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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • The only reason I wouldn’t go with Postgres is if I planned to do other things on the same machine. MariaDB/MySQL has been around forever. You may find something that requires it — Wordpress1, for example, requires MariaDB (or MySQL but use MariaDB) and doesn’t support Postgres.

    Also, there’s solutions like Docker containers if you are running multiple things on the same server. But if you’re just learning and putting one thing on a Raspberry Pi as a project or whatever, you don’t need to learn Docker yet.

    1 I’m not recommending Wordpress. It’s ancient and has security issues all the time. But over 40% of sites on the Net still use it in some form. (I mean Wordpress.org, the open source project. The Wordpress company seems to be having some “crazy CEO” drama at the moment.)







  • Helene’s size shocked me but the storm surge for Katrina was unusually extreme. It was a well organized Category 5 and then weakened to a strong 3 right before landfall.

    To compare with Helene, which was similar in terms of (east to west) diameter but covered much more area overall, with category 4 winds at landfall: the Weather Channel was making a big deal out of the 8ft storm surges. During Katrina, the Mississippi Gulf Coast had a 28 foot storm surge. (The Miss. Gulf Coast isn’t that geographically different from the Fla. big bend region but that plays a role too.)

    Helene’s unusual movement speed kept it strong very far inland and caused massive issues in places that rarely see tropical weather. Harvey was the opposite: it stalled over Houston and dumped days of rain on a major metropolis.

    I wish we could update the Saffir Simpson scale to something that takes into account more variables. There are other measurements but no storm is identical in terms of damage potential. A category 5 can not even make landfall whereas something like Hurricane Sandy was a category 1 (or equivalent since it wasn’t technically still a hurricane) when it hit NYC and caused massive damage and flooded subway systems. Sometimes, a storm hitting a place that isn’t used to them can knock over all the trees or flood rivers while a similar storm would be nothing to Miami or New Orleans.













  • That’s why we make a distinction between:

    • formal sciences (math, logic, statistics, etc.)
    • natural sciences (physics, chemistry, geology, etc.), and;
    • social sciences (econ, anthropology, archaeology, etc.)

    People in formal and social sciences don’t put “scientist” on their business card because the popular understanding of the term is a natural scientist in a lab coat doing controlled experiments. You don’t get a nice clean lab to do controlled experiments on societies, economies, or ancient ruins. When you study those things, your degree still usually says “Bachelor of Science” and not “Bachelor of Arts” because the terms “sciences” and “arts” are more expansive than the way we use them in every day conversation.


  • Economics filtered through politics and media can get silly but actual economists doing actual economics create rigorous models (like any science) and most don’t even necessarily make predictions about the future. A cross-discipline academic project on the effects of past coastal erosion might, for instance, have an ecologist, historian, and economist all write separate papers. That’s more common than pontificating on TV.

    Econ is also prone to being misrepresented by politicians because there’s almost always trade-offs in the real world. Like imagine a proposed tax on gas/petrol to fund public transportation. An economist would just predict who will benefit or be harmed but you probably already know exactly what the different political parties and media outlets in your country will focus on.