It's because the notation is pronounced "order of", which is also the vocabulary used when you do Fermi estimation: you don't care about exact numbers, but you want to guess the order of magnitude / power of ten correctly. It's linguistic overloading if you want.
From TFA: "Mueller-Korenek sat on a bike with gearing so steep that she needed to be towed to around 100 mph before taking over under her own power." So no, she didn't just maintain 184 MPH.
The semantics of it are silly and pointless to discuss, since she's not accelerating those extra 84MPH using only her own power. There's a lot of aerodynamic influences happening here and this is more of an engineering feat than an athletic one.
The GP is factually wrong, this isn't "semantics". Your comment moves the goalpost to "well the aerodynamics help". This is true: The slipstream moves at the speed of the car ahead, so it's like she has no headwind slowing her down. She still needs to accelerate 84 MPH (on top of maintaining 100 MPH). Think of doing this on a gym bike where you don't have headwind either. This is very much an athletic feat.
It's also an engineering feat, but again TFA: "As they targeted the overall record, their team revamped the same dragster that was used to set the men's record" -- they're reusing last time's engineering.
This record is like having a record for bench pressing with the aid of hydraulic lifts. How much do the hydraulic lifts help? How much is the person contributing? The whole premise just seems really stupid, and it's even dumber if they were to make the headlines "Woman smashes world record bench press at 23 tons". Just throw someone in Elon's hyperloop vacuum tubes on a bicycle fixed to the rails, make them wear a pressurized diving suit, and let them go to town. I'm sure they'd break 184MPH and it would be an equally pointless dick measuring contest.
Yes, she also needed to accelerate from 100 to 184, which (I am guessing) is a significantly lesser feat than maintaining a balance on a salt lake surface and keeping herself in 3 meters of a slipstream area. This is all remarkable, but the point was that this setup is probably not what most people would imagine when told of "a woman riding bicycle at 183.9 MPH".
DDG is an ok skin on bing search results, but their pushy and misleading marketing is a huge turn-off to me. And I'm very very sympathetic to the "we don't track you" cause in general.
I got downvoted the last time I posted this (love you HNers) but DDG states they're more than just a skinned Bing: https://duck.co/help/results/sources
Regardless of CA, it's a lot everywhere else. Especially when they're bunking three in a room at that rate. The markup (for all of it) is the real atrocity here.
It's a triple occupancy dorm. You could definitely do that in Seattle/SF/NYC considering it's a single room with no kitchen or bathroom shared by 3 people (other than the fact that I think it would be illegal to rent out).
What I mean is, if the US had decided to do something that seemed sensible, even if it was outside the usual bounds of behavior, I think most people would have looked the other way. Indeed, we did do something stupid, but we did even that with a coalition of other countries.
More importantly, I like to think other countries would have signed on to something constructive quickly as well. Wasted opportunity.
> More importantly, I like to think other countries would have signed on to something constructive quickly as well. Wasted opportunity.
Personal anecdote:
I was in a tiny town in Portugal during 9/11. In the following days, I read all of the available papers and saw that even China was ready to share intel with the USA. Random Portuguese people offered me a place to stay while my country was "a war zone." The outpouring of global support was unprecedented.
Meanwhile, I called my younger brother who was normally well informed, was attending a very liberal university, and yet was worried about ME! All he knew about was all of "the anti-American sentiment" around the world. That was the day I truly understood the power of the reactionary idiocy of US media.
The USA could have used 9/11 to really start A New American Century, but the morons in charge were truly just morons. They were all part of a think tank named The Project for a New American Century, yet they let that opportunity pass them by. This was the moment that I understood the idiocy of neo-cons.
When future historians analyze the end of the American era, this will truly be the turning point.
Note: I have been careful to avoid being political on HN, but this topic deserves no less. I will never forget.
The domain is called "polemic digital" and -- surprise -- offers a polemic view to cash in on amp hate. That it's doing so well over here is a nice example of polemic half truths doing well on social media.
I think it's only loyalty of userbase - they're the first mover of privacy conscious search.
Any competitor would have to prove credibility in the field, as they'd be trading on ethics.
I use DuckDuckGo exclusively - the only two reasons for me to stop I can see would be some kind of ethics scandal, or the quality of the search dropping dramatically.
