I did the same thing this New Years. Blocked email, safari, all non-important applications. Kept things like: message, fb messenger, fitbit, camera, etc.
If I really need to know the answer to something, I will ask Siri. And most things I just add to my to-do list for looking up the information later.
"Things became difficult for them when the Gezhouba Dam was built in 1981—it split the paddlefish population in two and prevented those fish trapped below it from spawning"
I haven't used or prepared rope memory, but I have done quite a bit of research and planning to potentially construct some in the future.
Using it wasn't terribly exciting; the rope memory for a program was broken up into six rope modules that could be installed into and removed from the back of the AGC pretty easily with a screwdriver. Dedicated rope modules were only really used for flight and for completed test programs. For the most part during development they made use of "core rope simulators", that simulated the electrical properties of a core rope memory, but read data from a traditional coincident current ferrite core stack. This let them much more easily and quickly test programs out on hardware, without going through the pain of shipping a release out to the factories to manufacture.
The long and expensive assembly process caused last-minute changes before mission to be, in some cases, a bit hacky. They would do their best to localize changes to a single module, if possible, so that they would only have to re-manufacture one of them instead of all six. The Apollo 11 LM thus flew with 3 modules of Luminary 97, 2 from Luminary 99, and 1 from Luminary 99 Rev. 1. And this page from the Apollo 5 software Sunburst 120 shows how messy that could get: https://archive.org/stream/yulsystemforagcr00nasa#page/n485/...
Rope memory led to one of the most interesting "binary" output formats from an assembler that I've ever come across. The assembler (https://archive.org/details/yulsystemsourcec00hugh), upon successfully assembling a program, could punch a paper tape for manufacturing. The tape didn't contain the words of the program, directly. Rather, it contained commands for a special machine that was designed to help with the construction of the rope modules. The machine would position a small loop in front of the next core a wire was supposed to be threaded through. One of the two operators would pass a needle and wire through the loop and through the core to the operator on the other side, and the loop would then be repositioned in front of the next core the wire was to pass through. This video describes the process in more detail and shows it being done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIBhPsyYCiM
Preparing it nowadays is a bit challenging. Contrary to most descriptions you'll find online, rope memory is not "just" simple transformer coupling between the drive lines and the sense lines. The operation is a lot closer to the concept of coincident current ferrite core memory. Just like regular ferrite core memory, rope memory relies on the switching action of cores with "square" hysteresis loops. When a particular word is being read out of memory, a single core is addressed (each core stores the data for twelve 16-bit words). This core is "set", or driven to one magnetic polarization, by a set current, with all other cores being held by a series of inhibit lines. After a short time, the core is then "reset" to its original polarization by flowing current through the other direction. The changing magnetic field of the core couples into the sense lines that go through the core (and not onto those that don't), which are run into a traditional sense amplifier circuit.
Anyways, the cores used were (as far as I've been able to gather) metal tape cores, wound with 1/8mil thick 4-79 molybdenum permalloy tape. Similar stuff is still made today, but it's not super easy to come across. Each of the six modules contains 512 of them, so you'd need 3072 cores total if you wanted to weave one of the full manned flight programs.
Here is a follow-up article written by one of the 33 members of the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty to sign a letter criticizing Amy Wax:
Don’t Care if Amy Wax Is Politically Incorrect; I Do Care that She’s Empirically Incorrect
All they care is that she is "Politically Incorrect" -- they could not care less about the facts.
Not to mention that when someone is wrong about facts you correct them, you don't fire them or ask for their condemnation. Professors are not supposed to be correct, just to probe for what's correct. In fact they should be encouraged to be boldly inquisitive and incorrect in that pursuit, and use dialog to sort out the ultimate answer.
And of course even "incorrect" ideas can be considered correct in an era -- in the 19th and up to the mid-20th century there were all kinds of facts and studies showing how some races were genetically inferior available to racists (that is: almost everybody).
Now we laugh at them, but how many similar (or even in the reverse direction) BS we take as fact because social "scientists" just put things under the rug and only give facts and statistics that are compatible with current cultural norms?
Indeed - if Prof. Klick really "[doesn't] care if Amy Wax is politically correct", why did he sign a letter that says "We categorically reject Wax’s claims", instead of refuting them? Refutation is so much more effective than condemnation.
It is strange and disturbing to see academia joining the alt-right in its attempt to resurrect a pre-enlightenment age of dogma and allegations of heresy. For academia, it is a losing proposition.
> All they care is that she is "Politically Incorrect" -- they could not care less about the facts.
Remember the saying "perception is reality"? Keep that in the back of your mind, I predict it is going to become increasingly indispensable to understand events going forward in Western nations.
Professors are supposed to present the conclusions they've come to from their studies and work with no "self-awareness" filtering to avoid hurting anybody's feelings. Doubly so in an article, which is not a scholarly paper, and is meant to represent a broader picture with broader strokes.
And being a professor is not about only presenting raw factoids. It's also about drawing conclusions from the data and pointing to the bigger picture the way you interpret them -- a bigger picture that no data are going to give you by themselves alone. Informing the public opinion is not about being a glorified statistician.
Of course nobody would have batted an eye if a processor had done exactly the same kind of "stating of facts" for opinions they like (and that goes for "righteous indignation" both sides, left and right).
I think in the world of economics, those are very fuzzy lines. Economics and law are full of conjecture, the belief that if one thing is true, others will probably be as well (see supply-side economics, Marxism, and so on), and the amount those views are clung to despite existing data is startling. I don't agree with the conclusions she comes to, but it's not a huge jump from what economists the Krugman do all the time.
The response makes the situation even more absurd. Suddenly it is OK to denounce a professor because he/she is not correct from someones point of view? Isn't a debate about what is real and what is not the base for any science?
I would understand, but not be happy for, that professors are called for not being politically correct. I can't understand denouncing for not being correct by someone's argumentation.
I believe more and more that social justice and seeking for truth are not compatible.
What concerns me is that people act like she doesn't have the right to write her opinion (it clearly is just her opinion; it was published to the opinion section), without her facing repercussion.
Tolerance only goes so far. You can have whatever opinion you want, but that doesn't mean you get to escape the consequences of having views that people find objectionable.
You can certainly walk around town telling everyone they are stupid, but you shouldn't be surprised when everyone hates you afterward. "It's just my opinion" is a weak excuse.
It's not an opinion, it's a conjecture. Opinions are emotional responses to facts, not arguments about their veracity.
Examples of opinions include:
The color red is beautiful.
I'm sad that sharks are being hunted.
I hate poor people.
None of the following are opinions:
This rose is red.
My landlord poisoned my dog.
Poor people do more drugs than rich people.
In particular, a statement is not an opinion simply because it is presented without evidence. It is only an opinion if it can't possess any in the first place.
If that were what this was about, it would all be a bunch of papers and op-eds discussing the evidence. And it's nice that you can link to some of that, and I wish this controversy was all just ding-dong of evidence, counter-evidence and the interpretations thereof.
But it's hard to see the linked article as anything but a fig-leaf, when the centre of the actual controversy is an attempt to sack Prof Wax, on the grounds that her arguments are morally unacceptable.
Thanks for posting. The original article is clearly hyper-racist--how unbelievable that the only cultural tradition suited for the 21st century also just happens to be the one which you hail from--but also just weirdly certain about things that deserve no certainty.
If I really need to know the answer to something, I will ask Siri. And most things I just add to my to-do list for looking up the information later.
It's been great!