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Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 1) 124

NGL, I'm definitely liberal-leaning, yet I sincerely believed the "pay gap" was 99% explained by reproductive status and a general willingness to negotiate more aggressively for better pay (or similarly, willingness to apply for more aspirational jobs beyond the applicant's qualifications and experience level)>

The former is clearly protected under Title VII, but that doesn't change the physical reality of someone who left the workforce for five years having five years' less experience than their peers. The latter is a much harder social indoctrination (or maybe just a testosterone) problem.

This new study though... Holy shit, that's pretty black-and-white! Barring some non-obvious methodological issues, there's nothing here to argue with. We now have concrete data that even the label "male" or "female" applied to a genderless construct adversely affects perceived value.

Comment Re:Safer? (Score 2) 45

Look, I use HEIC, but JPEG-XL is just better.

* Royalty-free
* Lossless transcoding of legacy JPEGs to immediately reduce their sizes by ~20% (fast enough that you can have webservers do it in realtime)
* Better fine detail / high frequency data representation for the same bitrate. HEIC was designed for video and simply is not as good at stills.
* Faster decoding
* MUCH faster compression
* True progressive decoding - and not old-school blocky progressive decoding, but using a smart algorithm that restores coarse detail (particularly focusing on parts of the image that the eyes immediately focus on) first, then progressively adding in finer detail that the eyes take more time to notice later.
* Vastly better lossless compression
* Better colour depth and native HDR (up to 32 bit per channel)
* Up to 1B x 1B pixel images (again, useful for scientific and engineering applications), with efficient loading (don't have to load and decode the whole 1B x 1B image at full resolution to view it)
* Arbitrary colour spaces - you can even use it for scientific hyperspectral imaging. You can include e.g. alpha, depth maps, thermal data, selection masks, etc etc.

It's just a better format for stills. It's annoying that it's taken this long to get support to take off (because it takes ages for most people to update their browsers), but I'm really glad that it's starting to.

Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 267

If you had any critical thinking skills, you'd realize that my original point applies not only to keeling over, but also to feeling unwell.

More feeble people would suffer throughout the year with either permanent DST or standard time than the current one bad night in March. (Which, BTW, could be totally avoided by planning ahead and adjusting your bedtime a few minutes per day in the preceding week.)

Biology matches DST adjustments more than a fixed clock. Most everyone woke up with the sun from the dawn of humanity until the late 19th century, and adjusting the clock for the seasons stays closer to that.

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 267

Finally, a sane voice among the noise! The arguments about "which" time we keep are slowly killing us all from inaction year after year after year. "Perfect is the enemy of good".

I seriously couldn't care less if we go to permanent standard time, permanent DST, or hell, just ditch time zones altogether and go to permanent global UTC. It makes no difference whatsoever whether we wake up at 6am EST, 7am EDT, or 11am UTC, they're all the same damned thing from a biological perspective.

The only approach that isn't perfectly fine is resetting the clocks multiple times each year because some morons can't stand the idea of waking up at "2:30am" even though that's still roughly their local dawn.

Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 2) 44

You seem very angry... A nobel prize in penguin country should make any self-respecting Linux nerd happy !
Anyway, this observatory doesn't just prove that neutrino exist, we already knew that as you mention, but it is also highly directional and can build a map of sources. The JWST is very noce, yes, but it only take *better* pictures than previously. This allows for an entirely new view on the universe, in the same groundbreaking way as the gravity wave detectors. A few years ago everything we knew about the universe was from photons: radio, optics, then UV, IR, gamma, etc... but still electromagnetic. Then we build (I built !!!) cosmic ray detectors. And now neutrinos and a few others. It's great.

Comment Re:Fundamental physics has never been more dead (Score 4, Funny) 44

"Okay, nuclear power. Yeah. Yeah, they did give us that. That's true. "

"And industrial-scale superconducting magnets!"

"Don't forget GPS satellite relativistic corrections!"

"And radioisotope therapy!"

"Electron beam therapy?"

"World Wide Web, wasn't that created by particle physicists?"

"Yeah, they did do that."

"Capacitative touchscreens too, you know."

"All right, all right, FAIR ENOUGH! But APART from computers, telecommunications, nuclear power, PET scans, MRIs, satellite communications, superconductors, radioisotope therapy, electron beam therapy, heat-shrink tubing, cargo and baggage screening, smoke detectors, muon tomography, capacitative touchscreens, and the World Wide Web, WHAT HAS PARTICLE PHYSICS EVER DONE FOR US?!"

"Synchrotron light sources for drug discovery?"

"Oh, drug discovery?! GROW UP!"

Comment Re:Very funny (Score 1) 74

if this were true it would not be possible for the system to read the watermark.

You confuse "invisible to humans" with "invisible to statistical analysis". Humans can't, for example, see the difference between metameric colours. Statistical analysis can. Humans can't see minor drift at scales where Brownian motion dominates. Statistical analysis can. Humans can't see the difference between background disease rates and new rising threats. Statistical analysis can. On and on. Statistical analysis is a far more powerful tool than human perceptual abilities.

this is also a lie. Identical thoughts must be expressed identically, otherwise they are, in fact, *different* thoughts.

I literally gave an example above. If you saw "picked a mango", "selected and picked a mango", "from within the tree, picked a mango", you would never think there was anything going on in the choice, and it isn't going to change the story one iota.

Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 2, Insightful) 267

Permanent ST is more closely aligned with circadian biology, although earlier dusk may limit some evening activities

You know what's aligned even more with circadian biology?

Keep the current system, get up off your ass, and change your clocks twice per year without whinging like a precious snowflake.

That way you you don't have to deal either with the sun beating down on you while you try to sleep at 4am or with your poor children getting run over in the dark on their way to school.

Sure, a couple of codgers might keel over in march, but they were probably gonna die soon anyway. It's much harder to measure the statistics of all the other people who would die steadily throughout the year due to the aforementioned issues, as well as similar problems caused by a static clock that doesn't adjust at all to when the sun actually rises. However, I would bet good money that it would add up to far more casualties overall.

For some reason, I seem to be in a small minority on this issue, though. It's probably because everybody would rather believe in a solution to the problems of living on a tilted axis that's clear, simple, and wrong.

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