I got a new land-line-number in the early 2000s. One day, I got a collection call for someone with a Mexican surname. I explained I had just gotten the number and I didn't know who that person was. So naturally, they called twice a day for months. I disconnected the line because I was basically paying $20/m for them to harass me. And here's the part I can't explain-- even after being disconnected, the phone would ring but only for the debt collector.
EDIT:
Another story. Solar Panels in the late early 2010s. The ex-wife's father died years ago, once or twice a week, someone would call her cell phone, ask for her dead father and then try to sell her solar panels. They would not stop. It escalated to calls 6 days a week.
I eventually got fed up and told them I'd be happy to come down there with a pistol if they kept calling. I know, not the best choice, but keep in mind this is after 6 months of daily harassment.
The guy on the other end of the phone flipped out, told me “I was committing a federal crime, and he was going to report me to the police and to expect them shortly.” Then, as an intimidation tactic, he read my full name and address-- except it was my dead FILs information.
I told him to go ahead and put his name on a police report so I knew his name.
The calls stopped for one month, and then started again.
"In simple terms, diamagnetic materials are substances that are usually repelled by a magnetic field. Electrons in an atom revolve around the nucleus, and thus possess orbital angular momentum. The resultant magnetic momentum in an atom of the diamagnetic material is zero."
Yes, if this material is diamagnetic without being a superconductor it is by far the strongest such material we've ever found. 15x stronger than pyrolitic graphite.
From what I heard, it would. This kind of diamagnetism would be strong enough to be potentially interesting in other applications and research, if it turns out not to be a superconductor.
Not over a single dipole magnet. The "shape" of the field wouldn't make it stable, you'd need to add other magnets or a piece of string to stabilise. As I understand stable levitation over a dipole magnet is indicative of flux pinning which is a property exclusive to type II superconductors.
I am just confronting this now. My daughter is 6, and I'm trying to teach her math and reading. She's excelling at reading. The thing about math is, I have to teach her math the way the standards specify. The problem is…
The common core math is just strange. I find it confusing, and I did a full tour at an engineering college.
Math is a “procedure”. That's why programs like MatLab/MathCad can solve equations-- they just have a set of rules that solve problems. Learning math is the process of internalizing these rules.
The common core stuff seems to be the opposite of this. I want to build with my daughter a set of skills (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, exponents etc, eventually moving on to trig, linear algebra and calc) she can build on. But common core hopelessly confuses even simple things like adition.
Please look into Beast Academy (online without books) and work through it with your daughter. Read the comics to her and go through the exercises together as needed.
Khan Academy worked well for our kid, who started at that age. She worked through 1-2 grades per year and is now in their Algebra series. The main complaint I have is that there is no concept of 'practice' or 'drilling'. You just learn something and go straight to the quiz.
There are two problems with this. The first is that it doesn't get kids used to doing practice, which is critical for learning more advanced skills.
The second is that the quizzes use a lot of multiple choice (particularly in the younger grades, where kids are not assumed to be literate). Getting a handful of multiple choice questions correct is not a good indicator of having mastered a topic. Once I realized this, I told my kid she had to get all of the questions correct on the quiz 3 times in a row in order to move on.
I have a story I'm fond of telling-- I ordered a pizza from GitHub for pickup. The restaurant was literally closed when I arrived. GitHub customer service instantly "resolved" the issue by ruling in their own favor (I even showed them pictures of the restaurant with chains on the door).
So, of course, I did a chargeback and never used Grubhub again.
My experience with Uber and Grubhub et al is that even they generally tend to side on the consumer, especially for small value transactions like a food order. So either you’re being an unreliable narrator or Grubhub in particular has gone off a cliff. But given that Grubhub is subject to USA chargeback policies still I’m not sure why they would invite a chargeback like that for your case.
> So either you’re being an unreliable narrator or Grubhub in particular has gone off a cliff.
This is one of the dumbest comments I've ever read. You're taking a premise you have no evidence for (UBER and GH have good customer service) and using faulty logic (assuming there are only two possible explanations) to make a conclusion that fits your wrong world view (that my literal direct experience must be incorrect).
Disney uses all this data to "optimize" the park-- for profitability. They're not interested in you, exactly. They've gamified the park, which is what sucks about it now. I was very blessed to have the means to live near Disneyland and be able to afford yearly passes for a decade. I've been to Disneyland at least a thousand times-- and if you think surveillance is a new idea there, you are mistaken.
True story-- I worked as a sysadmin for a number of years, and as such found it useful to carry a knife with me to open boxes-- as receiving equipment was a daily duty for me. My weapon of choice was a CRKT "snap lock" mini knife with a blade no larger than an inch. It was completely inoffensive, but it could open a package quite well and due to the design it was quite safe to keep in your pocket. They don't seem to make this knife anymore-- but be aware it was not the quite large "snap lock" knife CRKT still makes-- this guy about the size of a key.
So, I arrive at Disneyland like any other day. Park in the mega-structure and when I arrive at the security gate, a very respectful gentleman in touristy clothes says to me, "Excuse me sir, can you come over here for a moment?"
He pulls me aside-- he says, "The knife in your pocket. You can't bring that into the park."
I am floored. How could he possibly know about a knife I literally keep on my key ring that doesn't even look like a knife? This is the day I learned that Disney employs security staff to pretend to be park guests.
I said, "Yes, I do have a knife, but I think if I was allowed to show it to you, you might agree that it's not a weapon. If you disagree, then I'll give it to you, so it doesn't enter the park, but don't throw it away because it's a great knife, so consider it a gift."
To his credit, I showed him the knife-- and he said something to the effect of, "That's fine. Have a great day at the park."
To me, this was security done correctly. The guy identified a possible problem (my knife), and was allowed to exercise his own judgement about the situation.
Here [1] is a video someone recorded of a fight that happened in a Disney park. And here [2] is a Reddit thread discussing it. Expand the comments. Numerous people talked about Disney's infamous security and the apparent lack of it in the video. Not a single other person in that thread noticed the four plainclothes officers in the video, two of whom were present throughout almost the whole video.
Can you find them?
This day was grey-hat day. The first one shows up exactly 30 seconds after the incident starts. The one who does the choke-hold departs almost as fast as he arrived and acknowledges his coworker at 5:29. And no one saw them even from their armchairs. Caught on video and still complete ghosts.
I worked for a university here in So Cal. Our lab fell on hard times and we were scrapping equipment. We had a Crimson series (if memory serves) server that had originally cost like 40k. My boss was screaming at me to sell it for something (think early 2000s).
I had to explain to him that we could pay to have it recycled for $85.
So, I'm 42 at the time this took place. I had just gotten a divorce... I met a nice, 24 year old, and we began dating.
She was a great person, but very much a SJW. She had no compunction about making outrageous demands about my personal speech patterns.
Two incidents that stuck out:
I have a cousin who has FAS or is autistic, or both. He texts me 20x a day at least, and I happened to mention it and say my cousin was "retarded". She lit me up saying I should know better than to use that word-- and I explained to her that was the clinical term for people such as him. Was not meant as an insult.
Another time, I made a joke by answering a question she had in a pseudo-gay accent-- a lateral-lisp. She lit me up again for making fun of gay people-- which I was not doing at all. And I explained to her that I went to speech therapy for YEARS to get rid of that exact lisp and it was something that I owned because I was born with it, as opposed to folks who adopted it to indicate group membership.
I got a new land-line-number in the early 2000s. One day, I got a collection call for someone with a Mexican surname. I explained I had just gotten the number and I didn't know who that person was. So naturally, they called twice a day for months. I disconnected the line because I was basically paying $20/m for them to harass me. And here's the part I can't explain-- even after being disconnected, the phone would ring but only for the debt collector.
EDIT:
Another story. Solar Panels in the late early 2010s. The ex-wife's father died years ago, once or twice a week, someone would call her cell phone, ask for her dead father and then try to sell her solar panels. They would not stop. It escalated to calls 6 days a week.
I eventually got fed up and told them I'd be happy to come down there with a pistol if they kept calling. I know, not the best choice, but keep in mind this is after 6 months of daily harassment.
The guy on the other end of the phone flipped out, told me “I was committing a federal crime, and he was going to report me to the police and to expect them shortly.” Then, as an intimidation tactic, he read my full name and address-- except it was my dead FILs information.
I told him to go ahead and put his name on a police report so I knew his name.
The calls stopped for one month, and then started again.