Syzygies

47 ms·

481.
by Syzygies 5y ago
The Wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language) is terse but matches what I've read elsewhere over the years: Forth is both easy to implement and yields very compact binaries, so it
482.
by Syzygies 5y ago
That, and I'm glad I didn't read "Mensa-level IQs" while drinking coffee, I would have spit all over my keyboard. Mensa? A low threshold, yet smart enough to be in the game if you can find something that really interests
483.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Individuals are subjected to "alternative minimum tax". Why not corporations?
484.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", "Sapiens" spins a tale. True or not, I can see how these ideas could be dangerous in a mind like Carl Rove's. As a mathematician, I take ideas under consideration, to expand my imagina
485.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Computer Modern is the "plaid shorts" of TeX fonts. I profoundly admire all of Don Knuth's efforts, and I've had the pleasure of a number of conversations with him. He threw in the towel himself, recognizing that artists
486.
by Syzygies 5y ago
The programming book genre needs to be redefined. In college I was nearly thrown out of my math major, after giving no evidence of having started a year-in-a-semester modern analysis course, with three weeks to go. (I had been busy with a d
487.
by Syzygies 5y ago
On the contrary, many of us were amused at the birth of the term "data science". With "political science" and "computer science" as examples, we felt that including the word "science" in a field name
488.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Yup. This sent me digging, and I soon found: > The last few weeks, I spent a little time getting Objective-S working well on the Raspberry Pi, specifically my Pi400. It's a really wonderful little machine, and the form factor and p
489.
by Syzygies 5y ago
I scripted in C for the longest time, after thousands of lines it was in muscle memory, and I could reuse boilerplate. I was profoundly embarrassed to then discover Perl; I felt late to the party, like I'd thawed out of a glacier. Then
490.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Yes, "Guns" is wildly entertaining. Why we stopped at domesticating horses: Donkeys are only mildly irritable. If a Zebra bites you in the thigh your only option is to shoot it. I sensed an intuitive truth to the instructions on m
491.
by Syzygies 5y ago
I'd wondered about this. Baseball pitchers don't throw the worst pitch every time; you'd be expecting it. There has to be game theory here, too. Thanks for articulating it.
492.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Yes. Chez Scheme in particular is a remarkable implementation. Idris 2 for example (a leaner, dependently typed relative of Haskell) relies on Chez Scheme. As a mathematician I don't need a large ecosystem of other people's work.
493.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Compelling analysis. From reading meta-histories such as "Guns, Germs, and Steel" or "Sapiens", I get the impression that various organized religions exploited these same dynamics. I always imagined that Karl Rove had a
494.
by Syzygies 5y ago
My recollection is that implementing this algorithm is fraught with peril: Some very smart people have coded it with mistakes that only appear for rare bit patterns.
495.
by Syzygies 5y ago
At the 1996 MacWorld there was a bin of floppies for Earthlink's dial-up service supporting the then-new World Wide Web. They weren't prepared for the server crush. I made nine attempts to create an account, before succeeding. Eac
496.
by Syzygies 5y ago
> "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?" Everywhere else he had to invent stuff to parody the language. He presents Haskell straight up.
497.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Processing parentheses is still parsing. It's kindergarten-level parsing, but it's still parsing. I've written thousands of lines of scheme code preprocessed to eliminate most parenthesis. I'm convinced Lisp self-asphyx
498.
by Syzygies 5y ago
> Of course, making such simplifications sort of defeats von Neumann's original purpose Yes. In von Neumann's last book "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata", he thought about machines having viable offspring. This wa
499.
by Syzygies 5y ago
When I play it, one time out of six it sends me to https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
500.
by Syzygies 5y ago
I doubt it. This was mid-80's at Columbia. I'd love to watch it again if you can find it!
501.
by Syzygies 5y ago
For "lay" people, Whitfield Diffie talked at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in 1996 on the politics of communication, with Tim Berners-Lee in the audience. This was one of the best talks I ever attended. The other wa
502.
by Syzygies 5y ago
Yes. My induced psychosis took the form of hyper-rationality, which I diagnosed as a reaction to the intensity of India rather than to the drug. I didn't sleep, and India never completely quiets down; I listened like a dog to every sou
503.
by Syzygies 5y ago
When I traveled with a Canadian colleague to Hyderabad, someone described how few catholics there were in India. He was startled, replying that this was the population of Canada. I was on Lariam as an anti-malarial. He and others could clea
504.
by Syzygies 5y ago
The virus uses our immune system against us. Think Aikido using your opponent's strength, or a gravity assist for interplanetary flight. A modern virus attack is higher order, which is what makes designing vaccines so hard. Screw up, a
505.
by Syzygies 6y ago
My father worked in the research labs at Eastman Kodak (where he later devised the Bayer filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter for digital cameras). In the early 1960's the labs held an open house for
506.
by Syzygies 6y ago
If he was incapacitated slowly, he might have time to don a spacesuit, anticipating this scenario? NASA must know. I've been in a number of situations myself where swift incapacitation would have killed me. This is common.
507.
by Syzygies 6y ago
> nitrogen narcosis sometimes causes inexperienced divers to reach it For those of us who (don't) remember the 60's, experience can take many forms. I remember reaching a depth of 100' in scuba training, and being asked to
508.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Exactly. A proxy.
509.
by Syzygies 6y ago
CO2 is a good proxy for airborne infectious disease risk. Outdoor air is 400 ppm or so, best practice in modern building going into the pandemic was 600 ppm. Get CO2 down to 450 ppm and airborne infectious disease transmission plummets. We
510.
by Syzygies 6y ago
Slide/negative scanners use multiple passes and depth perception to cleanly ignore dust on film. I'm surprised that this wasn't part of ELP's spec to the engineers. A giant fail if they can't even remove this noise

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