Here's my experience with (attempted) theft on a train:
I once was on a MARC train at DC Union Station. Some train cars have electrical sockets, so I plugged in a bike light I had since I'd be taking a bike for the last part of the trip. The train hadn't left the station yet. I was standing near the seat with the socket. Some unassuming looking guy was walking through the train car, like probably 100 did before him, when he grabbed the light, unplugged it, and kept walking. I immediately confronted him (I was in his path) saying something like "What are you doing?" Without a word, he handed me the light and walked off the train. I found a conductor like 15 seconds later and they called security, who apparently detained the guy.
This guy was way more brazen about stealing something of little value than I had expected. I was standing near the seat and watching it! I guess he didn't expect me to be the owner.
This reminded me of some earlier discussion on Hacker News about using LLMs trained on old texts to determine novelty and obviousness of a patent application: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43440273
The core simulator part works, but I don't yet have a user interface or documentation. Probably just going to be text input files to start, maybe a GUI later. Recently, I'm mostly working on testing.
The simulator is object-oriented and basically allows one to build up a blaster from separate control volumes and connections between control volumes. This is useful as it allows the same core simulator framework to handle different blaster configurations and even variants of them. For example, someone asked me to make the spring piston able to pull a vacuum on its back side due to not having sufficient flow. That's easy here as I just need to add another control volume and the appropriate connection onto the basic springer configuration.
I don't think crowdfunding is a good funding source for science in general. Crowdfunding's going to overemphasize already popular and easy to explain science at the expense of everything else. Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed.
I disagree. There's a guy that doesn't have much attention that's creating fuel from burning plastic. He got crowdfunded. I also recall finding a website way back when of a dude that explored the old railroad tunnels of downtown Chicago. I would have 100% funded that guy for content.
He gets $36K from about 800 donors for a project that seems pretty easy to explain ("creating fuel from burning plastic") and is something probably millions of people are interested in. Wikipedia says he has millions of followers!
The stuff I'd like to do would probably not have even 800 people interested in it after I carefully explained it. And $36K is not a lot when it comes to experimental research in the physical world.
In my view, working a day job and taking periodic sabbaticals would have better ROI for this guy and myself.
> "Boring sounding and unfamiliar stuff like the research I'd like to do would not succeed."
"Boring sounding" to anyone who don't have a "passion" for that particular area of science as you must if you're wanting to research it. The (hard) trick is to get your crowdfunding request in front of the specific eyeballs that will understand (and be excited by) your motivations and interests enough to want to finance advancing that research.
Unfortunately, Fortran's implementation of this has some inconsistencies. Doing certain operations will convert from the custom indexing back to 1-based indexing.
Worse than the pitfalls that can arise with a correct compiler is the fact that most Fortran compilers have bugs with non-default lower bounds -- and they're not always the same bugs, so portability is a real problem. The feature is fine as it stood with Fortran '77 dummy arrays.
In practice, unit checking is almost never done on actual code, though it should be done. From what I recall, some Fortran folks have been trying to get unit checking into the Fortran standard itself since the 1970s without success.
An approach based on static analysis would not have the downsides I listed, but I personally would prefer being unable to compile the code at all if it had an error that could be detected.
I once was on a MARC train at DC Union Station. Some train cars have electrical sockets, so I plugged in a bike light I had since I'd be taking a bike for the last part of the trip. The train hadn't left the station yet. I was standing near the seat with the socket. Some unassuming looking guy was walking through the train car, like probably 100 did before him, when he grabbed the light, unplugged it, and kept walking. I immediately confronted him (I was in his path) saying something like "What are you doing?" Without a word, he handed me the light and walked off the train. I found a conductor like 15 seconds later and they called security, who apparently detained the guy.
This guy was way more brazen about stealing something of little value than I had expected. I was standing near the seat and watching it! I guess he didn't expect me to be the owner.
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