What stops me from encrypting things?

So the answer is just it's for backwards compatibility with MySQL 3?

I was kind of hoping for more.

For example, if you have a friend who hates chi-squared tests, instead teach them correspondence analysis.

A year later you can tell them they already know how to do a chi-squared test. To be fair, this latter comment depends a bit on how the library is implemented, and possibly it only does correspondence analysis while not giving you direct access to a way to generate p-values. Some libraries will have a function that you can call that runs simulations and then provides the p-values.

Many of these statistical techniques are an obligation only if you have to sample from a space and you have to somehow determine whether the sample is representative. If you presuppose that your sample is representative, then you move into a parallel world of statistics. An example would be a thermometer. If you sample it at 10:00 00 and again at 10:00 01, certainly you would expect both to be the same? If it's not the same or a close value I would rather say that the thermometer is broken, not that your within group variation for the minute 10:00 is high...

Do you mean learn other people's songs from sheet music, or do you mean write down, from the sheet music, the same song again on blank sheet paper?

Edit: Or do you mean write down the song via hearing?

The first thing would be to write them as: entry1,"0123456789",entry2 rather than entry1,0123456789,entry2. This has worked for me in some instances in Excel whereby I have to escape certain things inside a string, but I would not be surprised if Excel still messes this up. For example, giving the triangle exclamation mark box and then helpfully suggest to convert to number.

If you want to go further, you can do something like write a routine that alters the CSV, such as entry1,hospitalString(0123456789),entry2. Sure, there are problems with this too, but Excel can break a lot of things and the above examples I do use in practise (the first example I put the double quotes to escape single quotes in foreign language unicode).

Another thing Excel can do is break your dates, by switching months (usually only for dates < 13th of the month, but often a partial conversion in your data for < 13th and >= 13th) or convert dates to integers.

But... I don't live in the US. We pay tax and received no services in return.

If I can give my tax money to someone of my choosing, I think it may incentivise people to feel better about where the money is going.

To be clear, not making your tax payments less, but rather choosing where it goes. Of course, if you have a network of nonprofits, this become a bit grey. In the USA I have gotten the impression that people do try to game the idea of nonprofits.

This is an interesting topic for me personally, and the way I experience it is like this:

The starting point to a musical scale, classically, is major. Minor is the first alt-culture in key signature.

However, the next step to get a major minor like, is the major 7th, or other half tones, like the 6th. Then, you have the converse, making minors major like, such as the melodic minor scale, or the minor 7th.

Interesting songs, especially in popular culture, make use of this dualistic view. Examples are Wicked Game by Chris Isaak (in a mode, where you don't regress to tonic, giving it an incomplete and spooky theme), Clocks by Coldplay (major chord, minor on 5th rather than major; major on 4th).

The issues that came, like the keyboard, or lack of repair DIY ability coincided with the advent of the iPhone. The question at the moment is whether 2019 and 2020 is a quality age for MacBooks or not, and I don't know the answer to that, but it does appear like 2012 MacBooks are more resilient than 2019 ones.

I think a Frankenstein Dell XPS / MacBook is round about time now from some company X.

I know it sounds tangential, but this does resonate with my own roundabout way of going from studies -> work and the gross lack of fundamental science companies in Africa as a whole. I did not have depression, but rather my own cocktail of problems as a student, and a lot of it (at least for me) stemmed from clear dissonance between your current situation and an inability to anticipate a future self that is acceptable to your current self.

With depression, the situation is similar and more importantly, you become more and more subjective and people outside your situation are needed, as probably is medication, to bring you back to personal assonance with what you want in life.

The article doesn't say what the reasons were, so Wang may have had different reasons.

I would have expected a bit more sophistication, like hidden URLs in emails that autoresolve, at the least. Not my area, though.

I also don't think the people being ransomwared are the same people who try to weaponise your data, hospitals being a good example.

My opinion about it is that many companies don't understand their systems (and yes, I do blame Microsoft, Apple and for that matter Salesforce or Oracle). However, many people don't understand their microwave ovens, myself included, so perhaps it's unrealistic to start that conversation and perhaps focus on the pragmatists, like Art.

> There is a widely held belief that because math is involved, algorithms are automatically neutral.

> This widespread misconception allows bias to go unchecked, and allows companies and organizations to avoid responsibility by hiding behind algorithms.

I think the wording of this casts a shadow on what mathematics is. Opaque accounting or opaque algorithms, it doesn't matter what the underlying hidden components are. But the belief that the words "algorithms" or ever "smart" would hide things says more to me about people in management than it says about people who discover algorithms.

Mathematics can of course be weaponised, but a bigger problem is ignorance towards mathematics. After all, many things can be weaponised. I think the text on Tijmen Schep's websites have a good message, but I do think one should slow down when it comes to compassion fatigue. One way that I use to do this is to ask questions about concrete resources: What are things we need? What are the things we want? And are we progressing to improve people's living conditions?

For the most part, the answer to the last question is yes. It's important to realise this. There is a good book written about our progress as a society by I think an Estonian author, or another Eastern country. I wonder what it is called again.

In Southern Africa, we have a situation whereby not all woodpecker species can peck the holes from start to end.

The ones who start the holes look similar to the ones in the article, but they are black, white and yellow with red flecks [1]. Then there is a smaller orange, white and black one that either steals the former's nest or uses an old hole, after which it proceeds to do some interior decoration and expansion. This rather fashionable bird is also the emblem of the University of Johannesburg. [2] [3]

There are some other woodpecker species, but these two are quite common in places where I have lived and although I am not an ethologist, I believe the comment about their interaction is accurate. The Crested Barbet is somewhat bigger than the Hoopoe, so it would be interesting to know the full picture behind their symbiosis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crested_barbet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_hoopoe [3] https://www.uj.ac.za/

[1] https://youtu.be/fBRMaEAFLE0?t=651 "Free with every CD, a Cray supercomputer"

Or, assuming you are from a well functioning country, what would happen and how would you restart?