Viewing profile — dkirkman

Tahoe has a surprising number of jurisdictions! I'm on the Nevada side, so I don't have personal experience with the SLT enforcement. Here there seems to be a fair amount of teeth …

I think in general, it's very difficult if not impossible to realistically explore the counterfactual of "what would this property be if not for Airbnb". However, in my neighborhoo…

The whole issue of whether or not nanotech would end up just looking like enzymes was a big part of the famous Drexler/Smalley debate ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drexler%E2%80%9…

> Your are not required to use exceptions or templates if you don't want to. This is absolutely true -- at least if you're working alone. But I've always found the whole "let's use…

Yes, there are pills that will both increase insulin sensitivity (metformin), and to stimulate insulin secretion (the sulfonylureas). These are basically the first line of treatmen…

This isn't entirely snarky. The ACCORD trial was a spectacular failure ( http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0802743 ). Nobody really knows why (as far as I know), but since…

The precision of the timing and dosing depends a lot on what kind of diabetic you are. A type 1 with no endogenous production is going to need precision, and I can't imagine somebo…

Living with a type 1 for a number of years has given me a similar view. On the other hand, very real (and often hyped) advances really do happen. When pumps first came out, they we…

To be fair, the c++ programmer can also use reference semantics via pointers. Granted, garbage collection is not built into the language, but if desired, we can always write java-s…

> If I had to guess, I'd say it's based on the fact that math involves a lot of critical thinking and critical thinking is very difficult to teach. I think it's even worse than tha…

The problem is that in terms of getting jobs, promotions, and tenure, producing code has no value. Except for the people that actually write it, "programming" is generally consider…

> Thanks for posting. I would have thought narrow lines would produce the problem that those specific lines would become unavailable for study, or would be freely mixed with the "r…

On Mauna Kea (big island of Hawaii) the biggest sources of light pollution are the airports and harbors. For the telescopes near big cities, I'm not sure if anybody has worked out …

Street lights that emit narrow spectral lines are not a problem at all for spectroscopy, except of course at the line wavelengths. I have a bit of experience here -- a few more tha…

There are a few good reasons that one might prefer common lisp to scheme. It has been stable for a good long time. Which is nice if you've got a giant repository of old code that y…