Leave the field to the censors, create an alternative, and hope that they will not pursue you? Or stand your ground and fight them wherever they are? That is the question.
Finds all items partially equal (not necessarily literally equal) to val. In a generic slice in ascending or descending order. Returns the Range of the matching items. When the range is empty (n..n), then n is the sort order of where the missing val could be inserted.
Assigns a comparator closure `pcomp` just once, depending on whether the order is ascending or descending.
It is worth mentioning Jan Hus: Orthographia Bohemica, 1406 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographia_bohemica which introduced diacritical marks to facilitate expressing all the sounds of Slavic languages in Latin alphabet by single symbols. They have logical phonetic meanings, for example háček (the hook) indicating the placing of the tip of the tongue on the palate. Though, admittedly, they are somewhat inconvenient on modern keyboards, usually relegated to the top row.
Jan Hus was later burned at the stake for his 'heresies', which probably slowed down the uptake of his eminently useful invention in the rest of the world.
It is my opinion that even English more than 600 years later could benefit from it, as in: 'caš ček' instead of 'cash cheque', thus also finally attaining much simpler, logical and phonetic spelling.
This is unfortunately just one of many examples of generally widespread malaise of conflating correlation with causality.
It is especially common in certain "sciences" which typically involve a lot of data collection. Followed by attempts to crunch it up into some kind of popular and far reaching conclusions, intended to fool the examiners into awarding a PhD.
Speaking as a person with a PhD, I can say from personal experience that you don't need popular or far reaching conclusions to earn one. Most of the time the committee wants to see you've done the work and have, in some small way (sometimes surprisingly small) pushed the boundaries of knowledge out a bit.
The kind of Academic Inflation you're talking about is almost entirely the product of PIs who need to publish, publish, publish to get tenure and funding. The vast majority of people who are awarded PhDs understand they have almost no chance of even landing a tenure track position and consequently have little incentive to fluff up their work.
It is sad that even in this case, the orthodox line that "the ancients were ignorant about the movement around the Sun" is pushed by the very people who perhaps ought to know better. This machine would clearly have been a useful predictor of the positions of the planets regardless whether you subscribe to the heliocentric model or not.
It was more likely inspired by the pythagorian numerical model of the universe. Who is to say that Pythagoras was wrong? For example, all of modern chemistry is explainable in those terms.
"Ignorant" is a bit of a value judgement that I didn't perceive the article as attempting to make. Heliocentricism was indeed the dominant theory in ancient times. There were competing theories but they didn't have many supporters. It makes sense that the Antikythera device would probably reflect the prevailing opinion of its time.
There will be a maximum drop rate that is supported by the machinery being built, and it seems reasonable, though not mandatory, that a 5x weight system will be designed to handle more generation than whatever it's 5x of.
This is the difference between "Bob the engineer says the bridge will fall down if you cut this cable", Vs "Bob the engineer cuts cable to demonstrate how easy it is to knock bridge down".
We should trust our engineers, and not require them to demonstrate something at great cost to get the attention of people who make decisions...
Which engineers to trust? The ones saying Y2K needed billions of investment or cars all crash with planes falling from the sky as we usher in the post-technology age Jan 1, 2000. Remember that? Some people still believe them that we headed it off successfully, everywhere on earth in every industry, regardless of how little was spent, including nothing at all...
You can't trust engineers anymore than you can trust lawyers (which lawyers?) or Doctors (Second opinions ever much?) Or indeed scientists, managers and politicians. The question to ask is "Do you have good reason to find this convincing."
When what is at stake has sufficient value proving the obvious is indeed, also correct, beyond doubt has very real benefits.
This is the same kind of thinking that has people questioning quarantine protocols (in general, not just this one). A precautionary measure that prevents a worst case scenario doesn't suddenly become stupid because the scenario it was designed to prevent does not happen. We hedge our bets all the time, and strategy people who don't hedge will end up driving busloads of people off a cliff sooner or later. Reckless gambling has no place in policy decisions.
We also had some pretty fair warning from industries that use long-term thinking. Banking software was already breaking in 1969 (30 year mortgage logic). For many industries this was a long emergency.
Even by a cynical view that these were pork projects that didn't 'need to get done', so what? We do these all the time. The cash infusions prop up industries or divisions, and often serve as cover for attacking deferred maintenance. Over beers you can complain about how stupid it is to have to get things done this way, but at work you take the money and run as far as you possibly can.
What bothers me most, I think, is that if you've worked in software for very long at all, you should know all of this. Politics and proxies come up if you work at a mature company, or one that matures while you're there.
(On December 31st 1999, I watched the New Year's celebrations for Tokyo and Australia. When they didn't blow up, I agreed to make plans involving alcohol for the evening. By the time Europe didn't blow up, I figured we were gonna be okay, so Happy New Year to me.)
>This is the same kind of thinking that has people questioning quarantine protocols (in general, not just this one).
There are competing protocols from different expert sources. Which to trust?
The ones that make a convincing case. See how that works?
Who to believe about Y2K? The engineers who make a convincing case.
(Y2K wasn't nothing, but a huge part of the investment in mitigation was a con. Cables certified where I worked. Every windows95 desktop. Do you believe those engineers who said that was necessary? What about the ones who said, "Yeah probably should check your billing system and interest rate calculations. Airplanes, not so much..." But they usually weren't selling using the fear-frenzy for leverage. Do you remember all that?
As someone who worked through Y2K, over 90% of the money spent accross society was straight-up con. It wasn't nothing, but what a massive sales beat-up it became.
Disagree, go nuts. Who do you trust? The engineer making the convincing case. "Trust engineers" not so much.
It's like the story of the factory hiring the experienced engineer and getting a massive bill for tapping a machine with a hammer. Paraphrasing from memory:
The factory had a machine break down. They hired a few cheap engineers who were unable to diagnose and fix the problem. Eventually they found an experienced engineer who fixed the machine by tapping it with a hammer and charged them $1,000. When they asked for an itemised invoice they got:
Tapping with a hammer: $5
Knowing where to tap: $9,995
It's also super expensive to develop current generation offensive and defensive military hardware. It's super expensive to play wargames.
The end result is know about an issue someone else could exploit if they have the time and will to do so. The US is going against state sponsored actors who will spend the time and energy to figure out ways they could cripple our country. And we do the exact same thing to them.
Security is done in layers. If you're a nation state, you need to be prepared to defend against other nation state actors. And that costs a lot of money.
