bloak

43 ms·

601.
by bloak 5y ago
And here's a gzip quine for anyone who likes that sort of thing: ( echo H4sIAAAAAAAAA5Pv5mCIeLzKnIGZgYHh/38GEYbX/+WxiDl1 ; echo KB5hIIJ1TXfrBNeU3DznNGYG78SS1AKgEchsAEthdGVwAAAA ) | base64 -d | gunzip > quine.gz
602.
by bloak 5y ago
The situation of Cornish is rather different from the situation of Yiddish. Cornish entirely disappeared as a native language for about 200 years and the surviving literature, mostly from the 15th/16th century, was so meagre that many
603.
by bloak 5y ago
> Or the speed traps that just trigger a red light. This sounds interesting. Since when have they been doing this, and do you have a link to photos, video or a more detailed description?
604.
by bloak 5y ago
Amazon's description of "The Burnout Society" says: "His work is presented here in English for the first time." Interestingly, Amazon doesn't say anything about the book being a translation, but goodreads.com n
605.
by bloak 5y ago
The "right to be forgotten" relates to personal data on a living person, not works of literature, unless, I suppose, it's biographical literature about people who are still alive.
606.
by bloak 5y ago
When I read about the history of science I get the impression that almost everything of interest happened between about 1860 and about 1960. Since then there has been continuous quantitive progress in some areas, such as "Moore's
607.
by bloak 5y ago
"Title insurance" isn't much of a thing in the UK. I think this is because the Land Registry gives you something similar as part of the service. Random quote from the web, from the Law Society Gazette, no less: "We alrea
608.
by bloak 5y ago
Yes, it looks like they're fruit botanically and culinarily, but they're vegetables "agriculturally", whatever that means.
609.
by bloak 5y ago
There is at least one proposal for a properly pronounceable gender-neutral version of German: https://delesystem.wordpress.com/ -> https://geschlechtsneutral.net/ Yes, it's quite a big change, but p
610.
by bloak 5y ago
Also, some typewriters did not have !: you had to type ' BACKSPACE . Vaguely related to people typing O for 0 and l for 1: UK number plates do not distinguish between 0 and O and between 1 and I so software that handles registration nu
611.
by bloak 5y ago
I use Perl all the time for short programs, up to a few hundred lines. The main advantages of Perl are that it's already installed on all the systems I use and the language itself is not changing: Perl scripts I wrote 20 years ago stil
612.
Lost in translation? The one-inch truth about Netflix’s subtitle problem(theguardian.com)
1 points by bloak 5y ago|0 comments
613.
by bloak 5y ago
With cats it's the other way round: the humans for cats.
614.
by bloak 5y ago
I for one am not going to watch a video on effective writing!
615.
by bloak 5y ago
All living things on earth are related, but Julius Caesar is thought not to have any living descendants. (He had a son who died young, and a daughter who died in childbirth, and a grandchild who died young, or something like that. Of course
616.
by bloak 5y ago
I agree. Probably most people who know what "transcendental" means would guess that the number described is transcendental. However, only a small proportion of people who know what "transcendental" means are capable of p
617.
by bloak 5y ago
If you've tried playing Pelmanism with young children you'll know that memory starts deteriorating before you reach the age of 20. So perhaps it is OK. Pelmanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(c
618.
by bloak 5y ago
Almost everyone's memory seems to get noticeably worse with age, so almost everyone complains about it from time to time. Also, stress and lack of sleep can temporarily impair memory. So it's probably not Alzheimer's!
619.
by bloak 5y ago
In a traditional cryptic crossword each individual word has at least two independent things in the clue referring to it, for example, in an unrealistically simple case, "it means X" and "it's an anagram of Y", so ea
620.
by bloak 5y ago
Is this the "differential" technique in which you have a number of ground stations observing each satellite, so you can compute the positions of the satellites, and the device that wants to know its own position both observes the
621.
by bloak 5y ago
There are plenty of videos on YouTube of wild koalas interacting with humans, sometimes having invaded people's houses apparently motived by curiosity. It seems to me that koalas are a lot more intelligent than you might expect from th
622.
by bloak 5y ago
Unfortunately this doesn't work with banknotes ... unless you can find lots of people who are willing to accept a banknote that appears to have been torn into two pieces and then stuck together again with sticky tape, with the line of
623.
by bloak 5y ago
Yes, but there are degrees of "dark" ... According to timeanddate.com, the latest sunrise in Durness (NW Scotland, on the mainland) is at 09:09, at the end of December, but "civil twilight" is then at 08:16, so if school
624.
by bloak 5y ago
They observe the crescent moon just after sunset. Although officially the month starts when an official sees the new moon, I wonder to what extent they predict in advance when the moon is likely to be visible and then, in order to avoid unn
625.
by bloak 5y ago
While we're on the topic... A UK passport has a "surname" field and a "given names" field. But a recent UK birth certificate has a single name field in which the "surname" part is distinguished by being wr
626.
by bloak 5y ago
> with "X" as a first name and "AE A-XII" as a middle name It sounds as though they allowed the middle name to contain a space, which doesn't match my mental model but perhaps that's how they do it in Califo
627.
by bloak 5y ago
> »« is allowed but mostly used in Switzerland I think it's «...» in Switzerland, while »...« is widely used in several countries, including Germany, and is the "main" system arguably only in Denmark. See https:/&#x2
628.
by bloak 5y ago
> Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and said, as his foot rebounded, “I refute it thus.”. Well, I don't really like that: it just doesn't look nice to me. I would suggest one of the following: Dr Johnson kicked a large rock and s
629.
by bloak 5y ago
It might be a good idea to take account of how long the door stays open. For me, making a cup of tea involves opening the fridge door twice but for less than a second on each occasion: to get the milk out, and to put the milk back. There&#x
630.
by bloak 5y ago
National flags are not in general a very good way of labelling languages. There are far more languages in the world than countries. In any case, since people are looking for a language they understand it's good enough to write each lan

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