What is Dutch food anyway? Bitterballen? Just some salted fish on a thin slice of rye? Seems like everyone there in your neck of the woods eats Italian basically? I spent a solid month in Amsterdam once and the most "Dutch" thing I ate was....Indonesian?
Dutch and Amsterdam restaurants are not a good place to look for Dutch cuisine, although I remember the stamppot restaurant fondly. I'm afraid you'll have to get into non-urbanite homes to get a real taste, in the south of the country if you can, or accept a level of fusion which some higher-end restaurants offer, but is generally hard to trace, even for a Dutch person.
> Makes me wonder what we ate before potatoes were introduced to Europe, I have no idea really.
There is a very interesting book [1] on this subject, and it's title is slightly misleading: the cuisine of the Netherlands of course means you're going to be talking about European cuisine in general, and the effects of trade routes opening up (middle and central Asia first, north Africa, later east Asia and the Americas).
Highly recommended if Dutch/European history of cuisine interests you.
We can't prove that. It feels good to believe it, sure, but it's also possible that precisely zero people working in sweatshops have ever had Einstein's talent.
Sure, it's easy to say - take away the sweatshops, provide them with UBI and voila - suddenly we have 5000 Einsteins on our hands.
But it's also possible we'll still have zero. It's not like we don't have millions of people leading "cushy" (by comparison lives) in the West already, yet - no more Einsteins?
Why specifically Einstein... 5000 cushy people isn't likely to produce an Einstein but could easily produce some great artist or engineer or other researcher.
Anyway about Einstein you need to think about how many physicists existed at his time that had the education to even work on a theory of relativity. It's probably about 5 thousand. Think about it in terms of sports, someone who is a 1 in 5000 talent probably wouldn't even make it onto a college sports team, but that's because sports is something we as a society support tremendously. Someone like Michael Jordan is 1 out of 10 million, cut down the overall population to 5000 and it's like celebrating the "genius" of a district middle school star.
It seems like we'd have to have been extremely lucky for the one Einstein to have been born where he was and not as a subsistence farmer if there were zero potential Einsteins among the subsistence farmer population.
We were extremely lucky, yes. Not to mention he was Jewish and being born, say, even just 15 years later than he was, could've meant he'd have ended up in concentration camp and we'd still have no theory of relativity. That's quite possible.
From a Bayesian perspective, I think we should consider the luck required for this hypothesis as a strike against it. In other words, if the hypothesis contends that observing an Einstein was very unlikely, then the fact that we did observe an Einstein is strong evidence against it.
I think people are getting hung up too much on the "their own" part vs "full of geniuses" part.
Ok, fine, if three - instead of one - people - out of billions - came up with a revolutionary new idea - that does not, to me, discount the idea of the "lone genius", just because 2 > 1 and we can't strictly use the word "lone" anymore.
The idea would be discounted, if say, 500 million people all invented calculus independently of each other over a period of 5 months.
The vast majority of geniuses were lucky enough to be born into families that were very much above the lower socioeconomic classes of their times. These were not "lone" geniuses, not when everything about their early lives gave them advantages above the majority that allowed them to pursue a life that left room for intellectual pursuit.
Whether it's 1 or 10 that made discoveries around the same time, they have still taken advantage of 1) every piece of knowledge they've encountered that came before them and 2) At least limited, and often not very limited, collaboration or "bouncing ideas of off" people around them. 3) The circumstances of their birth. These can't be discounted.
These are, however, matters of degree, and as I said it can still take a unique intellect to put the pieces together. That can't be discounted, but there still must be pieces to put together. Even Ramanujan had tutors from a very early age who taught him quite a bit, along with multiple books on the subject of mathematics, to help him along his way. Each of these sources had in turn built upon many years and many minds' worth of knowledge. Ramanujan is probably the most "lone" of lone geniuses that I can think of, and still he would likely not have achieved nearly as much without that foundational knowledge.
This is not just about simultaneous discovery-- although that does demonstrate the "fertile ground" aspect of things. It is fundamentally about the sum total of knowledge that came before a genius and the social network of very smart, though perhaps not genius intellects, that served as sounding boards, critics, etc.
And though the author of this article wants to discount the "luck" aspect of these individuals, it is extremely notable that most if not all of the individuals that spring to mind came from circumstances of birth that allowed for their intellect to flourish. They were born into circumstances of middle class or higher where resources supplemental to the basic necessities required for life & sustenance could be devoted to their education & leisure time to pursue their interests: Einstein was not born into a working class family with parents confined to jobs of physical labor. Newton's family similarly was not of the labor class. Nor was Ramanujan's. Or Leibniz's.
And yet - why are so few others capable of standing on the shoulders of said giants? Here I am, with more giants' shoulders to stand on, if I wished it, with easy access to vast wealth of information that Newton (or someone living in the 1980's) couldn't even dream of - and yet - my contributions to calculus are precisely zero.
I studied drumming for 6 years and could easily be outmatched (and have been) skill-wise by a 5-year-old with talent.
Are there just no "geniuses" at all? Could anyone paint the Sistine Chapel? Carve out David? Paint the Mona Lisa? Play drums for Led Zeppelin? Invent new fields in mathematics? Is 99.9999% of humanity just ... what? lazy?
back in Newton's era there was less competition and the intellectual barriers to entry were lower. Knowing calculus was enough to be a genius. now you need to invent a new type of math. Things have become so much harder that in many instances outside help is necessary. But it also makes genius more necessary too. It just means more help and having more genius.
There was less competition but it was also tremendously difficult to even see what others are doing, or to learn from them, or to even talk to them....just being in possession of scientific texts was enough to get you killed not too long before Newton's time. That makes his accomplishments more impressive to me, not less.
Here's an analogy.
I'd be more impressed by a medieval European serf if that serf could create the Intel 8086 than by you if you designed the next AMD 32-core processor.
>But you can't fire people because you think they probably have the wrong opinions based on things they said 5 years ago, that's Soviet level repression.
"Soviet level repression" would be sending Mr Martinez to a forced labor camp; maybe his relatives disappear, that sort of thing.
If I find out that a coworker of mine attended a White Power rally a few years ago, or stormed the Capitol this January, you bet I'm bringing it up to my manager in a "it's either me or them" conversation. And I won't be the only one on my team.
You may be cool working with all manner of assholes, doesn't mean other people should be.
It used to be you were innocent until proven guilty. Attending a white power rally isn’t a crime in most places (freedom of assembly).
Assaulting law enforcement and damaging the Capitol is. If you have evidence, report it to law enforcement.
If the person does nothing while at work, there shouldn’t be a problem. You are not their judge. This is precisely why we have around privacy, what your company can ask you, etc.
You can save your boss the time and quit. You can save even more time by asking for the full background of every coworker of yours and determine if they live up to your standards.
Better yet, make your own company comprised of only people who meet your definition of acceptable people based on their political and social opinions that they don’t even share at work. Be careful though, you’re likely to get sued for violating employment laws.
The justice system is not for moral credibility, it is there for moral determination. Even the accusation of sexual abuse is extremely chilling for those who work with children — because it strikes at credibility, at whether people feel you are safe around kids. Would you feel that a pediatrician or teacher accused of sexual misconduct is safe around your children? Or rather, are you surprised that many people would say f-ing no?
Note that being accused is not a crime, and it's an even lesser standard than some old Tweet, because at least that's a written record. But mere accusation can destroy credibility, especially when it has to do with sex.
Now if you were a black man and your boss attended a white power rally, are you seriously going to say there isn't a F'ing Interesting Story of Moral Credibility going on here? If that employee ever sues for workplace discrimination, do people think that a history of white power rallies shouldn't come up?
Which group is the assholes? The one who stormed the capitol or the ones who go to their manager about what someone does completely separate from work? Or the ones who insist on capitalizing "White Power" sans quotes?
If you started your adult life with the same help from Daddy that Trump had - and did nothing, literally besides putting all of that money into an index fund - you’d be richer than Trump is today. They did the math.
So what exactly are Trump’s accomplishments? It’s not like the dude started off selling hot dogs. He made a lot of shitty investments, lost a lot of money, and is one of the few people on this planet capable of bankrupting a casino. In Vegas.
Yes he’s famous, of course, but his “look at me I’m a successful billionaire” image is all smoke and mirrors.
Go back in time a thousand years and tell people that one day man will fly faster than a bird and land on the moon.
FTL is not impossible. The only thing physics say is that you can’t accelerate a particle that has mass past c because that would require infinite energy. But accelerating an object doesn’t have to be the only way to move “faster” than light.
Look at our civilization today and compare it to what it was a thousand or two thousand years back. Now imagine a civilization that’s had three hundred thousand year head start on us.
Who’s to say they haven’t mastered wormholes or bending gravity or harnessing dark energy to accomplish things that are purely in the realm of science fiction today?
You get 10 years of headaches for everyone who gets close to the language. Even today, the python executable in Ubuntu is called `python3`, not `python`.
To be fair though, it would be less of a problem for C++ than it was for Python, since you wouldn't have to depend on the compiler from the end-user system.
But yes, there's a reason why high-visibility C++ projects like Chrome basically white-list 30% of the language and keep it that way, to some small sub-set they feel is "good enough".
The problem is the fragmentation this causes. I pick these 5 features of the language, you pick another 7, I can't use your lib, etc, etc.
C++ is becoming extremely bloated. Bjarne said as much in one of his recent criticisms at the highly-specialized use-case proposals that people wanted to make "standard".
I enjoyed his C++11 book but now that's probably all outdated "oh we don't do it that way anymore" stuff and I can't afford to just buy 2-3 1000-page books every year to keep up. Got better things to do.
If Ubuntu depended on random users pointing their browsers to ubuntu.com and then clicking a download link to download and burn an ISO, they'd be long, long gone. There hasn't been any real $$$ in that since, well, forever?
