(I mean, maybe you’re right in some places, but it’s certainly not everywhere. Ironically, I happened to be standing next to a completely empty crossing, gates down, bonging away, while reading your comment.)
The nearest crossings where I live indeed stop the chimes when the barriers have been lowered. This doesn't actually make much of a difference really, because the train arrives only a few seconds after, and, because it's a local line, there are never more than three cars in the train so it passes very quickly.
Not that I'm bothered by the chimes at all. And grandson loves them.
I often wonder about stories of relatively short-lived geniuses such as Ramanujan. Is there a timeline where he recovered and continued making discoveries for decades? Is there some correlation between extreme genius in one area and suboptimal physical health? What if he had existed in modern times instead?
Modern world, not just India, is way worse at talent discovery. It's impossible to even publish a physics paper and get a DOI. There were some new research ideas coming in chinese and hindi during early bitcoin days, all of which were lost to a vocal english population, and some the ideas are only resurfacing now again after 15 years of noise. I know of Shannon-Satoshi level bitcoiner theorist who died in poverty as a janitor in Canada. I know of many ideas that were never discussed, so am sure many such people exit in other fields. Only cause Ramanujan's equations are from a different time and so weird have they survived plagiarism otherwise IP is completely insecure now & intelligent non-smart people are in poor health.
I mean we have one extreme genius who showed promise early and remained exceptionally productive in mathematics for a long career: Leonhard Euler.
"Euler's work averages 800 pages a year from 1725 to 1783. He also wrote over 4500 letters and hundreds of manuscripts. It has been estimated that Leonhard Euler was the author of a quarter of the combined output in mathematics, physics, mechanics, astronomy, and navigation in the 18th century, while other researchers credit Euler for a third of the output in mathematics in that century"
But of course everyone is interested in the "what if" question of what might have happened had a particular person not died young:
- What if Galois hadn't died in a duel?
- What if Niels Henrik Abel hadn't died of tuberculosis?[1]
- What if Emmy Noether hadn't died of cancer so soon after she started teaching at Bryn Mawr and Princeton?
[1] This one is one of the saddest stories in maths to my view. Abel died in his 20s basically because of extreme poverty and 2 days after he died a letter arrived from one of his friends who had got him a teaching position that would have made him financially secure. Hermite said of Abel "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years."
> long tradition of naming theorems after the second person after Euler to discover them.
Some of my favourite examples of this are:
- The "Lambert W" function, discovered by Euler to solve a problem Lambert couldn't solve
- "Feynman's trick" of differentiating under the integral[1]. Invented by Euler. Done by Feynman because he says in his autobiography he learned it from "Advanced Calculus" by Cook. So now it's called "Feynman's trick". Like dude it had been around for 250 years before Feynman did it.
- "Lagrange's notation" for derivatives. Yup. Euler.
- The "Riemann Zeta function". Of course discovered and first studied by Euler. Riemann extended it to complex numbers though.
Another example is William Kingdon Clifford, who also died too young, while having excellent chances of advancing mathematics.
James Clerk Maxwell died simultaneously with Clifford. Maxwell was not so young, but his death was also very premature.
Had not both Clifford and Maxwell died too soon, there would have been very good chances for the mathematical bases of the theory of physical quantities to be improved many decades earlier, possibly skipping over the incomplete vector theories of Gibbs and Heaviside, which while very useful in the short term for engineering, in the long term were an impediment in the development of physics.
He lived in India. In the early 1900s. The average lifespan in India in 1920 when he died was 21 to 25 years old. He was 32 when he died, so better than the average. The math checks out.
Very low historical life expectancies are driven by childhood illness and maternal mortality. If you made it to 15 your life expectancy might be somewhere in your late 50s.
There isn’t data for life expectancy at 15 before 1950 for India here (when it was 60) but you can see the it for Sweden back to 1751.
Well, these numbers are averages between people living until old age (65+ years) and high infant mortality. I don't think most people keeled over when they reach 25 years...
This is a good example why "mean" and "median" have very different meanings. You can't use an average of life expectancy in an era where a huge percentage of people died before age 5. It's not a useful statistic to the make the point you suggest, and in fact is misleading.
The average life expectancy in the 1920s, even in India, was most definitely not 21-25 years. Various sources show the expectancy age as 51-57. This is because there wasn't enough data for this.
Interesting, this is my first time consciously thinking about this trend.
Perhaps the needs for read/write speed are bounded (before processor, etc. becomes the limiting factor), while more capacity is only limited by price. Or maybe increasing density of storage inherently means a tradeoff with I/O speed (AFAIK, NAND flash needs to rewrite lots of data just to make a single write? Atom-scale interactions have side effects)
An unnecessarily long comment that rambles on about a simple core point, that could be summed up in one sentence but has excessive detail added to ensure that everyone gets it.
(Are sentences like this akin to literary quines? The sentence describes its own purpose/function, while also fulfilling that function. It feels like constructing one should be easy, but ends up being harder than it looks.)
As someone who makes things it always confuses me when millions just disappear whenever a company or government contractor makes things. Give me $17M and I'll build a vacuum robot prototype in under 2 years, I can't imagine 10 engineers getting paid $100+k/year can't do it in less time? Tooling is expensive, but not THAT expensive...
I would agree. CNC-ing POM also tends to work extremely well for prototype plastic parts.
Also, I already built a robot arm, a robot car, and a custom camera in my free time. So I’m having a hard time imagining that a robot vacuum prototype wouldn’t be possible for me to build in a year, let alone with the team size that $1m in annual salaries buys.
Get it approved in a lot of large markets? Deal with ongoing supply issues as suppliers change and you need to maintain your product? Market it? I could keep going on, but making a prototype is the easy part, making a sustaining business out of it is the hard part.
> Switzerland relies on neighboring countries to police its airspace outside of regular business hours; the French and Italian Air Forces have permission to escort suspicious flights into Swiss airspace, but do not have authority to shoot down an aircraft over Switzerland.
They were friendly enough with their neighbors to let their own Air Force have the nights and weekends off.
Passport control when I went from France to Switzerland was someone coming onto the train and yelling “anyone not allowed in Switzerland? No? Good!”
Just another example of Japanese attention to detail and human oriented design.
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