braindongle

Agreed, "global warming" is poor marketing. It's also a common colloquialism among climate change deniers, no? So, if you need to explain to someone how cold weather doesn't mean "global warming is fake", maybe also steer them toward the notion of climate change. "Anthropogenic forcing" or "it's our fault" is of course another important matter.

Is it one or the other? I don't know anything about dark rooms where captains of industry who profit from fossil fuels orchestrate climate denialism. Sounds plausible. But in any event, such efforts are surely more difficult, if possible at all, with an informed citizenry.

This is great. People who don't trust experts and cynically think that everything is political can readily say "It's really cold! See, global warming and climate change are fake!" Here we see that the polar vortex isn't extra-strong this year, it's extra-week, and the breakdown may send chunks of it southward.

This armchair level of understanding (even if my summary is not right on the nose) is what we need when we encounter people who actually want to politicize the weather. Will we defeat ignorance, or will ignorance defeat us?

For some reason, I have a PhD in Health Policy and clinical practice, so, I'm inclined to look at the healthcare system when thinking about this question.

IMO it's simple (and this is of course a common view): healthcare in the United States is a failed market. It's not about free market fundamentalism vs socialism, it's just that in this case, this market is totally broken. Costs are completely out of control, and accordingly, access, that is, access without incurring crippling debt, is a huge problem.

Obama tried to address both cost and access. He went up against the insurance companies, and lost. He got somewhere on access, but even that is just access to insurance; insurance that may leave you with thousands of dollars to pay out-of-pocket if you walk into the ED with a complaint. So maybe you don't go.

Socialized medicine, it seems, certainly won't fly in this country. But socialized insurance, "Medicare for all"? We, the little people, have many reasons to support a multi-decade experiment with that.

There's no ideology here. It's just insane (unless you're profiting!) given history for us to continue imagine that in this case the Invisible Hand is going to fix things.

Yes, or (in this case?) interpreting it. I think of spreadsheets as visual functional programming environments. The humble spreadsheet has an interesting kinship with the most trendy, and, for some (me!), difficult-to-grok programming paradigm.

Really, a ding here? I thought HN was where you go to discuss what's actually going on under the hood, not so much "now you need a Google account", which will surface itself in your general tech news feed. Hmm. I hope we don't go the way of Slashdot. What a sad decline that was. Where Google comes down on TLS vs E2E is a BFD.

Yes, cleaner, and no switch in Python.

If I'm teaching young'ns per se using a toy language, I'd reach for Scratch. It's history and Google's embrace of it seem like strong endorsements. Are there other good candidates in that space?

If I'm teaching an intro class using a general purpose language, it's Ruby or Python. My heart lies with Ruby, but having basic Python chops is such a bigger win downstream.

  for i in range(1, 101):
      if i % 15:
          print ('FizzBuzz')
      elif i % 3 == 0:
          print ('Fizz')
      elif i % 5 == 0:
          print ('Buzz')
      else:
          print (str(i))

  (1..100).each do |i|
    if i % 15 == 0
      puts 'FizzBuzz'
    elsif i % 3 == 0
      puts 'Fizz'
    elsif i % 5 == 0
      puts 'Buzz'
    else
      puts i
    end
  end

Who cares about the philosophical implications of the theorems? Philosophers! The linked article is about how the theorems destroyed Whitehead et al's aspirations to find One Algebra To Rule Them All.

The literature on Gödel and philosophy is gargantuan, for some reason. Wasn't it summed up well by Wittgenstein? Paraphrasing: "Who cares about your contradictions?" Well said. Also not the topic Wolchover's article.

Math people can make the same move: "Who cares about your philosophizing?"