We’re seeing a lot of goods birds form the bus on this trip, including Crimson-fronted Parakeet and White-tailed Kite. The first one we pulled over for was a Long-tailed Silky-flycatcher, that I missed. However I did get the subsequent Mountain Thrush in the same tree, #858:
I arrived in Costa Rica yesterday after dark as planned, but too late to do any birding. This morning, however, Tommy and I were up even before the rest of the group and out in the gardens at 5:30AM, and we were not disappointed. The first bird up with us was #851, Rufous-naped Wren:
Until recently, I hadn’t paid much attention to Pomodoro, though I’ve heard of it for a few years now. “Uncle Bob” Martin seemed to like it, and he’s usually worth paying attention to in such matters. However, it mostly seemed to me like a way of organizing a variety of tasks and avoiding procrastination, and I’ve never had much trouble with that.
However after the January CFAR workshop suggested it in passing, I decided to give it a try; and I realized I had it all wrong. Pomodoros aren’t (for me) a means of avoiding procrastination or dividing time among projects. They’re a way of blasting through Ugh fields.
If anyone out there has the JDK installed on Windows, could you run this program and tell me what output you get, and what version of Windows and the JDK you’re using?
import java.nio.charset.*;
public class URLtest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(Charset.defaultCharset());
}
}
Just leave a comment with the info. Thanks.
Continuing to think about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I noticed that the Stanford Prison Experiment continues to confuse me. Just what was Quirrell really thinking here? On no level did this make sense. And then I realized that I had neglected one key event in the story. Bellatrix comes to believe that her master is inside Harry. At the time I just assumed without reflection that this was just a necessary part of the plot to free her, but what if it’s more? In fact, what if it was one of the main purposes of the whole breakout? Voldemort is preparing Bellatrix to be ready for the time when he moves from Monroe/Quirrell’s body to Harry’s.
Now if this were any regular fiction, I’d stop there, but consider the author for a moment: Eliezer Yudkowsky, a man who does research in artificial intelligence and is fascinated with the idea of AIs and the singularity. Hmmm.
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For many centuries, bleeding patients was a standard treatment for many diseases. Cancer? Bleed the patient. Headache? Bleed the patient. Fever? Bleed the patient. Pneumonia? Bleed the patient. Bleeding was accepted medical wisdom.
Perhaps surprisingly to modern patients, bleeding worked, at least some of the time. I.e. the patient would get better. Of course, a lot of the time if the doctor does nothing, the patient still gets better. No one bothered to ask whether it was the bleeding that caused the patient to get better or not. Few people even knew how to phrase the question.
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