vitus (u/vitus) - Readit News

vitus commented on Equal Earth – Political Wall Map (2018) equal-earth.com/index.htm... · Posted by u/bjelkeman-again

There is literally a huge and prominent link entitled "Equal Earth Projection" in the middle, at the top, that when clicked take you to a description of what the intent of the projection was:

    It was created to provide a visually pleasing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which some schools and socially concerned groups have adopted out of concern for fairness. Their priority is to show developing countries in the tropics and developed countries in the north with correctly proportioned sizes.

    In addition to being rigorously equal-area throughout, other Equal Earth projection features include:

    •  An overall shape similar to that of the Robinson projection. (The Robinson, although popular and pleasing to the eye, is not equal-area as is the Equal Earth projection).

    •  The curved sides of the projection suggest the spherical form of Earth.

    •  Straight parallels that make it easier to compare how far north or south places are from the equator.

Perhaps that makes it clearer for you.

vitus · 7 days ago

    > •  The curved sides of the projection suggest the spherical form of Earth.
    > •  Straight parallels that make it easier to compare how far north or south places are from the equator.

Okay, we've now added a constraint that this should be pseudocylindrical [0].

So why pick this over, say, Eckert IV or something from the Tobler Hyperelliptical family?

There is perhaps an additional argument (present on the wiki page [1], and elaborated on the paper introducing the projection [2]) that the equal earth projection is computationally easier to translate between lat/long and map coordinates, as it explicitly uses a polynomial equation instead of strict elliptical arcs. (This is the main argument presented against Eckert IV.)

The paper also lists some additional aesthetic goals: poles do not converge to points (ruling out Tobler Hyperelliptical), and meridians do not bulge excessively.

In fact, the paper describes Equal Area to be a blend of Craster parabolic and Eckert IV (then aesthetically tuned to avoid being stretched too much in either direction). It is also notable that the Equal Area paper measures both lower scale distortion and angular deformation for Eckert IV.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_map_projections#pseudo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Earth_projection

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=doi.org%2F10.1080%2F136...

edit: I found https://map-projections.net/singleview.php which you can view a bunch of other possible candidates by selecting Pseudocylindric + Equal-Area.

vitus commented on XSLT removal will break multiple government and regulatory sites github.com/whatwg/html/is... · Posted by u/colejohnson66

troupo · 9 days ago

> WHATWG have removed features before, e.g. frameset, font, and applet elements from HTML.

font: supported in all browsers https://caniuse.com/?search=font

frameset: supported in all browsers https://caniuse.com/?search=frameset

applet: supported in all browsers https://caniuse.com/?search=applet

> All of them were rarely used and had better alternatives available.

"Rarely used" is not enough of a justification

vitus · 8 days ago

nit: document.applets is not the same as the <applet> tag.

    Note: Support for the <applet> element has been removed by all browsers. Therefore, calling document.applets always returns an empty collection.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ap...

For instance: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...

    The <applet> element has been removed (Firefox bug 1279218).

Also see https://github.com/mdn/content/pull/26850 which removed MDN docs for the element a couple years back, citing removals from major browsers.

<font> and <frameset> are still implemented in browsers, though, even if they are fully deprecated and marked by WHATWG as obsolete and non-conforming: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/obsolete.html#non-con...

vitus commented on Hyatt Hotels are using algorithmic Rest “smoking detectors” twitter.com/_ZachGriff/st... · Posted by u/RebeccaTheDev

FireBeyond · a month ago

> A person outputs about 1kg of CO2 per day, which is less than 1 gram per minute.

I'm skeptical about this. Normal adult tidal volume is about 500mg, with a normal respiratory rate of 12/min, so 6L/min. Normal air is about 0.05% CO2, so you're at 3 grams/minute atmospherically that is inspired and expired.

We actually output closer to 4% CO2. 240ml/minute. With the windows and doors closed in my 10x20 living space and 4 people, CO2 can easily go from a baseline 4-500PPM to over 1000 in an hour. That's not 240 grams of CO2 doing that.

https://airly.org/en/the-composition-of-inhaled-and-exhaled-...

vitus · a month ago

You're mixing your units -- 0.05% of 6L is 3mL. In order for that to weigh 3g, atmospheric CO2 would have to be as dense as water.

Most figures I see peg 1mL of CO2 at closer to 2mg (it's about 50% heavier than the equivalent atmospheric volume, since that's mostly N2 with some O2). Your estimate of 240 mL / minute is about 346L per day, or about 700g of CO2. That's roughly the same order of magnitude as the cited 1 kg / person / day.

edit: Another way of thinking about it: if you scale up your numbers to grams per day, you'd end up with a ludicrous 346 kg / human / day. Multiply that by 12/44 (mass of Carbon-12 vs CO2), and that's the equivalent of a human shedding 100kg of carbon every day from just breathing. Most humans don't even weigh that much.

vitus commented on The radix 2^51 trick (2017) chosenplaintext.ca/articl... · Posted by u/blobcode

volemo · 3 months ago

Setting both to 2^63 means your original 256-bit numbers were 2^255, thus the addition would overflow no matter what intermediate encoding you’re using.

vitus · 3 months ago

Sure, then set one to 2^62 and the other to -2^62 (namely: 0b1100..00). It's overflow as far as unsigned arithmetic is concerned, but not in the case of signed arithmetic.

That said, when you're dealing with 256-bit integers, you're almost assuredly not working with signed arithmetic.

vitus commented on Denmark to raise retirement age to 70 telegraph.co.uk/world-new... · Posted by u/wslh

vitus · 3 months ago

Right. I thought about part-timers or people working reduced schedules bringing the average (mean) down; I just wasn't sure if I was missing something systemic or not.

It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.

In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job.

There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?"

On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers.

From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).

vitus · 3 months ago

> It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.

Okay. It seems that the cited numbers are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a... which in turn is derived from OECD data, which also allows you to view employees by bands of hours worked per week:

https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?lc=en&df[ds]=DisseminateF...

In particular, it looks like as mentioned, most employees in Denmark fall in the 35-39h bucket (nearly 4x the size of the next biggest bucket, 40+ hours). Meanwhile, if you look at the US, the 40+ bucket is more than 10x the size of any other. But it's not exactly a US vs Scandinavia situation -- Sweden has just under 70% of its workforce also working 40+ hour weeks, higher than the UK or Germany.

vitus commented on Denmark to raise retirement age to 70 telegraph.co.uk/world-new... · Posted by u/wslh

simongray · 3 months ago

Full-time in Denmark is 37 hours/week and most people have around 6 weeks of vacation/year (the legal minimum is 5). Some people will be working part-time, bringing the total hours worked down, so the numbers make sense to me.

vitus · 3 months ago

Right. I thought about part-timers or people working reduced schedules bringing the average (mean) down; I just wasn't sure if I was missing something systemic or not.

It might be more interesting to discuss the median hours worked (or any of a number of other percentiles), but it's not obvious those figures are public.

In particular, counting unemployed labor force participants feels wrong, even if you're counting how many hours a week they're spending on job seeking activities (applying to jobs, prepping resumes, interviewing, etc). I know I would burn out if I spent even 5+ hours a day doing just that, 5 days a week, even if I didn't have a full-time job.

There's also a pernicious thing that certain companies do (I'm thinking retail) where they just won't schedule you for enough hours to qualify you as full-time, since if they exceed that threshold, then (gasp) they have to pay benefits like health insurance. I also would prefer not to count that in the discussion of "how much does a typical employee work?"

On the flip side, I'm also less interested in considering the workaholic lawyers and consultants who are putting in 60-80 hours a week (or more!). There are far fewer of them, but they still skew the numbers.

From my perspective, the stereotypical US workweek is and has been 9 to 5 (whether you count that as 35 or 40 hours after accounting for lunch) for the past 50+ years. We certainly fall behind when it comes to vacation, since we still have no legally mandated minimum (I think 2-4 weeks is typical; anything higher is good but not unheard of).

vitus commented on Denmark to raise retirement age to 70 telegraph.co.uk/world-new... · Posted by u/wslh

AStonesThrow · 3 months ago

In the United States, full-time hours are in a range.

Part-time workers are often capped at 29 hours per week, due to tax considerations, such as the Affordable Care Act and other benefits. 30 hours is where the "full-time" label is applied there.

A wage-earning (non-exempt) worker must be paid overtime when they exceed full-time, which is typically a 40-hour maximum. Overtime pay may be "time and a half" or "double time" in certain circumstances.

Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States. Sometimes we refer to "banker's hours" which has the negative connotation that the worker never ever works outside that schedule.

vitus · 3 months ago

> Dolly Parton's feminist anthem "9 to 5" always mystified me: that's already 40 hours! Don't you stop to eat lunch? But that is the standard idiom for a "normal [office] job" in the States.

I have seen it go one of several ways.

- Technically count the person as 35 hours per week, giving a 1-hour lunch break. (Or 37.5, with a half-hour unpaid lunch break)

- Add an extra half hour to the day, e.g. have the employee work 8:30-5 or 9-5:30.

- Salaried employees aren't explicitly punching in and out of the clock each day, so there's nothing stopping them from working 8-6 or even longer hours. They don't get overtime, but at the same time the company doesn't care what hours they work as long as they get their work done.

vitus commented on Denmark to raise retirement age to 70 telegraph.co.uk/world-new... · Posted by u/wslh

jltsiren · 3 months ago

That's been happening, but not as quickly as earlier generations expected. In 1970, the average labor force participant (employed or unemployed) in Denmark worked 1845 hours. By 2022, the number had fallen to 1371 hours. The numbers are similar for most West European countries but not for East Europe or the US.

vitus · 3 months ago

> 1371 hours

Out of curiosity, what drove that shift? Shorter workweek, fewer hours per day, drastically more vacation, or some combination of the above?

Based on a 40-hour workweek, this would be 34 workweeks. Adding on 2-3 weeks worth of paid holidays, that leaves the equivalent of 15-16 weeks of vacation a year? I know my coworkers in Europe get more vacation than we do, but somehow I don't think it's that much more.

With a 32-hour workweek, this instead looks like ~6 weeks of vacation, which is more believable.

vitus commented on What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything Alexa had heard theguardian.com/technolog... · Posted by u/robaato

kbelder · 3 months ago

People buy eggs off Amazon? Every now and then the modern world boggles my mind.

vitus · 3 months ago

Why not? Amazon owns Whole Foods, and Amazon Fresh has existed for almost 20 years now.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07GBM7TZJ seems like a totally normal price to pay for eggs these days, although you probably wouldn't just buy a dozen eggs in isolation, given delivery fees and driver tip.

vitus commented on Harvard Law paid $27 for a copy of Magna Carta. It's an original nytimes.com/2025/05/15/wo... · Posted by u/jgwil2

highfrequency · 4 months ago

The magic of compound interest: buying an original Magna Carta for $27 and selling it for $21 million 80 years later is equivalent to achieving 18.5% compound interest. Roughly the same rate and duration as Warren Buffett's investing career, with a smaller starting value.

vitus · 4 months ago

The $21 million figure was based on a 2007 sale, which would have been closer to holding it for 59 years -- almost 26% interest compounded annually. If that rate of growth held for another 18 years, we'd be looking at $60 million today.