bloak

63 ms·

841.
by bloak 6y ago
Since no one else seems to have mentioned the obvious XKCD: https://xkcd.com/949/ Does anyone know why it uses 5 ports (9009-9013)?
842.
by bloak 6y ago
> And if there are 20 left-handers with a graduating class of 180, we might describe their prevalence as 180/20 = 9% lefties. Primary school maths FAIL!
843.
by bloak 6y ago
Or good old short-wave radio. Much lower bandwidth, of course, but good enough for a short message, with a delay for delivery, like an SMS.
844.
by bloak 6y ago
You can really do that, sort of, for example: https://github.com/libnoon/compress The problem, of course, is that you have to decompress the file a large number of times. (The length of that number looks suspiciously s
845.
by bloak 6y ago
It doesn't inspire confidence that the German examples in that response are all wrong. But I can recommend Everett's book "Don't sleep, there are snakes", which is only partly about language.
846.
by bloak 6y ago
I tested everyone in my family with an online test of facial recognition (probably it was https://facetest.psy.unsw.edu.au/ ). The results from the online test did not correlate with our real-life experience: a person who is
847.
by bloak 6y ago
Does anyone reading this have a copy of either of the "repudiated" novels, "The name of action" and "Rumour at nightfall"?
848.
by bloak 6y ago
This sounds rather important. I hope that draft versions of this definitive register will be published online so that the general public can easily check for omissions.
849.
by bloak 6y ago
Apostrophes in street names is a bit of a cause célèbre in the UK. Also, should we treat ' and ’ as equivalent?
850.
by bloak 6y ago
Typically you need several independent name fields because people may use different versions of their name, or entirely different names, in different contexts.
851.
by bloak 6y ago
I don't know about UK-US, but I think I've noticed a difference between the UK and Germany in this respect: in the UK the sign tells people that something is dangerous and gives some hint of why; in Germany it just says "Verb
852.
by bloak 6y ago
Cancelling a public right of way is not easy. If it were, most of them would have disappeared years ago because land owners don't usually appreciate them being there. By the sound of it, the current signage is hardly enticing. But it&#
853.
by bloak 6y ago
I'm surprised something that simple can be protected by copyright. But apparently it is: Wikipedia says so. (I wouldn't trust a BBC journalist to understand the difference between a copyright and a trade mark or even a patent.) I
854.
by bloak 6y ago
Yes. You get about 7 hours of daylight on the shortest day at a latitude of 55°. So nearly all of the population of England could avoid going to/from school in the dark. But Scotland is another matter.
855.
by bloak 6y ago
Your opinion on whether 8 a.m. is too early somewhat depends on your local time zone and clock change customs: see thousands of comments elsewhere! However, 08:00 local astronomical time does seem too early and most European time zones are
856.
by bloak 6y ago
I don't want children to have to travel to or from school in the dark. It's dangerous by bicycle (a lot of children cycle), and unpleasant in any case. If you're at a reasonably high latitude that means you need the middle of
857.
by bloak 6y ago
I think it's education and urbanisation that most directly reduce the population growth. Those are linked to people getting richer.
858.
by bloak 6y ago
> if enough extreme environmentalists share the same thought, then there will be no more extreme environmentalists. Are you suggesting that being an "extreme environmentalist" is an inherited characteristic? Presumably not, bec
859.
by bloak 6y ago
What about false positives when looking for the next header?
860.
by bloak 6y ago
What do you think of his fake Russian accent in "Lobachevsky"? I think it's great. And isn't there a fake Irish accent in one of his songs?
861.
by bloak 6y ago
That's a bad example of how to express age limits. If I've just had my 60th birthday, or perhaps today is my birthday, which applies, or do I have to fill in both forms? Also, is it my age at the time I sign the form, or my age at
862.
by bloak 6y ago
I had an 18-year-old Python script. But it didn't work! And I couldn't make it work! Fortunately I had an even older version of the code in Perl, which did work after some very minor changes. This wasn't scientific code. It w
863.
by bloak 6y ago
Commercially available OCR is amazingly bad. The errors it makes are crazy. For example, if the top of a 'd' is missing it might read it as an 'a', while a human can see that it's identical to all the other 'd&
864.
by bloak 6y ago
Real food chains are cyclic, a bit like in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Ilkla_Moor_Baht_%27at Bad metaphorical usage of the term "food chain" is an example of "office speak". Personally, I don&#
865.
by bloak 6y ago
But that's wrong, too, because the concept is clearly as old as cross-stitch and related forms of embroidery, which go back to the Middle Ages at least.
866.
by bloak 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel : The concept of a "picture element" dates to the earliest days of television, for example as "Bildpunkt" (the German word for pixel, literally 'picture point
867.
by bloak 6y ago
To me it seems disrespectful to publish someone's book under a different name from the one they chose to publish it under. Also, the name "George Eliot" having been chosen by the writer herself rather than by her parents does
868.
by bloak 6y ago
That should be "poring through", I think. (It's not an easy one to remember.)
869.
by bloak 6y ago
Yes, I think you didn't understand. The question was "why". If newline characters (hypothetically) separated lines rather than terminated them, like how commas separate fields in some situations rather than terminate them, th
870.
by bloak 6y ago
How else could you distinguish between a file containing zero lines and a file containing one empty line? (That sounds a bit Zen, doesn't it?)

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