Professor Appel was my boss when I was a system administrator for the UIUC Math department, working my way through grad school. He was one of the best bosses I’ve had over the past thirty years and had a real knack for dealing with the immature twenty something’s (like me).
He was incredibly humble about the 4 color proof, and well, just about everything. He continued to learn new things — I remember him asking me to help him debug some PostScript and I couldn’t believe it was happening.
I’m in River Forest and the deer are a pain to deal with. They eat your plants, they’re not afraid of people (because they get hand feed) and they get hit by cars.
They’re lacking their natural predators — and the logical solution of introducing them is ruled out because the local forest preserves aren’t large enough to support wolf packs.
Maybe the coyotes will figure out how to take them down.
You need to shoot the people who are feeding them - that's the logical solution to the problem you posed 8) Their natural predators are now cars because that is how things are now.
An environment is whatever it is at a point in time. You have described how things are around you and that is the current normal. You may not like it or even understand it but that is how it is.
You have to decide whether deer should live within your domain or not. At the moment it sounds like they are a negative factor for you. When you have run out of deer, will you start on the coyotes? When you have run out of creatures with backbones, will you start on arthropodia or amphibians?
Not really. The deer that thrive in suburban areas learn to watch for traffic. Even where deer vs car collisions are common, deer multiply well beyond what car traffic takes out. Really, hunting is the only way to thin the numbers.
Deer eat grass, they can thrive almost anywhere in North America just fine with or without people feeding them.
In suburbs they probably need to capture and slaughter some number of them to keep the numbers reasonable.
Deer can eat grass, but it's not their preferred food, and they can't thrive on it. They eat forbs, shoots, browse (twigs, buds, etc.) and mast like acorns (they are set up to deal with the large amounts of tannin in acorns).
"Although low quality forages such as mature grasses provide adequate nutrition to animals such as elk and cattle, the quicker digestive process of whitetails requires more readily digestible forages to fulfill their energy and protein requirements. On severely overpopulated and depleted ranges, white-tailed deer have starved to death with their stomachs full of low quality forages."
Point taken. Of course, again there is no shortage of shrubbery in suburban environments. And the last point is just what always happens when a species that evolved as prey is no longer hunted.
Well there was a lynx spotted in north Oak Park in the last couple-three years so there’s another potential predator, but yep, they definitely need predation. I’ve seen some sizable herds north of North Avenue in the forest preserve there (along with lots of bread put out by people who wanted to feed the deer). They’re a lot bolder there than south of North.
Look up to my post—the village proposed shooting the deer and residents decided that they’d rather have nuisance deer than see Bambi shot in their neighborhood. (There’s also the safety questions around shooting deer in residential neighborhoods to deal with as well.)
I was writing software at a bank and found a bug. I was told to save it for when we had our audit —- because no matter what, the auditors were going to insist we fixed something and it might as well be something the development team wanted fixed too.
I’ve heard of contractors who leave electrical outlets out of their plans so that the building department, which will insist something be changed in the plans (proving the department’s usefulness), does not insist on something hard.
I mean, all banking software has genuine bugs team dont have time to fix. There is about zero reason to save a bug for audit purposes when you can just take something off jira.
I meet Greg when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University and he was earning his PhD. I helped out a bit with some of the graphics programming for his thesis. Greg was a class act, always patient and kind. It was super helpful to me when I went to UIUC for graduate schools and he showed up as a faculty member there; he knew how to get access to campus resources and was more willing to help me than faculty in my own department. He was a model RIP.
Met him at HAL 2001, volunteered together a bit there. I think he was heading the speakers herald team I was part of.
First encounter with the hacker conference scene, he guided me wisely.
Patient and kind indeed.
He's the reason I kept going around European hacking / free software events. I owe him cultural discoveries, long lasting friendships and tech partnerships.
Very saddened by this news.
So far the thread is full of similar interactions with him.
That person changed so many lives, by his contributions to culture and technology but more importantly (?) because he had tremendous impacts on the lives of many people he took time to interact with.
I know that these threads are always full of "this recently deceased people made the world a better place". I lived with him 4 days 24 years ago so I can't say I knew him...but I know I wouldn't be writing this about more "famous" people I interacted with.
I think people tend to underestimate the risks in allowing suicide —- here’s a blurb from the linked article:
However, social acceptance may lead to more egregious abuses: the issue gained a higher profile in early 2010, when an 80-year-old man escaped after discovering his intended fate and heard his family members discussing how they were going to "share" his lands, and took refuge in a relative's home.
> people tend to underestimate the risks in allowing suicide
People obsess over this risk. It—and religious opposition—are the reason it’s only an option for those who can travel to and hospice in Switzerland.
> social acceptance may lead to more egregious abuses
Do we have any evidence societies that have tolerated suicide had higher rates of murder? Switzerland doesn’t strike me as a hotbed of senior murder, for example.
suicide already is legal -> if you succeed there's no one to prosecute so the question is just absurd. One can only discuss legality of attempted suicide.
You're assuming someone in shape to do it correctly. Someone who is choosing it for medical reasons might not have the strength and motor control, especially if they don't have access to suitable tools.
The healthcare system should not be allowed to suggest it. And it should require an independent review if you request it. That doesn't mean the system shouldn't be allowed to provide it.
The healthcare system is financially incentivized to encourage you to do it. It must absolutely remain taboo for medical professionals to even think about the option.
>> But somewhere along the line other Callery pear trees and Bradford pear trees cross-pollinated and some began producing viable fruit. Birds and mammals eat the fruit and poop out the seeds, often far from the tree from which it came.
"Life ... finds a way".
... with bird poop.
The latter probably not in Jeff Goldblum's voice though.
I was on the jury for a resisting arrest case and ended up as an alternate. The judge pulled us into chambers and we talked for about an hour.
One of the things that he said that stuck with me was “Everybody thinks it is CSI in here. It’s not. People come here and they tell you [the jurors] stories and then you have to decide which are true.”
Yeah, all the lawyers and judges I've talked to hate CSI (the show) for what it has done to people's expectations. The legal system does not operate like it is portrayed on TV. It really does come down to "what story is more believable?"
Sometimes a story is more believable because there is incontrovertible physical evidence. Normally in those circumstances it'd never go to the court room though -- plea deal in criminal cases, settlement in civil.
He was incredibly humble about the 4 color proof, and well, just about everything. He continued to learn new things — I remember him asking me to help him debug some PostScript and I couldn’t believe it was happening.