dandrews

20 ms·

151.
by dandrews 14y ago
I like this, and it reminds me of the tagline from Asimov's The Last Question .
152.
by dandrews 14y ago
I'll guess this is the same as the 'unconference' talk that David Nolen gave at the 2012 Conj. He's doing some really spiffy stuff with the new constraint mechanism in core.logic, and this talk was among the best of the week.
153.
by dandrews 14y ago
"[university is] also a good environment for learning from others" Yes, yes, yes. I was delighted by the variety of experiences and interests of my new university chums, after four years of high school and its stultifying homogeneity. I l
154.
by dandrews 14y ago
My Segway LiFeMgPO4 (mfg by Valence) batteries are five years old with 7700 miles. They provide about 90% of the range they did when new. Your "year or 2" is well taken, but suggests cheaper (e.g. some Chinese knock-offs) cells or systems
155.
by dandrews 14y ago
I was struck by the amount of care that was seemingly influenced by fear of litigation. An ambulance driver diverted to a closer e/r despite having a physician onboard. A nurse wouldn't sanction ice chips without the admitting physician's
156.
by dandrews 14y ago
I see that they've been preserved elsewhere: http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Lifeline
157.
by dandrews 14y ago
You make me a bit jealous, rubbing shoulders with Conway and Gosper. Martin Gardner's October 1970 column in SciAm introduced me to cellular automata, and I spent a few hours meticulously tracking generations on a checkerboard before it oc
158.
by dandrews 14y ago
No, you are thinking of the Lumia 900. The N900 was indeed Maemo-based.
159.
by dandrews 14y ago
It'll likely be another ten years after that before the Googlecars are trusted to drive by themselves. I'd love to be able to send my car down the road to pick up my Mom, but the government will probably want to have a responsible driver t
160.
by dandrews 14y ago
Dying at Alcor seems preferable to dying on Mars.
161.
by dandrews 14y ago
Chalk up another one, Bob. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Metcalfe#Incorrect_pred...
162.
by dandrews 14y ago
Careful with this article. They get it wrong, suggesting the possibility of "instantaneous internet connections". No FTL information transfer allowed, kids.
163.
by dandrews 14y ago
I stopped caring much about extra minutes on the road when cruise control became standard equipment - years ago. When I drive a car without cruise I tend to be competitive and aggressive, but with cruise I set it and chill out. People may
164.
by dandrews 14y ago
26 years ago I wrote a BAT file ("kristen") for the household MS-DOS computer, which would play Christmas carols whenever my two-year-old daughter typed her name on the keyboard and pressed the return key. She learned quickly to switch the
165.
by dandrews 14y ago
There was a lot of optimism, 20+ years ago. Read up some. If you have lots of time on your hands, peruse the early sci.physics.fusion archives.
166.
by dandrews 14y ago
Agreed about the "engineer" label. My acquaintances at university were engineering students, and they would themselves correct me if I called them engineers - that requires licensure. (They're not even "engineers in training" until they'v
167.
by dandrews 14y ago
None of these were about garbage collection, which surprises me. Is GC considered a solved problem?
168.
by dandrews 14y ago
And I have, with IBM and Oracle (nee Sun nee StorageTek). Is this a poll?
169.
by dandrews 14y ago
Yes, the number of application cards that require geolocation is vaguely disturbing. You think Google's in your pants now? Just wait until you routinely enable geolocation on your mobile device. (Of course, I'm likely tilting at windmil
170.
by dandrews 14y ago
FOCAL! I spent many hours in front of a PDP-8L and ASR33 that was on loan to my smallish (at the time) university. It was my first exposure to a computer that was smaller than my apartment. 4K 12-bit words, I think it was? I just looked,
171.
by dandrews 14y ago
No shower at the office, otherwise I'd have given up the Volvo for my Raleigh a long time ago. I agree with you about the fitness aspect of bicycle riding, and used to do distance stuff (no racing) until I wore the cartilage down in my lef
172.
by dandrews 14y ago
Yes, I remember the Segway. I've owned a pair for five years and have 13,000 miles between them. It didn't take over the world, but it fits my use case perfectly .
173.
by dandrews 14y ago
You're not thinking of Falkoff/Iverson/Sussenguth's A Formal Description of SYSTEM/360 , are you? http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/class.files.cs2321.html/...
174.
by dandrews 14y ago
Couple of years ago I did this on my shiny new N900, and for a brief period owned one of the world's smallest (if not the smallest) MVS systems. Alas, time marches on and that N900 seems rather old-school now.
175.
by dandrews 15y ago
I did something like this once many years ago for one of my wife's students, a precocious high-schooler who needed to be challenged beyond the elementary Fortran she was teaching at the vocational school. So I outlined the steps it would t
176.
by dandrews 15y ago
"... scientists should be encouraged to share results that perhaps are inexplicable or against current thinking" Exactly. I very much appreciated the openness here, and was frankly more interested in how the issue was going to be resolved
177.
by dandrews 15y ago
Gentoo.
178.
by dandrews 15y ago
Do I have this right? Neutrinos are fermions, carriers of mass, and therefore have no wave characteristics in the two-slit experiment sense. Seems to me that "neutrino radio" is a misnomer?
179.
by dandrews 15y ago
More international cooperation? International competition got us into space to begin with.
180.
by dandrews 15y ago
The original vision for Walt Disney's EPCOT was a radially designed city, where "the pedestrian will be king" (Walt's own words) and electric vehicles are segregated from the streets. See: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/th

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