It is a triangle. The abstraction of lines in non-Euclidean geometry are geodesics and just like three lines form a triangle, so do the geodesics. If you walked along the earth’s surface from the equator to the North Pole and back, taking 90 degrees angles every time, you will have felt that you made a triangle by walking straight in three directions.

The reason the angle sum can be more than 180 degrees is that the sphere has a positive curvature. If you want one with negative curvature and less than 180 degrees angle sum, try to make one on the side of the hole on a torus (look up its curvature if my explanation was lacking).

EDIT: Picture for reference:

The answer is obvious. Depending on the curvature of the object the triangles have higher or lower than 180 degrees angle sums. Flat space just happens to have 0 curvature.

Did not know about this site. It was a nice read and their mission statement is cool. Thanks for sharing! :)

Yeah, hearing about how hard it would be to get tenure dissuaded me from pursuing my original dream of doing a PhD. In retrospect I think I am much happier where I am now than I would’ve been, which really is what matter the most to me now. Freeing myself of the obligation of attaining my goals was actually quite nice.

I misinterpreted your comment and was very pleasantly surprised that something named “rational wiki” would call him out for the crackpot that he is.

Yeah, this is not a nazi bar.

Realistically, how many people build applications themselves? Signal does not have reproducible builds (on Android at least) and depends on Play Services for notifications.

EDIT: Seems they have it now (since 2016). I am getting old.

Loved out of life 👻

If anyone wants to grasp the basics: here is some fun reading (leading on to some beautiful math). Changing the idea of parallelity leads to hyperbolic geometry and other fun stuff. :)

I obviously downloaded a car after seeing that obnoxious anti-piracy ad.

Yeah, kind of. Moderation is tricky and moderating moderators is even worse. I got banned from [email protected] for being a “white moderate”. Was it censorship of non-leftists? No. I am a communist, not a moderate.

There is one rogue mod there banning people right, left and centre and that is a problem, but not one of plain censorship. I would rather say it is frankly the problem of having a bad mod who does not understand their role. I imagine the same happens on .world and other places, albeit under different guises.

Yeah, living in a parliamentary democracy means I have to make an effort to wrap my head around how the US “democratic” institution works. The internal structure of the Democratic Party has more in common with our democratic structure than the structure of their “competing” parties. As a result there is more room for difference within the Democratic Party than within a political party in our system, but the political difference between parties in our system is greater than those within the democratic party.

Whilst it economically is to the right, many of its social policies it endorses are leftist.

My analysis has long been that there is no political will to implement leftist economical policies in the US, i.e. those that really matter in the grand scheme of things, even though there exists a semi-conscious wish for them within the populace. Please do not misunderstand, increasing equity between people of different backgrounds is important, but important single issues such as gay marriage are insufficient if they do not come along with, or better yet, as a product of equity of material conditions. It was all the same with the feminist movement where social advancements were conceded in lieu of increasing their economical statuses, with the division in measurable quantities, such as income or capital ownership still going strong (note I do not advocate changing the ruling elite from one subset of people to another subset of different characteristics, but instead saying that capital ownership should be transferred from the subset to the whole).

Strengthening the political power of the marginalized by increasing the material conditions of their strata is the best way to make social progress, which the ruling elite of the US is painfully aware and which is why they sometimes are willing to skip the first step and reach the inevitable second immediately. The discrepancy between the people’s wants and needs for leftist policies, again conscious or not, and the actual politics of the US, is deeply connected to the Democratic Party’s willingness to concede these social changes without losing the backing of the capital interests that fund them.

Because MSNBC is an American organization and their coverage is American-focused, their bias relative to American politics is what’s relevant here.

I understand what you are trying to say, but I disagree. They are making claims about a lot of news outlets in other countries, which means they cannot present an American skewed perspective as the truth (unless what they really want is to export political views and exert influence domestically and abroad, now we might be talking here).

It doesn’t matter what their beliefs or policy positions are relative to any particular standard, what matters is whether or not their work presents the news accurately or in a way intended to mislead or influence their viewers in favor of one side or the other, which they clearly do.

All reporting should be held to the highest standard. Anyone seriously attempting to critique and comment on reporting at a meta level, should hold themselves to the same, or even a higher standard, for the same reason. What I am essentially arguing is that the MediaBiasFactCheck falls in line with pretty much all of US news as mass propaganda machines in the interest of capital. If you disagree, why do you think they operate at all?

I am not from the US so why should I base my definition of left-wing on the Democratic party (and subsequently arrive upon the wrong conclusion that the Democratic party is leftist)? More importantly, why would you?

If you want to talk relatively, use relative terms. That being said, left of the farthest right is not very useful, which is precisely why I care about the distinction.

We seem to have a different opinion of what is left-wing and what is not. I do not think the Democratic party is left-wing at all. It is centre-right to right (with the Republican party being far-right).

I know of none American left-wing news outlets and the only left-wing bias I know of is truth.

As far as I know all bikes have these. The number is definite proof of ownership, but can of course just be removed by the perpetrator (if they bother).

Yes! Two days ago, someone stole my bike. That is, I had parked it (and locked it) in a bike garage monitored by CCTV at the train station where I commute and when I came back from work my bike was gone and only my broken lock was left. However, as I looked around a little the thieves had not moved it far, only down a floor into the premium “bike hotel” area that is an actual locked in area as well. So I just called the company, and they let me in and gave me my bike back.

Afterwards, I called the police to let them know someone stole my bike and that the whole ordeal was caught on cameras (they have to open an official investigation before the footage can be used due to surveillance laws). As I tried to report the theft (or attempt thereof), I had the following fun conversation with a policeman:

• Me: Explains the circumstances of what happened.
• Policeman: (Interrupts) “Yeah, maybe you should keep that in mind for next time.”
• Me: “Uhm what?”
• Policeman: “Yeah, maybe you should be a little bit smarter with regards to where you put your bike.”
• Me: “Uhm OK, I just told you I put it in the designated parking spot that, as pointed out, is monitored.”

I get that they do not really care about bike theft as they account for 30% of reported thefts, but I mean come on. They obviously moved my bike (along with others, I assume) to a nearby area so they could collect them all in a van later that night and drive off unnoticed. The police could have sent one patrol there at the right time and have them caught red-handed with video footage of the entire ordeal. Incompetence and unwillingness to actually do their work is precisely why there are so many thefts to begin with. Had I said I was a shop owner and had a bike stolen, I am certain they would show up in no time.

TL;DR: Bike got stolen and the police sucks. Thankfully, the thieves sucked marginally less, so I got my bike back.

The EU requires government acquisitions to be publicly announced so that private companies can make offers that the government then must choose from (not freely, mind you, but following some “objective” metrics).

Even though this might sound great to some, it has the downside of promoting commercial services and vendor lock-in up to the point that even if a free and open source alternative exists, it cannot be used unless there also exists some commercial entity behind it that can sell the software and support for it in accordance with the established metrics.

This might be one of the biggest hurdles in the way for Linux adoption, since anyone can claim to do lots of great stuff with SUPERproprietarySOFTWARE^TM and then hold critical services, like healthcare mentioned elsewhere, hostage to their failure to deliver on promises and future bad support.

I can send you an ISO file with more Tux.

Thanks! As I have been learning to love the Nix way of doing things my only regret is missing the great documentation of Arch. Hopefully we can have the best of both worlds in the future!