Considering the actual post here, plus just decent manners, if you like a book, and you’re able, it’s worth considering supporting the author of said book.

That being said, you should seriously consider going to your search engine of choice and searching for an archive by a person named Anna: Anna’s Archive if you will. You might find something helpful and interesting.

I’m not a geologist but I’ve read up on it a fair bit.

This Mars photo appears to be sandstone.

On earth sandstone is usually associated with ancient rivers, lake shores, and sea shores. But also sand dune fields.

The thing with sandstone though, is it’s not just sand. Rather, it’s sand plus time plus pressure plus cementation.

Now, the time part is obvious. What’s sandstone now was sand a long ass time ago (usually).

Pressure? That’s a little harder to understand for me here. Has mars ever had tectonic stuff going on to bury it (and hence have pressure applied), followed by erosion and uplift? Or am I incorrect and pressure is not a necessary condition? Maybe sandstone without pressure is a thing it’s just weaker and/or less dense? Maybe layers of volcanic basalt or something could have a similar effect? I don’t know and would love to have someone more knowledgeable fill this part out.

Cementation? This part, I’m nearly certain, REQUIRES water. On earth anyway, this happens when ground water absorbs chemicals from other rock/stuff (for example carbonates from sea shells, but there’s lots of other chemicals that can do this), then flows through the beds of buried sand, and some of those chemicals are deposited along with magical chemistry stuff happening, and your sand becomes sand stone.

So I don’t 100% know that the short answer to your question is “yes”, but I’m leaning towards a solid “yeah, probably, but I’m not a real geologist and Mars isn’t a real Earth so I dunno”.

Depending on your threat model you’re almost certainly fine.

I don’t really have an opinion on this case (in terms of Syed’s guilt or innocence), but it all just seems like such a shit show. If this guy is innocent he’s been repeatedly screwed by the system.

I abide.

The catharsis is real!

This is similar to what kept coming to mind while listening to it last night:

“This is a former POTUS and the richest guy on the planet, and they’re both so… dumb”.

Blows my damn mind man.

Thanks for providing this update. You added some sources and data that I didn’t know, and your last point clearly articulates the set of likely causes of this misstep.

When I first became aware of this story my gut-reaction was “I fucking hate unforced errors like this!”; I’m now very curious why this happened the way it did. Mind you, in the grand scheme of things I suspect this is nothing more than a fleeting political blip.

I got 2.7k on a post, but I just got lucky.

I was biting down hard until the last sentence: “She Hits Me Every Night” and then I lost it laughing!

That isn’t true though. Most convicted felons can’t vote, but they can run for office.

I have nothing to add per se, but I just thought I’d thank you for writing such a well thought out, informative comment and sourcing it so well.

I can try to explain, but there are people who know much more about this stuff than I do, so hopefully someone more knowledgeable steps in to check my work.

What does ‘random’ or ‘noise’ mean? In this context, random means that any given bit of information is equally as likely to be a 1 or a 0. Noise means a collection of information that is either random or unimportant/non-useful.

So, you say “Compression saves on redundant data”. Well, if we think that through, and consider the definitions I’ve given above, we will reason that ‘random noise’ either doesn’t have redundant information (due to the randomness), or that much of the information is not useful (due to its characteristic as noise).

I think that’s what the person is describing. Does that help?

I’m not an Information Theory guy, but I am aware that, regardless of how clever one might hope to be, there is a theoretical limit on how compressed any given set of information could possibly be; and this is particularly true for the lossless compression demanded by this challenge.

Quote from the article:

The skepticism is well-founded, said Karl Martin, chief technology officer of data science company Integrate.ai. Martin’s PhD thesis at the University of Toronto focused on data compression and security.

Neuralink’s brainwave signals are compressible at ratios of around 2 to 1 and up to 7 to 1, he said in an email. But 200 to 1 “is far beyond what we expect to be the fundamental limit of possibility.”

That was a great read. Thank you.

Here’s the thing about Trademarks though:

Trademarks exist to protect consumers from confusion in the market, NOT primarily to protect the owner of the trademark.

So, like, a restaurant calling themselves McDonald’s could reasonably be assumed to be operated by the McDonald’s Corporation.

This makes trademarks distinct from both patents and copyright.

Do you honestly believe a rational consumer would mistake this design for one originating from the LAPD?

https://academic.oup.com/book/41769/chapter-abstract/354401357?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

‘’’

European Trade Mark Law Kur Annette and Martin Senftleben Contents Contents Search in this book CHAPTER 3 Rationales of Trade Mark Protection Get access Arrow Kur Annette, Martin Senftleben https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199680443.003.0002 Pages 1–26 Published: March 2017 Annotate icon Annotate Cite Icon Cite Permissions Icon Permissions Share Icon Share Abstract Although trade mark law is generally regarded as forming part of the larger body of intellectual property, the protection mechanism underlying its functioning is distinct from other intellectual property rights. Patents, copyright, or design rights award creative or innovative achievements with a limited period of market exclusivity thus creating artificial scarcity of the respective commodities. This grants the proprietor of such rights the possibility to raise prices above the marginal costs so as to recoup the investments made. Whether and to what extent that strategy is successful and even allows gaining a premium is determined by the market. Trade mark law coincides with that scheme insofar as it also engages market forces to determine commercial gains or losses. However, instead of creating artificial exclusivity of the goods or services offered, it provides a communication channel for entrepreneurs, so as to identify the goods or services originating from their business, distinguish them from competing goods, and transport product-related messages they want to convey to their customers. This, by reflex, provides information to the market, guiding consumer choice towards goods satisfying their demands, and helping to avoid those they do not want, at minimal search costs (see paragraph 1.08 et seq.). Thus, instead of restricting competition on the production level, trade marks are designed as an enabling tool without which competition in today’s mass markets would not function at all. ‘’’

Michael Lewis wrote an interesting book on this, published as an audio-book in 2018, called The Coming Storm (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41016100-the-coming-storm). It’s well worth the listen:

In his first Audible Original feature, New York Times best-selling author and journalist Michael Lewis delivers hard-hitting research on not-so-random weather data — and how Washington plans to release it. He also digs deep into the lives of two scientists who revolutionized climate predictions, bringing warning systems to previously unimaginable levels of accuracy. One is Kathy Sullivan, a gifted scientist among the first women in space; the other, D.J. Patil, is a trickster-turned-mathematician and a political adviser.

Most urgently, Lewis’s narrative reveals the potential cost of putting a price tag on information with the potential to save lives, raising questions about balancing public service with profits in an ethically-ambiguous atmosphere.

I’ll just leave this here:

https://www.recoveringfromreligion.org/

Recovering From Religion is a fantastic organization which exists to help people through this sort of thing. They’ve got lots of catalogued resources (podcasts, articles, videos, etc.), a 24-hour helpline, online support groups, and other helpful resources.

https://www.youtube.com/@TsodingDaily

If you’re a programmer, or think you might want to be one, I highly recommend this channel. He’s a savant at all sorts of low level things, quite funny and entertaining, and does a fantastic job of explaining what’s going on.

It’s not just a fat or muscle thing. Those both contribute of course; fat insulates and muscle produces more heat. But the real player is the surface area to volume ratio.

A bigger person has a lot more volume than they have a bigger surface area, and since heat is lost through the skin this has a major impact.