Very much looking forward to Emily Wilson's forthcoming translation. She translated the Odyssey a few years ago, still in verse but with less stilted language, definitely makes it more accessible. Looking forward to reading it to my children when they're just a couple years older.
Emily translated the first line of the Odissey as "Tell me about a complicated man". She almost went with "Tell me about a straying husband". Neither complicated nor straying husband appear in the original text. Pope's description (The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d...) is closer to the epithets we are taught at school (ricco d'astuzie or dal multiforme ingegno). πολύτροπος means resourceful, of many skills, well-travelled.
πολύτροπος literally means "one of many ways" or even more literally "multi-turned". Translating it as "for wisdom's various arts renown'd" is just as much poetic license as "complicated".
That's the first line of the proem and complicated tells us nothing about the protagonist. Everyone can be complicated, but only Odysseus is πολύτροπον. It's a quality of character few people possess. I feel like Pope's line, despite the artistic license, kept that uniqueness.
I also found her Introduction and Translator's note very good. She acknowledges her goal was not the most direct word for word accuracy but from what I remember more the general feel to how things would have been interpreted by the audience at the time. After all, these were oral works enjoyed by not just "intellectuals" in ancient Greece. The idea of having a single best translation isn't really the right goal to seek and it really wasn't her aim.
From reading her notes (and her twitter account) I've definitely gained an appreciation of how much an art in itself translation is.
Probably the same way a medical article ends up on the front page of hacker news. People have interests outside their area of expertise. Which is good!
"RIchard Feyman's wife: "WHY did you not take the trash out yet?!"
Richard proceeds to go on a long tirade about electromagnetic forces, gravity, string theory etc. until the wife sighs in despair and takes out the garbage herself. Again."
From the article (as well as other places I've read similar things).
"Why did so many young adults die? As it happens, young adults have the strongest immune systems, which attacked the virus with every weapon possible—including chemicals called cytokines and other microbe-fighting toxins—and the battlefield was the lung. These “cytokine storms” further damaged the patient’s own tissue."
The more robust immune response was a large cause of the increased mortality.
Iirc from my time as a biologist, we don't have any direct evidence that a cytokine storm happened and there seem to be other possible explanations for that distribution.
By all means, massage your breasts, but I'm not so sure your hypothesis holds up. The paucity of cancers of skeletal muscle is more likely due to cell type (terminally differentiated without much turnover) rather than vascular supply. Carcinomas of the lung and colon are some of the most prevalent (probably still would be even taking environmental factors into account) and those organs get plenty of blood supply. Leukemias also aren't rare and are literally bathed in blood flow.
I love it this part:
"The guy with a button that says “Steal $30 Million of Paychecks” doesn’t press it the first chance he gets. That would be stealing! He is a moral human being, he has standards, he stays well away from that button even if he is also simultaneously running a bunch of complicated frauds. You can look yourself in the eye when you’re running a complicated fraud;"
He's bang on.
I'm curious what his "other companies" were, that they became a source of such financial pressure. One would think a payroll middleman has the easiest job in the world next to printing money. Companies put money in the kitty, you disburse the monies to other parties and take a cut. HN crew could probably set up an event-sourced system with Lambda to automate it all. 8000 employees, that does not seem like a lot?
> One would think a payroll middleman has the easiest job in the world next to printing money. Companies put money in the kitty, you disburse the monies to other parties and take a cut. HN crew could probably set up an event-sourced system with Lambda to automate it all. 8000 employees, that does not seem like a lot?
Oh falling into the "could built it in a weekend" trap? Go right ahead, start a payroll company from scratch that can correctly pay, with proper auditing, checks and balances, any employee in the US (nevermind international) as quickly as possible, deal with wage garnishments, special deductions (401Ks, IRAs, FSA, HSA, and so on, part-time hourly and full-time salaried, bonuses with net-to-gross and gross-to-net, commissions for sales people along with "draw").... annnnnnnnd go!
Wage garnishments! Nobody mentioned anything about wage garnishments! :washes hands:
Heh, I beg your indulgence for my cheeky comment, I of course know nothing of this matter, it seems easy, as all those task you mentioned can be converted to single rules. Not a weekend worth of work, but perhaps 20 weeks worth of work for a prototype?
The hubris of this is wild - a payroll system that is compliant in every US state and accounts for the many, many nuances of the US financial system is no small project.
> it seems easy, as all those task you mentioned can be converted to single rules.
Single rules, yes. For each State in the US. And every other country in the world. And that can change at any time of the year. Oh, and nobody form those various state and federal government agencies are reaching out to tell you when and what is cahnging.
And GP just listed a few things off the top of his head - there are literally hundreds of complexities in doing this that he glossed over...
Have you ever seen how hourly employees get paid? Especially ones at union shops with crazy rules about overtime? And employees grandfathered in under older "legacy" rules" Or employees operating under one-off rules? And each employer you take on has their own set of crazy rules?
Dude. Stop while you are ahead. Payroll is edge case upon edge case upon edge case. And if you fuck up any of those edge cases, you are fucking up some poor soul's livelihood (or maybe making their day and the expense of their employer!).
C’mon, I think the right response here is for you to realize there are some serious unknown unknowns here and now out before you become the next “you can build a system yourself quite trivially...”
Sure, you can create a non-union, full-time, no overtime, citizen/permanent resident, no taxable benefits, CA resident and company location only payroll company “trivially,” but who the hell would use your software when there are ones that handle much more complex situations?
The easiest, though, is to simply subscribe to his newsletter, which has all the articles in full. There is rarely an edition I find myself immediately archiving.
My younger brothers are identical twins, one born vaginally and the other 20 min later via C-section. I've always said they'd be good data for these type of studies.
Anecdotally, they don't really have big differences regarding allergies or autoimmune disorders. Although growing up I always complained one stunk up the bathroom worse than the other.
Increasingly in developed countries twin births are caesars; the risk profile of twin births often necessitates this for patient safety.
When a normal vaginal delivery is possible (ie first twin cephalic) generally the second will follow.
My partner (obgyn Resident ) says she has had 2 twin births where the first was vaginal and the second Caesar, out of roughly a couple hundred
I found the book "Our Mathematical Universe" by Max Tegmark, a physicist, a pretty good read. His idea is basically that the universe isn't explained by math, it IS math. To get to what he means by that he provides a good review of theoretical physics/cosmology/quantum mechanics. No idea how other physicists think of his work but for someone not in the field who has some interest I thought it was a good overview and even if his ideas are wrong gives you something to think about.
Keeping in mind that Tegmark's idea is 2,500 years old and the basis of Western civilization. Pythagoras was the biggest philosophical influence on Plato. And, according to Aristotle (150 years later), Pythagoras believed that "all is number".
Thales (the "first" Greek philosopher) believed that the underlying principle of the world was water, a kind of flowing force. Anaximenes, his student, believed the underlying principle was air, a sort of bouncing around set of particles.
Pythagoras believed that underneath everything, the most basic underlying principle was math. And not just that: he believed that the natural harmonies in mathematics led to the natural harmonies in the kosmos (a term he is credited with introducing, along with the term "philosopher").
This reminds me of the project being worked on by Cohl Furey at Cambridge to basically explain physics out of the four normed divison algebras. I'm really interested to see where that leads, and kinda want to head into that field myself.
