> I specifically mean that young people today - that are deliberately trying to be world-changing entrepreneurs, and claim deep inspiration from Jobs - don't typically wander India, take typography design courses, or go to Reed College. They aim for prestigious universities
Reed is a major brand name as far as higher education goes. People have heard of it.
It's currently ranked 63 on the USNews ranking of "national liberal arts colleges", but it has much better name recognition than most of the schools ranked above it.
Whatever weather people are used to will be handled seamlessly. If it's unusual, it will cause failures. Doesn't really matter what kind of weather it is.
This is basically the Netflix Chaos Monkey theory of systems, applied to weather response.
(A friend of mine lives in Shanghai. She's shocked whenever I mention a power failure; in her mind, a functioning country wouldn't have them at all.)
The article has a section on "why are clouds white?", but it doesn't really address the reason I thought that question should be covered.
It just says that clouds act like a collection of randomly-oriented prisms, such that whenever light of any wavelength comes into the cloud, it is dispersed from the cloud evenly in all directions.
This would explain why a cloud was white if even white light was coming into the cloud. But the rest of the article establishes that the light coming into the cloud is predominantly blue and purple. Why isn't that also true of the light leaving the cloud?
Well, no; what's coming into the cloud is sunlight, filtered through the atmosphere. It scatters that light and so it has that color. The same like a heap of powdered salt in the palm of your hand, held up to the sun.
Clouds illuminated by the setting sun aren't white.
> Well, no; what's coming into the cloud is sunlight, filtered through the atmosphere. It scatters that light and so it has that color.
The model the article describes is:
1. The sun puts out a bunch of light.
2. Light that is lower-energy than blue light fails to be effectively scattered by the atmosphere, and follows a path from the sun to you.
3. Light at the levels of blue and up is effectively scattered by the atmosphere, and comes to you from a random direction.
So if you look toward the sun, you receive light that has been depressed of its blue-and-up wavelengths, and the sun appears to be yellow. If you look away from the sun, you receive light that has been enriched in blue-and-up wavelengths, and the sky appears to be blue. Crucially, the sky looks blue because it is sending you more blue light than the background level.
A cloud that isn't between you and the sun is getting its light from the sky background, which is blue. Why is the cloud not blue? It can disperse all the light it receives evenly, but that light is enriched for blue-and-up wavelengths.
> s sending you more blue light than the background level.
The background level is black! No air, no scattering.
d
> A cloud that isn't between you and the sun is getting its light from the sky background, which is blue. Why is the cloud not blue?
The cloud is bathed in intense, direct sunlight which is slightly yellow, and it is exposed to a small amount of scattered blue light. It could be that this mixture whitens the color, essentially reconstituting the light.
Why does white paint look pure white? Or snow on the ground? Same reason. It's reflecting the sky blue in a small amount, plus the yellowish sunlight.
If you are in a dark enclosure like a cave or barn, and sunlight is streaming in through a small aperture, if you hold some white object up to that light, it doesn't look the same as if you do that outside because it's not illuminated by the blue sky, only by direct sunlight.
Moreover, the shadowed parts white object sitting outdors, exposed to sunlight. tend to be tinged with blue.
1. Imagine a conceptual sunbeam originating from the sun and passing through the sky high over your head.
2. This sunbeams low-frequency components ("reds") continue on in their straight path, making them invisible to you.
3. The high-frequency components ("blues") are scattered by the atmosphere, going in random directions. When you look at the sunbeam, you can see these scattered blues, making the sky blue.
4. A cloud floating up in the atmosphere is illuminated by some direct sunbeams, which are "red".
5. It's also illuminated by the scatter from the atmosphere, which is "blue".
6. Do those two sources balance out exactly such that the light exiting the cloud has the same profile as light exiting the sun?
If you look at the solar radiation spectrum chart in the section "Why isn’t the sky violet?", you can see that sunlight is not evenly distributed along the visible spectrum--it emit more blue than red, and at sea level it's closer to evenly distributed. So the light that reaches the clouds is still mostly white light.
I think it may also relate to chromatic adaptation. To be white it doesn't need to be any exact absolute color just the color our brain sets our white point to.
Not answering this question but I found an interesting short paper about how at sunset and sunrise the color gamut of shadows doesn't fully overlap with the direct illumination color gamut due to the differences in the paths the light takes:
Hubel. 2000. The Perception of Color at Dawn and Dusk.
> I just don't think there was a great way to make solved problems accessible before LLMs. I mean, these things were on github already, and still got reimplemented over and over again.
What kranner said. There was never an accessibility problem for emulators. The reason there are a lot of emulators on github is that a lot of people wanted to write an emulator, not that a lot of people wanted to run an emulator and just couldn't find it.
> and the lesson plans seem designed to plateau to prevent you from actually getting proficient enough in a language to ever unsub
They don't need to design for that. If you want to become proficient in the language, you'll have to use the language for something. Whatever lessons Duolingo provides, they won't get you to become proficient in a language.
I agree with the article (well, the sauropod tracks in the article) that the natural resting position of your arm as you extend it forward has your palms mostly downward and a little inward. Fully downward is much, much more natural than fully inward.
At one point it says “fully pronated like we can, or bunnies can”, which sounds like a reference to actual rabbits, but some quick Googling suggests that rabbits don’t pronate? (I know nothing about the subject myself.)
I don't really understand what "pronating" is supposed to mean if you're not referring to human hands. This isn't a problem for the phrase "bunny hands", which refers to human hands.
But for, say, human feet, "pronation" would appear to refer to a position in which the soles of the feet face toward the ground, just as in hands it refers to a position in which the palms face toward the ground, or in humans overall it refers to a position in which the face and belly face toward the ground. That is the meaning of "prone" ("lying on your front"; it is the opposite of supine, "lying on your back"), and "pronation" just means "making something be prone".
But obviously all feet are always pronated in this sense. The article seems to have a model of the word which is more like "pronation [in the hands] involves a certain configuration of the bones in the arm, and I'm going to call that configuration pronation too". But then they also refer to rotating the forearm, which confuses bone configuration with yet another issue, the changeability of the configuration.†
So I'm left mystified as to how this single-or-possibly-manifold concept is supposed to apply to feet, human or otherwise. The article suggests that pronat_ed_ feet have the toes facing forward, parallel to the direction of the gaze, and also that pronat_ing_ feet requires the ability to rotate the lower part of the leg.
In humans, these claims cannot both be true. Toes are angled forward, but the lower leg doesn't rotate. Something else has happened.
So it's hard to say what I should conclude about the mammoth legs that the article also complains about.
† The article complains about a dinosaur skeleton in which the hands aren't pronated - they face inwards, in a pose we might call "karate chop hands". But it says that this pose requires "pronation" in what is presumably the arm-bones sense. In "bunny hands", the hands are pronated according to the normal definition of the word, facing the ground.
Looks like you need to be careful with the definition of pronation and supination for feet. There's a lot of results for running where they use the term dynamically, and it looks to be different from the original technical meaning.
For feet, the word pronating seems to also mean (perhaps colloquially) rolling the foot inwards at the ankle. Not clear at all: although some of the images show twisting the shin or not (toe in vs duck feet).
> in some ancient version of english with characters that I've never seen
There are really only 3, or if you want to stretch it 5, English characters that you might not be familiar with as characters: þ, ƿ, ð, æ, and ȝ. And the last of those isn't even present in Old English; it's a Middle English thing.
If you were reading something in Old English, the use of ƿ wouldn't really be an issue - the issue would be that nothing made any sense. Recognizing the characters used, or not, is irrelevant.
Reed is a major brand name as far as higher education goes. People have heard of it.
It's currently ranked 63 on the USNews ranking of "national liberal arts colleges", but it has much better name recognition than most of the schools ranked above it.
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