Viewing profile — aomurphy

Zompist is a bit unusual these days: one guy working on one project (his Constructed World Almea) for over 40 years now, with 30 of those on the web. It's a beautiful relic of the …

Pretty likely! You can often see ones that follow the same format in the same hand, but with different names subbed in. Presumably some people went to a specialist who then followe…

There's a very active historical debate about whether a schedule like this, often called "biphasic sleep", was more common in pre-industrial societies. There's a historian called R…

Various environmentalists have tried this in the US. Here's a reason article about several attempts: https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-jus... Kind of frustra…

I don't quite agree with the author about modernity. I argue that the modern Ultra-Orthodox are modern, specifically in the way they justify their beliefs. Most of what I'm going t…

This has been predicted in higher ed for the past ~2 decades. It's relatively easy to look at the number of students in the pipeline, and you can see there were two big peaks in th…

I'm not Swedish, but I find this area relatively interesting. The idea is fairly straightforward: Sweden's model created low income inequality between the poor and the rich, but di…

It's worth one day finding a printing press class and setting some type by hand. For one thing, what you'll produce is beautiful, and it really gives a sense of how much art, work,…

Empirically, this does not seem to be the case. Labov at UPenn has been studying American dialect formation for the past ~50 years, and has found several ongoing changes. In some w…

This has an interesting perspective on why the number of CS grads in the US seems so cyclical. The author argues they aren't, and the 1980s crash was a capacity crisis, totally dif…

Could you link to some of them?

Yes, absolutely. I think LeGuin is the last "great" Utopian writer we've had. The Dispossessed is a beautiful work, and one that doesn't have a dark heart. It has bad parts, it mig…

Also, the work on Easter Island is widely disputed. Easter Islanders probably did not purposely cut down all of their big trees, but the trees were devastated by the release of rat…

One of the best books on the subject is Prof. Mark Noll's "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis". The first part is a discussion of how different American groups understood Slaver…

Lovecraft's racism was significantly more extreme than for his time. He constantly called New York "Jew York", even while married to a Jew. He was a complicated fellow, but explici…

These figures are similar from 2009: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fpt.2009.5 from Population Trends March 2009, Volume 135, Issue 1, pp 20–28 by Amy Ellis Office for …

No, the point of the stay is that he cannot. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/trumps-immigratio... See: 8 U.S. Code § 1152 - Numerical limitations on individual foreign s…

I think that being a student here is hardly catering to their whims. She was let in by the University, works there, and studies there. It seems fair to let her continue to do that.…

A majority of Americans want to allow refugees from Muslim countries, including Syria: http://www.voanews.com/a/poll-americans-divided-along-party-... Democrats (who voted 89% for …

I think, usually, hard work is necessary, but not sufficient. You won't succeed without it, but if you're not lucky, you won't succeed either.

And many were raped. Repeatedly. In a culture where this was thought of as normal. How can a relationship be consensual and loving when one partner literally has the right to order…

If you look at the linked study they're careful to point out that they're only looking at what happens when you're already stopped by police. Blacks in America are much more likely…

The situation for salarymen of the same year in big corps. at Japan is kind of similar. Wages are only from tenure, so two people who have been at the a corp. for 10 years have the…

It's path dependent. Many things happened in the SF Bay area that led to this. Here are factors in a rough order of importance. 1) Most people's savings are in housing. I do not kn…