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There is evidence that the ranking of students in order of who should get the best entry-level jobs is done mainly by the college admissions process which bins students into more or less selective colleges.


An old, unopened bottle of wine is like Schrödinger's cat - it may be alive; it may be dead.


1870 sees the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany, the unification of Italy, and the reorganization of continental politics. The US is in dynamic industrial and Western expansion following the Civil War. Britain is in the Long Depression of 1873 - 1896, until the flow of South African gold stops deflation and starts the economic boom. However, Britain is not competitive with the US and Germany and depends more and more on its Imperial system of trade.

Now consider that 1989-1991, with the reorganization of China following Tiananmen and the collapse of the Soviet Union are a similar epochal reorganization of global power structures.

It seems likely that we are now in our own Edwardian Era.


The Sud Aviation Caravelle first flew in 1955 and entered revenue service in 1959.

It was a small airliner with two engines in the rear. Although the Caravelle was retired in 2005, the twin rear engine layout was used by the very successful DC-9, MD-80 series, which is still flying, as are the similar Embraer ERJs. Twin rear mounted engines is also the design used by most private jets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sud_Aviation_Caravelle


A favorite book on the period is "Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914" by Frederic Morton. Freud's city was one of the centers of Europe's neuroses. It was also a center of political ferment under the lid weighted down by the Hapsburg monarchy.

Notably, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, and Tito were all there at the same time.


Freud was also a coke head. Even though he ended up supposedly quitting, he was a fervent supporter and advocate for its use for a very long time, and we know what and how cocaine alters people’s minds and personalities and character permanently even beyond that of any addict.


A relative worked at home doing medical transcription. It was not unheard of for physicians to make up non-existent body parts, non-existent drugs, etc. Part of her job was to correct their terminology.

She has since been replaced by cheaper off-shore transcribers and by speech to text applications. It's not clear how terminology is corrected now.


Why wouldn't any reasonably good AI be able to replicate large portions of the US Army TM 31-210 "Improvised Munitions Handbook"?


MPEG's patent policy was not its own. The Moving Picture Experts Group was Working Group 11 of Sub Committee 2 of ISO-IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. Other Working Groups in SC2 were the Joint Photographic Experts Group, the Joint Bi-Level Image Group, and the Multimedia/Hypermedia Experts Group. Therefore, the patent policy was the ISO-IEC policy for including patented technology in their standards.

MPEG was also joint with the video conferencing standards group within the CCITT (now International Telecommunications Union), which generally required FRAND declarations from patent holders.

My recollection is that MPEG-LA was set up as a clearing house so that implementers could go to one licensing organization, rather than negotiating with each patent owner individually.

All the patents for MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 must be expired by now.

Besides patent gridlock, there is a fundamental economic problem with developing new video coding algorithms. It's very difficult to develop an algorithm that will halve the bit rate for the same quality, to get it implemented in hardware products an software, and to introduce it broadly in the existing video services infrastructure. Plus, doubling the compression is likely to more than double the processing required. On the other hand, within a couple of years the network engineers will double the bit rate for the same cost, and the storage engineers will double the storage for the same cost. They, like processing, follow their own Moore's Law.

So reducing the cost by improving codecs is more expensive and takes more effort and time than just waiting for the processor, storage and networking cost reductions. At least that's been true over the 3 decades since MPEG 2.


Due to chromosome crossover, you do not inherit genes individually from ancestors, but instead you inherit segments of chromosomes containing many genes.

However, the randomness is great enough that first cousins do share approximately 1/8 of their genes, second cousins 1/32, third cousins 1/128 and so on. The rapid decrease of shared genes among relatives in successive generations also means that if mating in a population is really random, the population rapidly becomes homogeneous.

It is only assortative mating which generates and maintains distinctive subpopulations.


Migration and reassortment events in the US would include depopulation of Appalachian coal fields, the migration of farm kids from rural counties as farm size increased, and core city to suburban movement in rust belt cities as manufacturing decreased.

Most of my high school mates from a rural county who went to college never returned to a rural area. Those who stayed behind were disproportionately from the lower half of the class.


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