jacobolus

1539 ms·

1. 3841.▲
   by jacobolus 9y ago

   I dunno, I think the container format sounds pretty reasonable, at least at a high level (I haven’t tried to implement it or anything). Many of those features [choice of lossy or lossless compression; extensible embedded metadata; multiple
2. 3842.▲
   by jacobolus 9y ago

   At the same time, we do have to collectively make decisions with real impacts, involving some people benefiting and some others getting hurt, and not always can everyone be persuaded to sign onto the socially agreed decision. * * * But for
3. 3843.▲
   by jacobolus 9y ago

   If you actually need to use this seriously there are ways of customizing keyboard layouts and text input on every platform and every reasonable text editor.
4. 3844.▲
   by jacobolus 9y ago

   Why do you think that? The basic ideas of group theory are definitely accessible to grade schoolers, and even the fancier parts of an undergraduate group theory course (Sylow theorems, etc.) are accessible to high school students who go thr
5. 3845.▲
   by jacobolus 9y ago

   On all my browsers here it animates smoothly enough (good frame rate), but every time it renders changing parts of a frame there’s some flashing effect, and as a result when the car is moving fast looking at the background is pretty unpleas
6. 3846.▲
   by jacobolus 9y ago

   Or in some cases they weren’t, and civilizations collapsed.
7. 3847.▲
   by jacobolus 9y ago

   To the grandparent poster: A gnomonic projection is not the most useful for these particular maps, because the distances are so long that distortion starts getting out of control. Better would be some kind of azimuthal projection centered o
8. 3848.▲
   by jacobolus 9y ago

   Try reading it. Definitely accessible to HS kids if not younger.
9. 3849.▲
   by jacobolus 9y ago

   Your first two links seem like isolated examples of crimes for law enforcement to handle. Your third link is about migration of women have been mutilated to England. I’m not sure what you are trying to say with it, or what it has to do with
10. 3850.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    As far as I can tell many cultures throughout the world are changing extremely rapidly in response to collapse of agrarian and nomadic societies, urbanization, education and economic opportunity for women, birth control, proliferation of co
11. 3851.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    One big point of “Western civilization” (religious mores about cousin marriage and inheritance; the classical liberal / republican tradition with religious toleration and representative government; science; European legal traditions wi
12. 3852.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    Yeah, why bother with any kind of personal ethics? If you don’t take the dirty money, someone else will always be found, so it might as well be you, right? I mean look around, those guys over there got away with literal war crimes. For that
13. 3853.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    ----
14. 3854.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    I would reply at length and quote extensively from every section of the book, but 15 years of internet arguments has convinced me there’s really little point and it would be largely a waste of time. If you can even flip through the pages in
15. 3855.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    A big point of hand counting is displaying numbers silently across the room. Thumb-counting finger sections is almost worthless for this. Counting to yourself using hands is not really all that useful for mental arithmetic, IMO. I don’t con
16. 3856.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    Dividing by both 6 and 8 (also 2, 3, 4, 9, 12, 16, 18, ...) is easy in a duodecimal system. In a sexagesimal system it’s additionally easy to divide by 5, 10, 15, etc. I’m not sure what your point is. If you have a family of 7 or 11, you’r
17. 3857.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    The ancient Mesopotamian (Sumerian/Akkadian) system was floating point. The exponent was implied rather than explicitly written though. So 1/120, 1/2, 30, and 1800 were all written the same way. Modern 'scientific notati
18. 3858.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    We get the strictly positional numeral system from the Indians. But base 10 was also used by people in various other places and some earlier (Greeks, Minoans, Egyptians, Romans, Semites, Chinese, ...) The source for most (all?) base ten sys
19. 3859.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    I think you basically entirely missed the point of the book, to the point of obtuse deliberate misreading. Given the amount of work you clearly put into your review, and your apparent ability to write (and presumably comprehend) coherent se
20. 3860.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    You might use them more if they were more convenient in your number system.
21. 3861.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    Plenty of people use base 12, and various famous people have recommended its general use throughout history. If you’re curious, check out the US and British duodecimal societies (now “dozenal” societies) http://www.dozenal.org
22. 3862.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    Can anyone find the original paper referenced here? Searching the journal’s archive and Google scholar isn’t turning it up.
23. 3863.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    Usable implementations shouldn’t take decades if people put the research and development work in, though the basic UI research probably needs at least 8–10 years of some top-class people thinking hard about it. I’m just speculating that it
24. 3864.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    The interface for reading on screens sucks. The hardware (e.g. iPads) is getting there but the software is still miserable. Hard to browse, bookmark, annotate (either in place or separately), cross-reference, cut and paste (as with scissors
25. 3865.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    Also sad is that recent republication of classic book titles and too much publication of new niche works is done print-on-demand, with poor quality paper, poor printing, and very flimsy binding. If I’m going to spend $100 for a new book, I
26. 3866.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    Dramatically more convenient is having 3 grocery stores within 4 blocks, so you can buy groceries in small batches every other day, or wheel a wagon over for a larger load.
27. 3867.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    It had already been implemented in the alpha versions of TextMate 2 earlier. But it’s quite plausible that the two implementations were independent. ... Unlike most of Sublime Text which was a close copy of TM features except for the abilit
28. 3868.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    I want open chat protocols so I can use whatever client I damn well please (e.g. Adium, Pidgin, some terminal thing, or a bot made from a little python script, ...). Whenever I’m stuck using a centralized service (Twitter, facebook, some we
29. 3869.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    I recommend this lecture about the history of ketchup, which explains the relation to soy sauce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iYwUh1Hdho
30. 3870.▲
    by jacobolus 9y ago

    6 days to go in the kickstarter map https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1407076797/a-map-of-the...