Boredom may cause teenagers to commit acts of vandalism; it’s not a typical cause for revolution. (That would be things like famine, gross inequality, severe injustices and so on.)

From the article: “For well over a decade, the reliability data that exists (and I think this is backed up by the anecdotal experience that mechanics who work on Volvos have) is that Volvo reliability is mediocre to poor, but of course Volvo forums are full of people who insist that Volvos are among the most reliable cars and that the data are all wrong.”

The author mentions one explanation, which is that most people driving a Volvo won’t experience a breakdown (and then generalize from that). Another one is of a very different kind known as post-purchase cognitive dissonance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Consumer_...).

A mistake that both Dan and the forum users made, was to discuss averages instead of reliability for certain platforms and/or engine types. Most manufacturers have models with wildly different reliability.

There is a confounding variable, however -- the person is most likely a good dev. It stands to reason that they've had a decent career at least since then.

Yes but as a dev you are shaped by the projects you work on.

It is not necessarily untrue (source: am currently involved in battery R&D). However, the degree to which it is true will vary strongly based on the particular choice of chemistry, what sort of additives/agents are used (e.g. scavengers/getters), cell/pack engineering choices (protection against ingress of outside atmosphere and such), and so on and so forth.

Goes to show that having a creation date placed somewhere near the top of an article or blog post is a good idea.

It's always a good idea, and it's rather an obvious point - not to mention, something schools try to drill into kids since they're single-digit years old.

At this point I treat lack of dating articles as being done intentionally, and as evidence of malicious intent - i.e. that the entity publishing it has a reason they don't want readers to know the creation date, and there's really no reason other than trying to get away with lies or otherwise screw the reader over.

(Above is a heuristic I apply by default; this post is an example of a case-by-case exception, because of the type of site, my impression of articles read in the past, and of the author themselves.)

Dear ChatGPT, how can I patch a hole in my sock?

As a side-gig I taught within the doctoral education program for several high-ranking universities in Europe for about a decade (over a thousand PhD candidates). My impression is that nearly all funding for PhD projects flows to fields like medicine, physics, chemistry, computer science, electronics, and so on. Spending on humanities is absolutely minuscule compared to those.

I don't know, I did grad school in psychology and our grants would have been classified as "Medicine" or "Health" but a huge % of it is fundamentally ideological work rather than basic research. Academia really is a complicated mess, it's not an easy problem.

My first guess was that they used an external brick for the power supply with a relatively low output voltage--that would eliminate a lot of the CE test load. However, a cursory glance at the product photos suggests the power supply sits within the base of the lamp. Maybe the product developer can shed some more light on this. ;-)

That would certainly make certification easier, but as I suspect you understand, wouldnt achieve it alone.

Even if every component was CE qualified, the combination would have to pass its own testing, plus there are a lot more to the standards than just not electrocuting you immediately upon contact.

I can't see any of the energy efficiency labelling that would be required in the UK or EU for example...

1. there's no official mention of any CE / FCC certification

2. I asked shortly after the author offered to answer questions, but there was no response

I'm starting to wonder if this project maybe just shipped without CE / FCC certification because they didn't know it would be required.

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary it certainly seems likely.

Pretty concerning for such a high power device.

Cells specialize based on the presence of certain chemical gradients, for example. These types of 'signals' that guide specialization already become apparent in a very early stage of embryonic development. I don't think that's part of the realm of epigenetics.

I read it in a book called The Epigenetics Revolution, so I'm going to stick with what the author wrote there.

I can’t imagine anyone in my environment becoming really angry over this. Some of them would have to find new time sinks though—-hopefully ones that actually benefit them instead of turning them into commodities.