The title of his column and book "Metamagical Themas" is an anagram of Martin Gardner's previous column "Mathematical Games". It's clever wordplay turtles all the way down.
"tombeau" literally means "tomb", but the term also sometimes means "piece written as a memorial", like Ravel's piano suite "Le Tombeau de Couperin". And yes, Hofstadter explicitly links "ton beau" with "tombeau" (he doesn't explicitly mention the "memorial" meaning, though when he mentions the literal "tombeau de Marot" he is talking specifically about the epitaph on it) and also with "tome beau", the great book of Marot's life and work.
I'd find it a cleverer bit of wordplay if "le ton beau de ..." itself didn't feel clumsy. Surely it would always be "le beau ton de ..."?
This was all somewhere in the back of my head but my copy of this book is in my parents' basement somewhere. I'll have to rescue it so I can keep it in my basement.
Quite often I'm incorporating a new library into my source. Every new library involves a choice: do I just spend 15 minutes on the Quick Start guide (i.e. "copy-paste"), or a day reading detailed docs, or a week investigating the complete source code? All of those are tradeoffs between understanding and time to market. LLMs are another tool to help navigate that tradeoff, and for me they continue to improve as I get better at asking the right questions.
Or "do I even need a library really?" These libraries do what I need AND so many other things that I don't need. Am I just bandwagoning. For my very simple purposes, maybe my own "prefix(n)" method is better than a big ol' library.
If your goal is “ship it” then you might be right. If your goal is “ship it, and don’t break anything else, and don’t cause any security issues in the future and don’t rot the codebase, and be able to explain why you did it that way and why you didn’t use X” then you’re probably wrong.
Main issue for me in bed is failure to identify face smooshed into pillow. Raise head and unlock fine, even in full dark. Still requires neck muscle actuation that wasn't required with touch id.
By the same logic, all gas cars should be taxed on a sliding scale, where the more fuel-efficient cars are taxed at a higher rate. It's important to society that we incentivise people to drive the most polluting and climate-destroying vehicles.
More fuel efficient gas cars tend to be lighter, and pavement damage scales as the fourth power (!) of axle weight.[1] It's likely that fuel-efficient cars—despite paying less in road taxes—are still overpaying for the road damage they cause.
Of course fuel-efficient cars will still have similar impacts on road congestion and parking. So the real question is: what percentage of the fuel tax goes to paying for road damage, and what fraction goes to compensation for other externalized costs: urban congestion, parking, smog, noise, collision risk, pedestrian stress levels, etc?
All cars should be taxed on a formula of miles and weight. I own an EV, and I'm happy to pay my share, especially for the increased weight due to the battery. I'd love to see taxes that incentivize smaller, lighter cars in general.
And even if the power is green, less use is always better. Less tire wear and in general less energy used which means it can be used for other things or in general produced less.
I'd never heard of that fourth-power-law, fascinating. In fact I can't think of any other relationship in 'nature' scaling with the fourth power, and it seems that that is indeed rare, given the fact that the Wikipedia article is literally called 'fourth power law' and only refers to this effect. (Though I sure would have liked more background info on the actual physics involved; it seems they basically just observed cars and trucks driving on roads, measured the damage to the road, and called it a Law.)
This came to my attention when I was teaching Physics 102 at Cornell which was an auto tutorial course for pre-meds that had an unusual focus on fluid mechanics for an intro physics course.
It's more a rule of thumb than anything approaching a law. The exponent varies based on a number of factors like existing road condition, road construction standards, speed, weather conditions, etc.
There's also radar reflection, "Observe that the received power drops with the fourth power of the range, so radar systems must cope with very large dynamic ranges in the receive signal processing." - https://www.eetimes.com/radar-basics-part-1/
I would also call it a classic as I learned it from this scene in Robert Heinlein's book "Rolling Stones": "The result was eight shiny right-angled corners facing among them in all possible directions —a radar reflector. ... The final result was to step up the effectiveness of radar from an inverse fourth-power law to an inverse square law — in theory, at least. In practice it would be somewhat less than perfectly efficient ...", https://archive.org/details/rollingstones0000robe_q7v9/page/...
A quick search on Google Scholar finds there's a fourth-power law for shock waves:
"A fourth-power law relating the stress jump through a steady structured shock wave and the maximum strain rate within the shock wave has received recognition as a unifying relation over a sensibly wide range of materials and shock compression amplitudes." - https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jap/article-abstract/107/1/013506/2...
"The third‐order nonlinear optical susceptibility χ(3) of this glass was found to be proportional to the fourth power of the radius of the colloid particles or the fourth power of the absorption coefficient at the peak of a plasmon band when the total volume of the colloid particles was constant."
Well, the most fuel efficient cars will often be hybrids, whose extra components (battery, 1-2 motors) will offset any savings that you'd see in a pure ICE powered vehicle.
The point was addressed at the end of the article: The charge would be for all vehicles, with EVs and low-emission vehicles having the lowest rates. So the headline was clickbait.
(That would be the theory at least. How well such a proposal would survive the lobbying onslaught from pro-combustion groups is another question...)
Actually, it is important that a tax for road care stays a tax for road care so it would be better to replace it with a charge per km adjusted by weight of the vehicle (the primary contributor to differential road damage per km, atleast that we can reasonably and unobtrusively measuee)and adjusted to net out fuel taxes already paid for road maintenance. Could be collected once a year at registration renewal.
The annual fee becomes hard for those living paycheck to paycheck, they would get a large bill. Maybe something akin to payroll, where you pay in regularly and then rebalance to zero once a year
that argument doesnt really hold any water in amy context it is used. If you are capable of paying as a gas tax eaxh trip to the pump, but not as a yearly lump sum you probably shouldnt have a car, let alone an electric car.
There are a lot of people that are really bad with money. Also when you don't have a lot of money you pay what is in front of you. I think this the person above is correct, something like a prepayment with adjustment at the end is probably a better solution.
Facilitating people who are bad eith money feels like another way to let people be shitty, which should not be accomodated. There is an argument forprepayment if it in reases likelihood of collection but at least put a penalty additional fee on it to limit the fa ilitation of people beong shitty.
I am showing compassion. Allowing people to be shitty is not compassion, it is future problems for everyone. Compassion is letting them know this is not ok
ICE is taxed at the pump, and has these efficiencies built in.
EVs are charged at home, so it is hard to tax per refill. Certainly within EVs there ought to be differences based on weight and wear on the roads. However, they are bypassing paying for their shared good of common roadways. With the migration away from fossil fuels, we will have to find a new way to pay for road repairs
> 65% of the public believe it is fair for electric car drivers to be taxed, but at a lower rate than petrol and diesel drivers
Electric cars still use roads, which still need to be maintained. There's no "extrapolation of logic" required, because the tax on the most fuel efficient cars already dwarfs that which would be paid by electric cars.
Electric cars also weigh more and brake more than cars of equal weight. Petrol is already taxed ostensibly to pay for roads. So if anything, EVs just need to be taxed and everything else can be left alone.
This already happens for cars in the UK with 13 different road tax rates based on g/km co2 emissions. https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-tax-rate-tables . My last petrol car paid £0 road tax.
They are already taxed by efficiency+use in a very obvious and direct way: through fuel taxes. Electric cars on the other hand are not subject to fuel taxes.
In Safari I pop open Reader, it gives me the full article with no noise. This is the solution for 50% of the complaints I see these days on HN (font too small, too light, ads, popups, paywalls, what's up with web design).
Unfortunately my "serious business" of $2B revenue dropped Zoom and Slack like a hot rock when they signed an enterprise Microsoft deal, because Teams is free, and usability, productivity and job satisfaction be damned, and your jobs are moving overseas anyway and nobody dares complain there.
I find it more entitled to expect that "property" is a concept that transcends society's needs. Personally I require that my private collection of Picassos is burned upon my death.
Yes, so bad. Those buttons do a poor job of allowing action and showing state at the same time - they only use one property (icon no color or slash etc.)
Also click-and-hold with or without haptics is not obvious. I was stabbing at the Tesla screen to activate defrost in a snow storm. I had to call the owner to figure out why it would not activate. I really like the 3 but you cant just hop in and go without some prep.
