evanb

26 ms·

1. 271.▲
   by evanb 4y ago

   Great, let's definitely teach computers to play a game that requires strategic thinking, a robust theory of mind, the capacity to lie convincingly to your enemies, and well-timed betrayal, with the goal of world domination. Can't
2. 272.▲
   by evanb 4y ago

   The [bugs] tag on the Mathematica stack exchange has 1900+ questions https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/bugs Here are two that I found: the character table of some finite groups weren't sq
3. 273.▲
   by evanb 4y ago

   Mathematica has so much closed-source hidden stuff under the hood that there's a question of correctness. I've certainly found bugs / wrong mathematical facts before.
4. 274.▲
   by evanb 4y ago

   When the BlueGene/Q came online for testing and early science in Livermore, some of my colleagues burned out a number of power supplies. IBM wanted to make sure they weren't doing some "trivial" task; I guess while(true
5. 275.▲
   by evanb 4y ago

   You can see a hanging chain model in the basement of Sagrada Familia; it's extremely impressive and an enormously clever form of analog computational architecture!
6. 276.▲
   by evanb 4y ago

   -----8=-----
7. 277.▲
   by evanb 4y ago

   I have one as-yet-unredeemed gift certificate from my girlfriend for a left-handed bread knife. They're SO hard to find. Living in Germany I've wandered into multiple knife stores and ask and the people there all say "I kno
8. 278.▲
   by evanb 4y ago

   A related puzzle is: why is sin(333) + sin(355) = sin(22) [angles in radians] good to 1e-9? It's easy to say why it's good to 1e-3, a bit more work to show it's 1e-6, and just a little bit more to say why it's
9. 279.▲
   by evanb 4y ago

   "Shit outta luck"
10. 280.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    For those curious, this is often described as the look-elsewhere effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
11. 281.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    Carter pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers via a similar blanket proclamation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_4483 . But they're relatively rare.
12. 282.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    You might like this project https://www.spertilo.net/ which started as the Grateful Dead Time Machine.
13. 283.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    This is presumably a (physical) space-saving decision. The stop looks like it's right next to the 1. But dialing a digit requires moving the dial. So how can you dial 1 if the stop is adjacent and immovable? It looks like the answe
14. 284.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    "set" has more than 400 different senses listed in the OED.
15. 285.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    Billions of people celebrate religious observances every 7th day.
16. 286.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    Various species exhibit parthenogenesis under (sometimes unusual) circumstances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis No evidence of human parthenogenesis ('virgin birth') is known. The immaculate con
17. 287.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    AND! I forgot to mention the LQCD calculations of the muon's anomalous magnetic moment, g-2, which is a precision observable currently being studied by an experiment at Fermilab. This quantity (g-2) is dominated by electrodynamic effe
18. 288.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    "Solve the theory" is bit of a wish-washy expression. It depends on what you are interested in. What it really means is that it provides an approximation-free prescription for extracting observables from the QCD action. Given so
19. 289.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    I do lattice QCD. It's not that we have a problem because of float/double inexact and limited arithmetic. It's that we have a finite amount of RAM. So the thing we'd want is not continuous values but continuous regi
20. 290.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    > I guess the (crazy, I know) assumption that I made is that I have some analytical, symbolic expression for a function that describes the state of the universe at every point. This is the error. All you have is some partial differentia
21. 291.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    I learned your term for it from https://xkcd.com/243/
22. 292.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    Neither are Thor or Anubis.
23. 293.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    While Maxwell's equations certainly can be written with quaternions, they were not originally written that way. Maxwell originally just "wrote them out", meaning component-by-component. He had 20 equations! That's why
24. 294.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    I was acting with the principle of charity, assuming that you did not actually understand the sense the above poster meant. Hoping that you would apply the same principle to my comment, I pointed out in my original response that that sense
25. 295.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    I'm not interested in fighting on the internet. You asked > How did the 13th amendment codify slavery? It codified it the above sense.
26. 296.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/ > Section 1 > Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall
27. 297.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    Not OP but (classical) electromagnetic waves, water waves, and sound waves can all be split arbitrarily.
28. 298.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    The headline photo is a huge queue of tuktuks waiting for gas, so maybe it's not as naive a question as you suggest.
29. 299.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    I’d have gone with digit.
30. 300.▲
    by evanb 4y ago

    In Sweden in 1712 there was a February 30th. But never a 31st. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates