PaintedSnail

I would suggest doing so anyway. If they come across a firearm by happenstance then they at least won’t panic and will know what to do to be safe.

We used to have them until several years ago they were deliberately removed. Their roots were destroying the roads and sidewalks, as well as infiltrating the underground infrastructure.

How can I make sure that the citations are real and actually useful? Citations-cartels are already a thing.

I’m thinking that citations in papers can be actual links (akin to hyperlinks) to the location in the cited paper itself. This way it can be automatically verified that there are no citation loops, that citations reference current revisions, that the papers cited have not been retracted or otherwise discredited, and following citation trails becomes much easier. Would that help the citation-carcel issue, you think?

How can the review process be ported to that approach without losing the independence of the reviews? They are supposed to be anonymous and not affiliated with the authors in any way?

How important is anonymity in reviews? My thought process is going the opposite way: by linking reviews and comments on papers to the person/institution making it, it encourages them to be more responsible with their words and may indicate potential biases with regards to institution affiliations.

How can the amount of articles be reduced? Currently, you’re forced to publish as much as possible, published articles in “good” journals are your currency as a reseacher.

Here I’m also thinking the exact opposite: the issue isn’t the numbers of papers, it’s how the papers are organized that’s the problem. We actually want MORE papers for the reasons hinted at here: important papers are going unpublished because they are (for lack of a better word) uninteresting. A null result is not an invalid result, and its important to get that data out there. By having journals gate-keep the data that gets released, we are doing the scientific community a disservice.

Of course, more papers increases the number of junk papers published, but that’s where having the papers available openly and having citations linked electronically comes in. The data can be fed in to large data mining algorithms for meta analysis, indexing and searching, and categorization. Plus, if it later turns out that a paper is junk, any papers that cite it (and any papers that cite those, and so on) can all be flagged for review or just automatically retracted.

Thoughts?

I know little of the ins-and-outs of scientific publishing, but that didn’t stop me from having a dumb thought: could the fediverse be a potential solution? Each university or research group could host their own instance of some software specifically for publishing papers, papers can cross-link citations to papers on other instances, people can make comments across instances that are tied to their own identities from their home instance, paper revisions can be tracked easily and bad citations spotted when a paper is updated or retracted, that kind of thing. The currency then becomes the reputation of the organizations and individuals, and this opens up a ton of data for automated analysis. I just don’t know enough to know what problems would arise.

Basically, yes, though I think they have special hydraulic pullers, too. I forget the exact name. They have to take special measures if the day is too cold.

https://youtu.be/zqmOSMAtadc?si=FCG7HxiPWXNQY6Uj

According to Practical Engineering, tracks are no longer given a gap. The gap causes premature wear and excess noise. Instead, they lay the track under tension, and weld the joins between sections.

There is still a limit on how much heat they can handle before buckling, of course. I just thought that was a neat innovation.

And now you compare the Republicans to some natural force, as if they are inevitable and inescapable. Gravity has no will, no plan. It just is. Republicans have a will and a plan. Getting mad at the Democrats for not being good enough to stop that is akin to victim blaming. The Republicans should never have gone down this road in the first place.

Do you blame the thief, or do you blame the homeowner for not having better locks? Who do you hold accountable?

We’re not talking about a diseased animal, we’re talking about people who are making conscious decisions knowing what the results will be. I can and so absolutely blame people for that.

Your metaphor insinuates that Republicans are unable to control their actions. If that were the case, that’s all the more reason to vote and get them out of positions of power.

Because the Republicans control Congress, and at this point only an act of Congress can restore it.

It comes down to this: a Republican president would veto any abortion protection law, but a Democratic president would pass it. But the law has to get to his desk first.

I’m not saying planned obsolescence isn’t a thing (because it is), but that’s not the only reason. Making phones smaller, lighter, faster, and more feature-dense all mean that the phone has to be built with tighter manufacturing and operating tolerances. Faster chips are more prone to heat and vibration damage. Higher power requirements means the battery has a larger charge/discharge cycle. And unfortunately, tighter operating tolerances mean that they can fall out of those tolerances much more easily.

They get dropped, shaken, exposed to large environmental temperature swings, charged in wonky ways, exposed to hand oils and other kinds of dirt, and a slew of other evils. Older phones that didn’t have such tight tolerances could handle all that better. Old Nokia phones weren’t built to be indestructible, they are just such simple phones that there isn’t much to break; but there’s a reason people don’t use them much anymore. You can still get simple feature phones, but the fact remains that they don’t sell well, so not many are made, and the ones that are made don’t have a lot of time and money invested in them.

Now Voyager is an extremely simple computer, made with technology that has huge tolerances, in an environment that is mostly consistent and known ahead of time so the design can deliberately account for it, had lots of testing, didn’t have to take mass production into its design consideration, didn’t have to make cost trade-offs, and has a dedicated engineering team to keep it going. It is still impressive that it has lasted this long, but that is more a testament to the incredible work that was and is being put into it than to the technology behind it.

If I interpret your question correctly, you are basically asking what the practical difference is between interpreting a model as a reflection of reality and interpreting a model as merely a mathematical tool.

A mathematical model, at its core, is used to allow us to make testable predictions about our observations. Interpretations of that model into some kind of explanation about the fundamental nature of reality is more the realm of philosophy. That philosophy can loop back into producing more mathematical models, but the models themselves only describe behavior, not nature.

A model by nature is an analogy, and analogies are always reductionist. Like any analogy, if you poke it hard enough, it starts to fall apart. They make assumptions, they do their best to plug holes, they try to come as close as they can to mirroring the behavior of our observations, but they always fall short somewhere. Relativity and Quantum Chromodynamics are both good examples. Both are very, very good at describing behavior within certain boundaries, but fall completely apart when you step outside of them. (Both, to expand on the example, use constants that are impericaly determined, but we have no idea where they come from.)

The danger is in when you start to assume that a model of reality is reality itself, and you forget that it’s just a best guess of behaviors. Then you get statements like you first made. “Relativity assumes time is a dimension. The model for that works. Therefore time must be a dimension in reality. That must mean that not treating time as a dimension anywhere must be wrong.” That line of thinking, though, forgets that a model is only correct within the scope of the model itself. As soon as you introduce a new model, any assumptions made by other models are no longer relevant. That will pigeonhole your thinking and lead you to incorrect conclusions due to mixed analogies.

That is how you get statements like your first one. “Model A treats time like an illusion, but model B treats time like a dimension. Ergo, all dimensions are illusions .” That is mixing analogies.

Nope, you can do that with GPay, which is not the same as Google Pay, which is not the same as Google Wallet, but they all connect to the same account. Yay Google naming 😑.

“Google Pay” app is going away, but the “GPay” app is not, and you can use that for person to person transactions. Yay Google naming conventions.

Because Google is Google and can’t keep their own shit straight, there is a bit of confusion. “Google Pay” is going away, but “GPay” is not. You can still use the GPay app for person to person transactions. Google Wallet is used for things like tap-to-pay. Both apps link to the same underlying account.

I would be careful of confusing “reality” (whatever that is) with our model of reality. Relativity, which treats time as a dimension, is a good model that fits well with most of our observations. It’s not perfect, though, and it doesn’t fit well with some other observations. That’s how we know that it doesn’t fully match reality, and why we’re looking for a new model.

Paraphrasing the old saying: all models of the universe are wrong, but some are useful.

Time management is different for everyone, and when you’re on a deadline, or just dealing with a one-off situation, the extra research has no value.

Sometimes you don’t need to know how the clock works, you just need to know what time it is.