srl

"Few paintings have lasted the test of time as the great wave of Kanagawa. It took Kanagawa 40 years before he drew the wave he is most known for."

The painting is by Hokusai. Kanagawa is a place.

The American allergy to welfare and social safety has caused _global_ fertility to collapse?

"Police bad" doesn't account for differences in performance between SF police and others. "DA bad" at least tries to do this (although as you note, is in some tension with the facts).

Your statement about Dugin is false---I (in the U.S., to be clear) was able to buy a copy of one book on BooksAMillion, and it looks like most/all of them are still available.

Of course, it is true that his books are unavailable on Amazon and Amazon-owned sites. I wish I knew what caused this, or how to find out.

You and I have very different experiences. At the places where I've been a student and worked, it was possible and permitted to enter the vast majority of buildings (I think all academic buildings, but I'm hedging with "vast majority"), during working hours (something like 8am to 6pm), without any identification or permission. Importantly, this always includes libraries.

I know people who, when considering faculty job offers from universities, use "are libraries open to the public" as a proxy for other valuable properties of the university. It seems like a pretty good heuristic to me.

I've been asked for ID exactly once on a university campus---I needed security to let me into my office building in the middle of the night because I'd forgotten my wallet in there, and they needed to record my name for some record. The officer didn't seem interested in _checking_ the ID so much as copying down the name.

I don't understand the relevance of this. The claim is about what "half of Russia thinks". Why would propaganda in Africa have a strong effect on the thought of those in Russia?

This is a bit of a non-sequitur (not to mention silly), but I'm curious about the details. Do you have any links to this story of Rabi refusing to let Bader study part-time?

The problem, of course, it that the timing doesn't make sense at all. You say this happened in the early 50's. That can't be the early 1850's, since Bader wasn't born yet. But by the 1950s, Feynman was already long gone from high school. Indeed, he'd already devised path integrals, and so he certainly knew about the principle of least action!

Perhaps you meant 30's?

I'm baffled. Is there some broader context that makes this make sense? From what I can tell, this fellow (the one sending the email) is being paid money to develop priorities for updating the FreeBSD handbook. His response is to send an email to the /announcement/ mailing list, with a list of all the relevant bug reports he could find, asking others to do his job for him?

A reasonable survey to send around might be "how often do you use the FreeBSD docs?" "How often do you notice errors in section 1? Section 2? Section 3?" That's not what this is. It's "here's a specific error, and I'm gonna run a /poll/ to figure out what the priority on fixing it is".

Even ignoring the "that's why we hired /you/" component---this must be a singularly ineffective way to gain reliable information. Very few people are going to reply (because each of the ~100 questions is rather technical!). The responses are therefore going to be self-selected to... I don't know, whoever has the time and will to waste on this.