Viewing profile — bzbarsky

Total power radiated by a black body per unit surface area scales as T^4 (in Kelvin). So for black bodies with identical shape and linear dimensions R1 and R2, with identical power…

Heat and temperature are indeed not the same. For both the sun and a human on earth there are two processes going on: 1. Heat production per unit volume. 2. Heat loss per unit surf…

There was such a standardized test when I was in high school, for what it's worth. And some states still have them, and some require a passing grade on them to graduate from high s…

In some countries, you arrest people first, then find/manufacture evidence later.

Of course it comes out of your compensation in the end. It just doesn't come out of the "headline" compensation number you see. Which is fine if you're comparing equivalent "headli…

Note that France has one of the highest levels of government spending as a share of GDP (and hence represented by taxes, though this includes sales taxes/VATs/etc/etc) in Europe, a…

My apologies; I forgot that the nytimes is all paywalled now... I should make a habit of loading things in a private browsing tab as a test. You should be able to see the whole Tim…

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html is one such source. Note that the shift has been quite recent (more or less since 2017) and not uniform; the ACLU does s…

Popper was specifically referring to levels of intolerance that cause people to move from the world of discussion to the world of physical force. That is, per Popper, tolerating pe…

> China had a literal one child policy The operative word being "had". It hasn't had one in a while. > Population grows exponentially It really depends. It does if you assume TFR i…

Current TFR in China is around 1.7 according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033738/fertility-rate-c... it _has_ been climbing very slowly recently, but I'm not sure I woul…

For your first command: gzip -c /dev/sda > img.gz For your second command: gunzip -c img.gz > /dev/sda are what I suspect the blog post would recommend.

Just to make the numbers clear, Leningrad had something like 2.5 million residents in 1941. Depending on who is counting, somewhere between 600 thousand and a million died during t…

The issue is that there is an implied difference in implied causation ("difficult because of their personal qualities" vs "difficult because of the college environment", say) and t…

Written as response to a request for such comments, and distributed in the forum designated for such comments, yes?

There are privately owned spaces (shopping malls, some towns) that have been treated as public spaces for free speech purposes in US court cases, as I understand it. Basically, if …

> Candidly, no one would pay for a prep course for a 30 point gain. My understanding of the research in this area is that the 30 point gain is if you compare people who take a prep…

The "expensive preparatory courses" offer something like a 10-30 point benefit over checking out an SAT prep book from the library, if you control for the time spent on preparation…

Yes, but is that correlation after controlling for IQ and work ethic? Because family income correlates with IQ and work ethic... As far as I can tell, the thing the SAT really corr…

> Orwell was quite a devout communist I don't think that's true in his post-Spain days, depending I guess on how you define "devout communist". I would say he was a devout socialis…

If I can trust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-30_Minuteman a Minuteman III (which is the current ICBM design used by the US) will land within 800ft (240m) of its intended target…

> That's a bit of a strawman. I think that depends on your social circle. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-57853385 has some examples of people for whom this was clearly not a s…

> it is there to protect Whites Is it? The estimate at https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p... disagrees, but if you have other data I would be interested. …