmetical signs, which have non-arithmetical interpretations in many abstract algebras.

Well I guess that settles the question, then.

I actually though the divide by zero post was interesting -- not because I took the suggestion that language designers define x/0 to be 0 seriously, but because I thought it was an interesting challenge to explain to someone who thought this might be a good idea why it's really a terrible idea.

Also there are applications of algebra to sets of things other than numbers, like the permutations of a Rubik's cube, or to matrices, or to error correcting codes. These applications are called "abstract algebra", although in truth they're really no more or less abstract than the usual kinds of algebra. In these kinds of applications questions might arise that sound really strange, like "Is 1 necessarily different than 0?" Ask 99.9% of reasonably educated people that question and they'll consider it stupid, but press them and they can't provide any better answer than "it just is."

I think it's always interesting to try to explain something that most people think is "self-evidently" true -- by which they mean they have no idea why it's true. In 1984 when O'Brien torments Winston Smith with the non-sensical assertion that "2 + 2 = 5". But I doubt that a mathematician would find such a statement particularly disturbing; it depends on what you mean by "2", "+", "=" and "5".

Maybe struggling to obtain happiness is inconsistent with inner peace.

Blame posix for making all the goddamn pthread *_timedlock() calls take an absolute real time instead of a monotonic clock.

In anycase, I'm not even going to bother doing anything fancy. I'll let the system suddenly be one second off and then correct itself over the next hour. I'm certainly not going to do something stupid like letting the seconds field increment to 60. Having the ntp base time even go through these corrections is already dumb enough. Base time should be some absolute measure and leap seconds should just be adjusted after the fact in a manner similar to timezones.

-Matt