asciilifeform: and treated with much the same reaction as the 'financial academia' reserves for taleb or mircea_popescu
asciilifeform: but it is not the case that academia rejected schwartz without reading. they read, all right.
asciilifeform: because in order to distinguish the work from 'timecube', you need a) at least a year or two of undergrad physics b) a week or so of sweat
asciilifeform: the only place you can read his eotvos material is his site, which 'suffers' from '90s www design aesthetic and almost everyone spits on first sight
asciilifeform: al schwartz was rejected from, iirc, a dozen journals.
asciilifeform: the point is that no such thing is printable today.
asciilifeform: the translator did not lose them. they weren't there.
asciilifeform: muppets walk in, in search of muppetry (it is an iron law that a work of muppetry must reference other such works)
asciilifeform: academic librarians, incidentally, are merely doing their jobs. they keep things around which are often-requested, and tend to slowly discard what remains.
asciilifeform: when i came to this place, the latter were perhaps 1 in 20. now they're around half.
asciilifeform: in any academic library, there are books which are actually about something, and there are also those that were printed to pad a muppet career
asciilifeform: even with respect to the 'dead trees', the decay is rapid enough to be seen with naked eye
asciilifeform: every other major discipline has its own version thereof.
asciilifeform: less than one tenth of the subscription cost of one (!) typical journal.
asciilifeform: but moral principles against giving a scammer what he wants, won the day.
asciilifeform: i briefly considered subscribing to an 'audited' class (no grade) just to count as undergrad, to score the goods
asciilifeform: my 'industrial' library subscription merits checking out of books, but not interlibrary loan nor access to anything requiring a password
asciilifeform: and many (most?) journals no longer demand simply an ip within 'blessed' ranges, but actual login
asciilifeform: decimation: they were recently made login-only
asciilifeform: not much of a loss, however. the good stuff is usually decades-old and findable either in the (shrinking...) dead tree collections, or w4r3z
asciilifeform: speaking of my rotten old uni, i'm no longer permitted to read the electronic journals for any amount of money☟︎
asciilifeform: not even to mention the uranium in sea water.
asciilifeform: decimation: deep in the sewage beneath the city streets, there is almost certainly a golden ring. or dozen.
asciilifeform: decimation: i've 'eaten quite enough of the egg to know that it is rotten.'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: america article << are you sure you meant fermat's problem and not poincare's ?
asciilifeform: 'western media' is a steady diet of the archetypical 'honey don't forget to refuel the reactor, milk the bear, and turn us in to the kgb.'
asciilifeform: ben_vulpes: lol asciilifeform is the guy who shows up to work to push the right button << if you're thinking of my day job (vs moonlight gig, where i also push a button) - that firm folded. i do something quite like actual work now.
asciilifeform: 'Unlike the powder form, the liquid packets have indistinct borders and can therefore resemble regular bowel content. That means a suspected drug mule would have to be processed all the way through to a CT scan' (from same site)
asciilifeform: then saw, years later, that it was of course done long ago
asciilifeform: and thought 'this ought to be mechanized'
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: laugh, but i thought about this as a boy. mother had (still has! we dragged it along to usa!) an east german knitting machine. manually-cranked, but you get to set patterns with myriad knobs and switches.
asciilifeform: or the hell where you're responsible for (and are the only available set of hands) for a missing magic ingredient in six different angry kitchens
asciilifeform: there's the hell where you come up with things to do, none of which are rehashes of previous, ten times faster than you physically could do them, for instance
asciilifeform: and this being printed on the crate, no less.
asciilifeform: verizon's turd << what i can't fathom is who would willingly pay for this. it is quite like offering a door lock that is 's3cu43!!!11!' except for rapist, for whom it opens automagically and without fuss
