I understand and agree with your sentiment, but just don't buy the uni-tasker type lego. They make plenty of sets where most if not all of the parts are general and can be used for undirected play.
You can repurpose a lot of the space and themed bits, and some of them are truly wonderful, the ones which functionally allow bump-to-bump placement.
And for lego fanatics you can buy specified unit-sizes in specified colours, so there is that.
We got a lot of themed play stuff, fences, trees, animals. I do recognize how much kids love themed play too.
Back in the 60s/70s I had the trainset, which included a "one noise forward two noise stop three noise backward" controller. There were two or more generations of the train motor: the one with rubber anti-slip on the wheels and the one without. depending on how much you enjoy crashes, either were useful...
I’m up voting because I want to hear this side of the argument. I guess your point is that most people’s experience isn’t that bad, and they owe their parents.
Sure, so it can just be a matter of balancing how they treat you and your family vs basic decency and the benefit of merely maintaining contact and having them around as grandparents for your kids. Everyone’s experience and tolerance is different.
I don’t think we necessarily owe our parents. They made the conscious decision to have us and raise us, that ought to be a reward in it self.
I certainly will the best I can for my kids, but I don’t want them to think they owe me anything. This is especially true if I am (unknowingly or unconsciously) treating them or their family very badly.
Plus, people follow strict fasting (up to 210 mandatory fasting days in a year) ... at least the Oriental Orthodox church followers which make up 40-50% of the population.
This is all fine for personal/proprietary purposes, but open source can't be that cutting edge. While type annotations are probably fine (3.5), f-strings (3.6) or dataclasses (3.7) won't make it to mainstream OSS anytime soon. But they are great features nonetheless.
I mean, RHEL 8 is shipping with Python 3.6 and Python 2.7 available. There is no standard /usr/bin/python without making the symlink manually, and the system uses its own internal python for dependent tooling, so it doesn’t conflict with user installed versions.
And, based on my experience, general open source is usually much more cutting edge than the larger distros, that’s the whole point.
The fact that Google has so many cities mapped for aerial imagery is very interesting to me. Do we know how they get this aerial imagery data? (i.e. Is it one or more subcontracted companies that specialize in aerial photography?)
"The US National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP) offers aerial image data of the US at one-meter resolution, including nearly complete coverage every several years since 2003. Earth Engine includes this data as well as sample imagery from several commercial providers."
> Some thirty or so years ago, Bessel functions were included in
the syllabus, but in our day they are out of the question.
> Teaching a subject of which no honest examples can be given is, in my opinion, demoralizing.
I don't get this. Differential equations theory is about proving existence and uniqueness of solutions. If you have to use numerical techniques to actually compute the solution, then that's perfectly fine. After all, even if the solution is explicit, like sin(x), or especially a special function, then we still need to use numerical techniques to actually evaluate that explicit solution.
The article is not questioning the "theory", the identified problem is the teaching at undergraduate level. As it was/is commonly taught, it is neither pure nor applied. Rather it is categorisations and tricks, little of which has any practical value.
As a body of work Differential equations are so messy that theorists landed on so many disparate results. As such Differential equations courses are commonly taught as a "survey of the land" type of courses, so they tend to be incoherent. On the other hand if the teaching focused on practicality there is a lot of commonality among the practical cases.
I recently saw them in a grad eng class, but I agree with the article - from what I saw there is no need to give them the math professor treatment. You can use them as a piece of trivia - ie pde of type x has this set of basis functions - now apply the principles of basis functions to solve your your problem.
But are they useful now, other than as nomenclature? Bessel functions are defined as the solutions of Bessel's differential equation. It's all a bit circular. (there's the series expansion, but it doesn't gain you much)
30 years ago, if I wanted to plot the result of solving an equation like this, Bessel functions were useful as I'd just reach for Abramowitz&Stegun and look at the tabulated values. But now I have a computer, tabulated special functions don't matter nearly so much.
It's a long time since I had to use Bessel functions, so I could be very wrong, but this might be one of the reasons Rota said that.
