It's surreal to read written arguments defending an "extraordinary rendition" using the military in terms of domestic criminal cases. And to so plainly state that international law ought not apply to the leader of the free world, effectively because we think we can and our interests come first, is distressing. If this is an "arrest" of a "fugitive", to keep with the DOJ analogy, it should be subject to the laws of its jurisdiction. Not the laws of whomever has air superiority.
> ... international law does not prevent [us] ... from ... arrest[ing] individuals [residing in a foreign state] for violations of United States law.
God, that's chilling.
> Congress has declined to amend relevant statutes to deny the Executive the ability to engage in rendition.
> Congress's continued appropriation of funds to the agencies known to engage in the practice should be taken as (at minimum) acquiescence.
So, because our Congress can't pass a bill handed from God himself unless it fills their coffers, we're silently consenting to this baloney?
And I get that legal precedence is a thing, but we shouldn't be looking at military operations in Haiti, or Libya, or Iraq as justification for more international shit-stirring. It's a slippery slope.
Albeit semantics, rebranding to the War Department is not good optics if one intends receive said department's advice before carrying out "a use of force that ... does not rise to the level of war in a constitutional sense". This nonsense is maddening.
I guess I had never considered at face value what that kind of arrangement means until reading this DOJ document.
It makes total sense to me that committing terrible crimes should be punishable. When a criminal per domestic law resides in a different country (and the issue crosses national borders), it seems to me (not a lawyer) that the determination of appropriate force must be decided by an international group.
Otherwise, what's chilling to me is... what stops a country from unilaterally abducting anyone they want? The country doing the abducting determines the laws that have been violated, after all. In this document, we've explicitly determined that international law has no bearing on domestic consequences. So do whatever you want, so to speak. Freaky stuff.
> what stops a country from unilaterally abducting anyone they want
I think in a normal functioning world at least, the text of the treaty itself (and how both sides interpret it I suppose) would be the arbiter of how that should play out.
You mean like renditioning the head of one nation nation because of drugs after having pardoned another former head of a nation who was convicted of importing drugs?
> its carcinogenic effects are now well known (no more using it to decaffeinate coffee, degrease engines, or in shaving cream, thankfully!)
I had no idea benzene was used to decaffeinate coffee [1]. Solvent separation makes sense, but I'd never really thought about it. Definitely not a residue I'd want to drink.
From an amateur chemistry perspective, benzene is so fascinating. Benzene rings are one of the first, maybe the very first, structures students learn that don't have fixed, discrete bond counts. That they can be interpreted as a cloud of 1.5-electron bonds between each of the 6 carbons, or alternating double- and single-bonds, makes for some interesting hand analysis of molecules.
This was done before roasting. Benzene is volatile even at room temperature and the roasting process almost certainly removed it all. I think the concern was more about industry workers or the environment than the consumer. And maybe about the optics of using a particularly nasty chemical to prepare your food or drink.
> So you must always factor in the amount of time before a predicted crash: the longer it takes the more money you lose.
I think the idea is, as a put buyer (market taker), this has already been baked into the option premium. The only "maintenance cost" in the sense of a cost that adds to an open position is from interest on margin loans.
There would be a maintenance cost from rolling the position into a later expiry, but I think the impression is that this is a precise single bet.
EDIT: You're spot on about opening a position being a sort of cost too, due to missing out on risk-free returns. This is especially important for hedging. Less so for a directional bet.
If you want to minimize loss of time value, you buy 2 year LEAPs, and then as their 1-year approaches, you sell the LEAPs and roll them back into 2-year LEAPs. Theta rapidly changes as you grow closer to expiration.
No one should be buying and holding just one option. Anyone who understands Black Scholes will be selling/buying and exchanging options as time goes on.
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Buying puts is a bull-bet on Volatility and bear-trade on the underlying stock, while losing Theta (largely based on expectation date. Longer means less Theta decay).
Selling calls is a bear bet on volatility, bear bet on underlying while gaining Theta in value each day.
And then there are the many combination trades that are available.
In any case, I don't think any sophisticated trader does the strategy you are assuming here. The sophisticated strategies involve selling and renewing your options as time moves forward / and or the stock price changes (to keep Delta withing appropriate levels).
>> ...we can see that, in less than two decades, Earth has tilted 31.5 inches as a result of pumping groundwater. This equates to .24 inches of sea level rise.
For those confused how they managed that geometric analysis, the sea level rise mentioned in the paper [1] is caused by groundwater depletion. The tilt is caused by groundwater depletion. The sea level rise is not caused by the tilt.
One important factor shown there is that dams hold back water on land, so act to decrease sea levels. It is not as big an effect as groundwater depletion, but is significant (around half as much).
The net effect of these two is much less than the other factors causing sea level rise (melting land ice) - looks like around 10% of total sea level rise comes from groundwater depletion+dams combined.
here's the problem with dams filling up and offseting ocean rise, amost all of the potential large dams, have been built and are full now, and that offset has masked some ocean rise, which is now accelerating, but all of the "planning" ,climate mitigation policy, treatys, etcerlalala, has been working with the wrong numbers.
the wild card is changes in salinity and temperature shutting down the main thermo transfer currents at each pole, setting off deap ocean warming and expansion.
not good.
Not to mention that inches are not a measure of angle, they’re a measure of length. I would prefer a proper measure of angle such as arcseconds. With some dirty math (taking 31.5 inches as an arc segment of earth’s polar circumference) yields a tilt of roughly 4 milliarcseconds, an extremely small angle to say the least.
An arcsecond is 1/60 of an arcminute; an arcminute is 1/60 of a degree (°); a degree is 1/360 of a full turn. A "milliarcsecond" is probably an unfamiliar unit (an angle so slight will only be used in extremely specialized contexts), so if you like you could decimalize this to an angle of 0.000001°.
The measure of distance on earth is probably more easily comprehended by almost everyone though.
> The measure of distance on earth is probably more easily comprehended by almost everyone though.
The measurement itself is useless without knowing the size of the Earth, which very few people know offhand. That said, 30 inches sounds like something tangible, and that's the important information here. That human activity had a measurable, tangible effect on the Earth.
On a very large and massive object unexpected changes of such magnitude may be a 'small angle' but they still require so much energy that an explanation is warranted.
I, and I suspect many others, have no clue what an arcsecond is and thus it's significance in anything. Inches also doesn't really give accurate significance, but at least it's relatable and doesn't leave me 100% lost, and I can focus on the message that something significant has been discovered, which may require some action.
I think it's pretty apparent that ~1 yard, i.e. about one step at a typical walking stride, is tiny relative to the circumference of the earth. I agree that it's a more understandable measure for most people than "arcseconds"
A degree is too big for the effect, the division of the degree into 60 arcminutes and the arcminute into 60 arcseconds is the standard subdivision of degrees as an angle measurement going back to the Sumerians.
Still doesn't say much to many. Temperature will be what comes to mind first for the lay person when they hear "degree", blank stare for "radian". But pretty much everyone in the US knows what an "inch" is, and the rest of the world can do a quick lookup/conversion. And everyone knows immediately on seeing the headline that something moved from its usual spot to somewhere else.
"Calculate the fraction of the circumference represented by the arc segment:Divide the arc segment length by the Earth's polar circumference (in inches):31.5 inches / 1,574,896,558.4 inches = 0.0000000200012759 Radians.
Which is kinda interesting, as it calculates the earths' circumference in Inches. 1.57 Billion inches.
So just to clarify, what you’re saying is that the volume of water we’ve pumped is directly responsible for the observed sea level rise? The article makes it sound as if the tilt is what was responsible, and I was curious about the mechanics of that.
The outage page has been updated to include context:
>> MathWorks experienced a ransomware attack. We have notified federal law enforcement of this matter. The attack affected our IT systems. Some of our online applications used by customers became unavailable, and certain internal systems used by staff became unavailable, beginning on Sunday, May 18. We have brought many of these systems back online and are continuing to bring other systems back online with the assistance of cybersecurity experts.
Tinnitus is sometimes neurological, seemingly caused by the brain compensating for a loss of sensation. I can imagine a horror story in which this just makes it a thousand times worse, on top of permanently losing all hearing.
Now, being able to use a hot-swappable audio sensor instead of an ear made of tissue would be pretty dope.
I hear that theory but I don't believe it - I have tinnitus. Nothing else in the nervous system behaves that way - lack of light doesn't suddenly make you see blinding light etc. It's much more likely the sound sensor in the ear is jammed in the on position.
There are various explanations about the genesis of the sound for T sufferers, and it obviously depends on the kind of T that one has (this chart [1] helps navigate the variants).
But if you are one of the "common kind", which is typically an insult to your hearing apparatus that damaged your cochlea, then the work from Susan Shore [2] is a reasonable explanation of what could actually be going on (genesis by the fusiform cells of the dorsal cochlear nucleus). You may be interested in checking out her publications listed in the wikipedia article quoted.
Amputees have phantom limb sensations including pain. I believe this is more than theory. Certainly medical science has collected at least some case studies over the past century about people who have had their auditory nerve severed for one reason or another. And, as I recall, the auditory system actually does behave unlike other parts of the nervous system like vision which is more mechanical and less dependent on the brain for basic functionality.
Well, perhaps some but I don't think it's the usual cause. Phantom limb isn't just loss of sensation, it's also having part of the body chopped off. Just having part of your body go numb doesn't usually cause that.
It does and it is called neuropathic pain. Phantom limb is just an extreme case of it, but malfunction or damage to nerves can cause all kinds of phantom “pain”. Experiencing phantom sensations due to nerve damage is well known and widely documented, so phantom sound in the ear due to nerve damage is well in line with that.
As a user, I'm under the impression YouTube uses click follow-through for algorithm feedback. For the past two years, I've consistently gotten more random content with ~100 views suggested to me in the side bar. I often click and check it out. Maybe prime the pump by diving for some random vids?
>> Unsurprisingly, the combined solver performed the best, solving the puzzle in an average of 4.77 moves. The quantum solver was next, with an average of 5.32 moves, while the classical solver came in last place with 5.88 moves on average.
This effect is pretty neat. From the paper [1], the quantum solver can only do what they call "square root SWAPs", which is like a tile swap that relies on certain superposition rules. The classical solver can only use standard tile SWAPs. The combined solver can do both. A little over half the puzzle states are solved faster by the classical solver, but certain tricky states benefit from this new "move type". So the game had this quantum-like computation option tacked on, but certain initial positions just don't benefit from it.
I don't see any sort of "applications" section in the paper. They talk about how I guess you could build the puzzle thing with "arrays of ultracold atoms in
optical lattices", but that still doesn't answer the question. My takeaway is that even problems which benefit dramatically from quantum algorithms in some cases (in a future where that's cheap and widely available) should have careful algorithm design built on other heuristics.
They also allow the solvers a move that measures the superposition, and if the state collapses to the solved state then that's a finish (otherwise the puzzle resets to the initial scrambled state). So a viable quantum strategy is to just repeatedly get decent overlap with the solved state until you get lucky; you don't need to be perfect.
Something I initially did't understand is why their classical solver ever takes more than 4 moves to solve the puzzle. At most one move to ensure a green square is in the top row, and then at most two moves to move the other green square into the other top row slot, and then a move to certify the solution. The issue is that the puzzle can start in superposed states, where the classical solver can only permute which states have which amplitudes and so always only has a chance of verification succeeding and relatively few variations on this. Whereas the quantum solver can use interference effects to make a big amplitude that it can then move to the solved state.
I was sort of hoping that they would show, for example, that superposed moves could transition from some classical unsolved states to the solved state in fewer steps deterministically. Some sort of known-source-known-destination variation on Grover's algorithm. But nothing like that unfortunately. An obvious obstacle to this is that the square-root-of-swaps don't commute with each other in a simple way, so almost all sequences of them don't correspond to a classical permutation; you basically have to undo what you did to get back to the classical manifold.
> ... international law does not prevent [us] ... from ... arrest[ing] individuals [residing in a foreign state] for violations of United States law.
God, that's chilling.
> Congress has declined to amend relevant statutes to deny the Executive the ability to engage in rendition.
> Congress's continued appropriation of funds to the agencies known to engage in the practice should be taken as (at minimum) acquiescence.
So, because our Congress can't pass a bill handed from God himself unless it fills their coffers, we're silently consenting to this baloney?
And I get that legal precedence is a thing, but we shouldn't be looking at military operations in Haiti, or Libya, or Iraq as justification for more international shit-stirring. It's a slippery slope.
Albeit semantics, rebranding to the War Department is not good optics if one intends receive said department's advice before carrying out "a use of force that ... does not rise to the level of war in a constitutional sense". This nonsense is maddening.