No organization should be tax-exempt (not religions, not charities, not foundations), and no donations to such organizations should be tax exempt. Tax exemption takes money from the one democratic charity (our government) that supports vastly more than any other, increases undemocratic amounts of influence among the wealthy, and leads to financial shenanigans such as those we see here withe the LDS hoard. I've been in position to witness all of this via my parent's wealth distribution (almost entirely to charities, starting with 50% to LDS church).
Does the state need to encourage charitable giving, though?
Would a person stop donating $1000 of their expendable wealth to their favorite cause (e.g., hunger, cancer, cloning hitler, whatever) if that $1000 donation no longer reduced their taxes by $200 (for example)? If so, what kind of person would do that? Probably not the kind of person who ever donates to anything in the first place.
Worst case, if there were no more tax-deductible charities: that person would pay the $200 taxes and only donate $800 (instead of $1000) to their favorite cause. Best case: Megawealthy would no longer leave $20 billion to their favorite cause (be that their dog, the LDS church, their love of oil drilling, or whatever), but would pay $5 in estate taxes and only have $15 billion leftover for their love of oil drilling (or whatever be their whim).
the amniotic sac, just like the placenta and umbilical cord, are organs we all developed as fetuses. it should not be too surprising that we have methods to repair our own organs.
Most of our organs don't/can't self repair, so it is very surprising. Excepting skin which you may want to qualify as an organ, only the liver can regenerate. All of our other organs "repair" via scarring which may replace lesions but does not perform the function of the scarred organ.
That is not true. Bones heal, muscles heal, nerves grow back under some circumstances, the central nervous system compensates, every tissue fights infections and works hard to get rid of toxins where it can. These are all cases of self-repair.
Yeah some of these processes result in scarring, some of the time. That doesn’t mean it is not self repairing. In fact it is the result of the self repair!
Sorry that I jump on this, but it is incredible that we are all these advanced, beatifull, self-repairing “meat robots” and the processes work so smooth that someone doesn’t even notice all the self repairing which goes on inside their own body.
If you are wondering how an organ which stops self repairing looks like buy some meat, any meat, from a butcher and put it on your kitchen counter. It will within days start to smell bad, grow mould, liquify and eventually insects and magots will carry it away bite by tiny bite. It happens with the meat because it stopped self-repairing. It doesn’t happen with your flesh because it is constantly self-repairing.
Saying many of our bits at the macro level can't repair themselves is a recognition of our biology and that state of medical science. It doesn't take away from the fact that life is amazing
Yes, under a strict definition those are organs. But under the more common usage "a part of an organism that is typically self-contained and has a specific vital function, such as the heart or liver in humans." [1] they are not.
As for the last paragraph, I don't agree "self repairing" and "alive" are the same
this is just catering to the predominantly male audience of early tech adopters. I remember hearing that the landing assistant in soviet fighter jets has a female voice, because it has a soothing effect on the male pilots.
My personal opinion is the "Bitching Betty" voice with its crisp instructions and authoritative tone makes us subliminally think of our mother giving us guidance or reprimand at an early age. It is a great design; it has saved a TON of pilot lives who otherwise would have accidentally perished.
Love it. This is one of the primary features that RDIO had that I miss in Spotify, because it allows for discovering songs, as in “if someone likes this song enough to add it to a song list, I wonder what else they like”. I look forward to the indexing to increase, because many of my favorites aren’t in your index yet. (And they what would it be like if you cooold enter two or more song titles?)
Because JavaScript happened to be the language we at Nombas implemented in our "robust and predictable" engine. If a, e.g., python or TcL engine were as solid at the time for a can't-fail embedded engine, they could have happily used that.
Thanks for replying! I looked on your website, where there’s more information.
Half of my question was surprise, because I would have thought something like Common Lisp, Erlang, Chez Scheme, Guile Scheme, Chicken Scheme would have been interesting choices. Despite being compiled they have various support for interpreters, embedding, and live update / hot reload of code.
The other half was curiosity because I just didn’t know why JavaScript would be chosen and would like to know. (Hence my question.)
You should post here as your own post about the project. That would be interesting.
And congratulations on having some code running on JWST. It’s gotta be uniquely thrilling.
I just updated our "Nombas doesn't exist anymore" page, for readers of this nice and mostly-accurate article, with a little more background on why I think NASA chose it (tl;dr "robust and predictable"). <http://brent-noorda.com/nombas/us/index.htm>
BTW, it just occurred to me after writing that that one of the first customers to ever license our software, over the dozen years we were in business, used it to control a camera, while possibly our last customer (NASA) also used it to control a (much bigger) camera. JavaScript: it's a language for taking pictures.
This is awesome! How does it feel to have contributed to a massive advancement in space exploration? Did you develop ScriptEase with this use case in mind (cameras)? Why did ScriptEase development stop? Do you think ScriptEase would be useful in cameras today?
Thank. Yes, it feels very satisfying having it finally be deployed and operational, like a big sigh of relieve after holding in a small bit of breath (one alveoli's worth) for 20 years. ScriptEase started when I began working alone on a project, instead of with big teams, and needed a faster program paradigm so that I alone could be as productive as a big team. It turned out to be generic enough that it was useful for a lot of types of projects, not just mine (which was to be an infinite backup product) or cameras (nothing on my mind at the time at all) but pretty much any software who's core libraries needed easy modification--also turned out to be useful in web browers, although I didn't know it at the time, because I didn't know there was such as thing yet as browsers or the web. The development stopped because by early 2000 times were really changing--people were getting less into paying for software libraries and more into getting free stuff; but it was 9/11 that really killed it, because our customers stopped paying us (because their customers stopped paying them, and so on). The final nail in the coffin was a big snowstorm on the day someone offered to acquihire us and move us to California where we'd never have to shovel snow again.
Finally, ScriptEase itself would have too many legal troubles being used by anyone, but I do believe just about everything needs a script language so it can be altered and customized and personalized and applied to infinite new purposes (and not a new one invented every week, just something boring and stable).
If I were to revive something from ScriptEase, I've often thought it should be the ideas behind the test environment around it. Where everything that can go wrong will go wrong and it must still survive.
NASA licensed one $3 copy, but we didn't know why until ~a year later (just a guess how long it was) then found they'd had a team analyzing lots of software options, so by 2003 or so we knew it was for a next-gen telescope.
SE was never "open source" in the standard sense, although almost everyone who licensed it got the source. In the very early nineties I was contact by people to say that what I'd been working on should be "open sourced" in the "free beer" context. I needed money to pay rent, put shoes on the kids' feet, and stuff like that, so didn't understand how to get paid for free software. They said "people will pay you to customize it, or to fix bugs" and I said "it's already ultra-customizable and I don't release software with bugs". I kind of get it now, and if I could talk to my old self I would tell self to open-source at least parts so that there was no reason for anyone NOT to use it. So now I'm working on inventing a time machine to go back and tell myself that and A LOT of more important things, but the time-machine work is going very very slow.
