bluenose69

10 ms·

61.
by bluenose69 2y ago
This following book may be of interest to some people in this discussion thread. It's a re-issue of a book published decades prior, so of course it is not up-to-date. But it is deeply researched and really quite fascinating. Munk, W
62.
by bluenose69 2y ago
Slide rules were a great teaching aide, because they required you to (1) keep track of powers of 10 for yourself, and (2) understand the exponential difficulty of seeking more digits in a result. The first point lets you guess the order of
63.
by bluenose69 2y ago
I came here to see if there was an open link yet.
64.
by bluenose69 2y ago
Neal Stephenson has a good novel that deals with this ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell )
65.
by bluenose69 2y ago
I imagine some of us reading this learned to program before bitnet was a thing. Punched cards. Paper tape. Booting by entering a lot of binary numbers with toggle switches. Good times. Oh, and that ancient Fortran code? It still works
66.
by bluenose69 2y ago
The historical notes are a great strength of this book. As for learning the material, from what you've written, you would likely be better off with the sort of books used in first and second year university. A way to find good ones is
67.
by bluenose69 2y ago
I bought some software many years back. The serial number had 6 or so digits in it. At one point, I contacted the developer for some other purpose, and pointed out that I had made my purchase as soon as I heard about the product. He told
68.
by bluenose69 2y ago
This is spot-on. HR is bad, but at least writing is not their main job, so I'm willing to cut them some slack. My main concern is the writing I see coming out of the Public Relations and Communications departments. Writing is not exact
69.
by bluenose69 3y ago
Yup, I knew a postdoc once who didn't like to say litre; the first time I first heard him say "mole per dm cubed" I didn't know what he meant. (He also had an accent.)
70.
by bluenose69 3y ago
The film "It's quieter in the twilight" might be of interest to folks on this thread. I saw it on Amazon Prime, but I think it is available on quite a few platforms, according to https://www.itsquieterfilm.com&#x2
71.
by bluenose69 3y ago
I was surprised to read "Employing this strategy, the researchers measured glucose concentrations as small as a few millionths of a mole" in an article published on an NIST website. I fear that they, like so many organizations, mu
72.
by bluenose69 3y ago
I would have thought that lots of folks had watched the "The Durrells in Corfu" TV series (PBS Masterpiece Theatre) and then did some research on the family. I don't know whether this is available online, but I can recommend
73.
by bluenose69 3y ago
I remember once reading an opinion piece that suggested that most papers should trim the "introduction" section greatly, instead referring to key review papers or textbook entries. Although I've never followed this advice --
74.
by bluenose69 3y ago
For the macOS version, the docs suggest turning off font smoothing. This might not be something users want to do.
75.
by bluenose69 3y ago
I just tried it in R. The relevant package seems to be "arrow", so I did install.packages("arrow") and then I did ?read_parquet to get an example. I tried the example, and got the error message as fol
76.
by bluenose69 3y ago
Also, an analysis shows that Dias' thesis was largely (21 percent) plagiarized [1, 2]. 1. https://www.science.org/content/article/plagiarism-allegatio... 2. https://www.science.org/do/10.
77.
by bluenose69 3y ago
In their paper (1), the authors state that R is to relate to S, but also to, in their words, "part to celebrate our own efforts". (Note their first names!). It's a great paper, by the way. 1. Ihaka, Ross, and Robert Gentlema
78.
by bluenose69 3y ago
Julia was named because it was a "pretty name" ( https://www.infoworld.com/article/2616709/new-julia-language... )
79.
by bluenose69 3y ago
The phrase "2 MW of energy" makes no sense based on units. Shouldn't writers (and editors) be required to at least take high school physics or chemistry?
80.
by bluenose69 3y ago
On a bit of a Graham Green kick lately. This happens every few decades.
81.
by bluenose69 3y ago
Thanks for the link! As a fountain pen addict, I found the video captivating. I was curious, though, as to why the person was printing, not writing. Sad.
82.
by bluenose69 3y ago
It takes of order 6 months to do the work described in a single paper. Even if we imagine someone watching the videos at double speed, it would take 3 months per paper. And that's for an expert who can understand the material. Folks do
83.
by bluenose69 3y ago
Although I use markdown (and similar) for memos, I turn to latex for longer and more complex material. A lot of this is just because latex has been a standard for publishers in my field since I started (approximately a thousand years ago).
84.
by bluenose69 3y ago
I stopped reading the article at "Life is a double miracle." As is so often the case, discussion here on HN is more compelling than the article.
85.
by bluenose69 3y ago
A web search on "ax y" gave me the following ... maybe that's the answer. Ax = y
86.
by bluenose69 3y ago
That's a great image. Thanks for sharing.
87.
by bluenose69 3y ago
I remember when linux came on a floppy disk. I just read that the linux floppy-disk controller code is being orphaned. Things change.
88.
by bluenose69 3y ago
If you're interested in popularity, versus change in popularity, see the "Very Long Term History" section of the website. The consistent winner is C, which was the ranked number 1 or 2 in each of the eight report pentads. C
89.
by bluenose69 3y ago
I've seen similar things where I work. In a new building, the architects called for small air vents that would look nice according to some aesthetic criterion. Unfortunately, the vents were so small that, to maintain air flow, the fan
90.
by bluenose69 3y ago
I had to smile at the sentence "It essentially boils down to how much surface area you have to dissipate the heat" in the article :-)

More ›