Expert (?)

Expert system (the dumb) has these limitations: common sense, inspiration or intuition and flexibility to apply in the semi-relevant field. Experts (the sensible) decide based on their overall view of the occurred problem, but expert system has not enough information. Experts know their lack of knowledge and the limits of their information in dealing with new problems, but expert systems have narrow knowledge domain and just work when they are developed for specific or very specific problems. (source)

Unfortunately, off-the-shelf education can often make human just an expert system. The actual learning experiences: knowing what works and what doesn't, how and why, conceptualizing concepts across different phenomena; that make human an actual expert.

jacks of the trades: vehicle edition

Japan is quite a fascinating places when it comes to cars. The country has developed its automotive industry with quite a unique identity after WW2 but still likes the global "style" of automobile. Within the country, the are also subcultures associated with particular group of people, e.g. bosozoku, ricer, etc.

The Japanese consumers have indeed learnt a thing or two about cars when it comes down to pragmaticism of car ownership. Typical car ownership scenario in Japan involves family of 3 with one 4-seater kei or 5-seater compact hatchback; or family of 4/5 with one 7-seater (usually wagon) and a kei.

But, farmers, with ample subsidy from local government to run their business, regulated [high] price of agricultural produce, extended family living together within the same land plot, and relatively cheaper living cost in rural areas; have some spare change and purchasing power. And when they go for cars, oh boy, they GO!

This morning, I realized a farmer family in my town has five cars in their open-layout garage: just a roof with plastered floor. Those five cars are: a Subaru SUV,  a BMW station wagon, a Daihatsu kei, a Nissan kei truck, and a Mazda sedan.

Later I noticed that the Subaru SUV is no longer there, now there is a Mazda SUV.

The immediate neighbor has a Lexus, a Toyota wagon, and three keis. And the next neighbor collects Porsches, and drives quite a VW. Oh boy.

This neighbor just got a BMW replacing the VW for the daily.

 

migrating to a smaller SSD from larger harddrive with GPT partitioning

 A friend recently purchased an SSD (Crucial CT240BX500SSD1) to replace the now-getting-slower HDD (WDC WD5000LPCX)in his laptop. The SSD is smaller so simple dd won't like like what I did previously. Thankfully the old drive was not full and we can cram the content in.

The laptop has optical drive bay which I swapped with 2.5" drive caddy so we can use both the old and new drive together.

I went with FossaPup64 as it fits the only flashdrive within my grasp (1 GB) today. The current version of cfdisk now does support EFI beautifully, we can just mimic the partition table from the old drive, given that we still have the EFI partition, a reserved partition for the recovery mode,and Windows system partition.

Disk: /dev/sda (the new SSD)
Size: 223.58 GiB, 240057409536 bytes, 468862128 sectors
Label: gpt, identifier: 4AFD6168-865F-4702-BD2F-ADF7B40C7458

Device          Start         End     Sectors     Size Type
/dev/sda1        2048      534527      532480     260M EFI System           
/dev/sda2      534528      567295       32768      16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda3      567296   468862094   468294799   223.3G Microsoft basic data

Disk: /dev/sdb (the old HDD)
Size: 465.78 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Label: gpt, identifier: 1C7B31D6-E6ED-4F17-B1A5-F3CA5D141DB0

Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/sdb1       2048    534527    532480   260M EFI System                  
/dev/sdb2     534528    567295     32768    16M Microsoft reserved
/dev/sdb3     567296 974725119 974157824 464.5G Microsoft basic data
/dev/sdb4  974725120 976773119   2048000  1000M Windows recovery environment

mkfs.ntfs -f /dev/sda3
mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/sda3 /mnt/sda3
mount -t ntfs /dev/sdb3 /mnt/sdb3 (so as not to accidentally delete things)
rsync -rtvu /mnt/sdb3 /mnt/sda3

The business is then about reinitializing the loaders in the boot/system partition with bcdedit business. Then, profit!

A man of birds

If only more professors share his perspective on scientific archiving. http://shankarraman.in/2021/03/31/why-i-will-not-review-or-write-for-elsevier-wiley-and-other-commercial-scientific-journals/

My take on this, knowing that sci-hub has already  had such broad impact on scientific dissemination and it won't go anywhere anytime soon, there are some things we can do [prolly] right away to sort things out, harmonizing the need of academia and the openness of knowledge:

• entrust articles archiving to public libraries, they know how to index things,
• article processing fees go to paying those librarians (just add a floor to the amount so that if the journals aren't very popular, those librarians can still get by),
  
• hire server space from the likes of Google, just like porn sites do,
• stop making citation counts (IF, h-index, CI, etc) as a measure of how capable a person is in their field; just do an actual interview,
• start making friends in the academia, exchange emails, do actual discussions!
  

Academia should realize that scientific reputation goes much more beyond citation counting (it probably tells a bit about the article's in-site readership though, but not much more).