on 28-Sep-2018 (Fri)

When one person, object or activity is compared with another a comparative form is used: mia figlia nuota meglio della sua ‘my daughter swims better than hers’; la pasta napoletana è migliore di quella siciliana ‘Neapolitan pasta is better than Sicilian pasta’.

Anki makes memory a choice, rather than a haphazard event, to be left to chance.

The US military can destroy or neutralize the S-300, but it would need to devote significant assets and time to do so. US air operations in the Middle East over Syria and Iraq are not currently constrained by any requirement to use stealth aircraft. Because stealth aircraft have higher operational and maintenance costs and generally carry less ordnance than nonstealth aircraft, the US does not typically assign stealth aircraft to routine operations in uncontested airspace, such as the current campaign against ISIS. In the absence of the S-300 system, nonstealth aircraft currently assigned to conduct air strikes against ISIS could, on a very short timeline, be retasked to conduct operations against Iran.

The S-300 is another story entirely. It gives the Iranian military a significant strategic advantage against regional states and significantly complicates US air operations in the airspace protected by the S-300. The S-300 is the most advanced SAM system available for export to potential enemies of the United States, and significantly alters planning assumptions for potential US military operations. The S-300 may prevent the US from attaining air superiority as quickly as it has in the past, protracting air operations and potentially increasing the risk of losing aircraft and pilots.

The S-300 system is deployed as one or more battalions each consisting of up to six batteries. Each battery can have up to eight TELs (missile-firing platforms). The number of TELs determines the number of different targets that the system can engage simultaneously or in close succession. Deploying more TELs also complicates efforts to suppress the system because they can disperse over a wide area.

The Islamic Dawa Party reached a compromise candidate between the different wings led by Nuri al-Maliki and Haidar al-Abadi, as prime minister, while it was agreed to name Sadiq al-Rikabi to head the next government. ...

Iraq’s median age is [...] years old. 60% of the nation is 25 years or younger. Each year almost 900,000 people reach working age. By 2030, the adult population will grow from 20 million to 32million

Officially, unemployment is 16% and for the youth it stands at 36%. However, an estimated 80% of young males are underemployed or jobless.

Iraq has a largely unskilled work force. Around 33% of the young are illiterate or semi-literate. Only 28% finished middle or high school, and only 7% graduated college.

While Tarbush was focused upon how and why the military came to play such a leading role in 1930s-40s Iraq, his book can be used to look at current Iraqi politics as well. Today’s Iraqi government is again dominated by individuals such as Moqtada al-Sadr, Ammar Hakim, Haid al-Amiri, Nouri al-Maliki, Massoud Barzani, etc. They each have their own political party that is bereft of ideology and largely act as vehicles for their leader’s personal advancement. The government is still used to enrich the leadership and dish out patronage. The country’s institutions are still weak, and unable to constrain these individuals, and there is still no concept of an opposition as all parties are included in national unity governments. Finally, in neither period was the interests of the public really considered. The growing gap between the people and their representatives would eventually lead to the 1958 coup. Today, there are annual protests every summer, which pass as the heat dies down. Could this anger eventually boil over to a revolution or will the politicians be able to ride out this wave of resentment?

However vertex_for_first_force is a Vertex object. So we put it in parenthesis and add a comma indicating a sequence, and it becomes a Region object.

vertex_for_first_pin = trusslnstance.vertices \ .findAt((vertex_coords_for_first_pin,)) This statement uses the findAtO method to find the Vertex object and assign it to a variable.

Many referred to Basra as the Venice of the Middle East for its rivers, winding canals, and decorative gondola-shaped boats that bared exported goods and newlyweds.

Erbil is locally called Hewler by the Kurds

Former director of ICG Joost Hiltermann describes PUK's president Kosrat Rasul Ali vigorous, razor sharp and articulate, and holds a commanding presence despite his ailment which derives from shrapnel lodged in his body.

I was reading the AlphaGo paper in support of a creative project of my own, namely, writing an article for Quanta Magazine. This is important: I find Anki works much better when used in service to some personal creative project.

It's tempting instead to use Anki to stockpile knowledge against some future day, to think “Oh, I should learn about the geography of Africa, or learn about World War II, or […]”. These are goals which, for me, are intellectually appealing, but which I'm not emotionally invested in. I've tried this a bunch of times. It tends to generate cold and lifeless Anki questions, questions which I find hard to connect to upon later review, and where it's difficult to really, deeply internalize the answers. The problem is somehow in that initial idea I “should” learn about these things: intellectually, it seems like a good idea, but I've little emotional commitment.

Typically I will extract anywhere from 5 to 20 Anki questions from the paper. It's usually a bad idea to extract fewer than 5 questions – doing so tends to leave research paper as a kind of isolated orphan in my memory. Later I find it difficult to feel much connection to those questions. Put another way: if a paper is so uninteresting that it's not possible to add 5 good questions about it, it's usually better to add no questions at all.

One failure mode of this process is if you Ankify misleading work. Many papers contain wrong or misleading statements.

(...)

As an example, let me describe how I Ankified a paper I recently read, by the economists Benjamin Jones and Bruce Weinberg. The paper studies the ages at which scientists make their greatest discoveries.

(...)

One of the questions I added to Anki was: “What does Jones 2011 claim is the average age at which physics Nobelists made their prizewinning discovery, over 1980-2011?” (Answer: 48). Another variant question was: “Which paper claimed that physics Nobelists made their prizewinning discovery at average age 48, over the period 1980-2011?” (Answer: Jones 2011). And so on.

Such questions qualify the underlying claim: we now know it was a claim made in Jones 2011, and that we're relying on the quality of Jones and Weinberg's data analysis. In fact, I haven't examined that analysis carefully enough to regard it as a fact that the average age of those Nobelists is 48. But it is certainly a fact that their paper claimed it was 48. Those are different things, and the latter is better to Ankify.

The easiest way of tying states to the contract code that defines them is by hash. This works for very simple and stable programs, but more complicated contracts may need to be upgraded

Simple constraints such as “any contract of this name signed by these keys” allow for some upgrade flexibility, at the cost of increased exposure to rogue contract developers. Requiring combinations of signatures helps reduce the risk of a rogue or hacked developer publishing a bad contract version, at the cost of increased difficulty in releasing new versions.