jacobolus

5 ms·

31.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
There's no inherent issue with it. It just requires doing a bunch of additional design work, which is not free.
32.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
You are misunderstanding. The Nebula people were previously using the Whitney typeface. The organization that produced/sells Whitney changed ownership and the licensing became prohibitively expensive overnight. They wanted something th
33.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
From your OCW link, you can see the Spring 2006 version of the course has syllabus, lecture notes, readings, lab assignments, and 2 quizzes available, but no videos. Separately, videos of the 2020 version of the course are on YouTube: htt
34.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
This use of "logging" comes from the "logbook", a book recording what happened on a ship, which was called that because a literal log (i.e. part of a tree) attached to a rope was used to measure the ship's speed. Se
35.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
Some OCW courses have lecture videos, while others do not.
36.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
Personally I like books, but there are also many, many lecture videos on YouTube, some of them excellent (though I think they could still be better with bigger production teams and higher budgets). For college-level technical subjects, ther
37.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
I don't have a problem with Khan's site existing, but it's disappointing that often answers to requests for learning materials/ideas begin and end with Khan Academy. My personal opinion is that Khan's videos are rou
38.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
For what it's worth, the linked article has only en dashes. (I have no idea whether LLMs use en dashes.)
39.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
> The radians became popular in the 19th century Something akin to radians was widely used in ancient India. That is, sine tables constructed for a circle with circumference 360·60 (angular minutes) and radius 3438 ≈ 360·60/2π. In
40.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
Dickens is full of extremely theatrical scenes. The characters are often a caricature, but the caricature is so finely drawn that it is tremendous fun. (Nobody should be ashamed for having read or not read some work though, or for having en
41.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jacobolus/HalfTan
42.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
You might enjoy the much longer and more detailed article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesics_on_an_ellipsoid which discusses the context.
43.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
If you want a single number (e.g. you are trying to serialize a lot of data), in many contexts you can replace the coordinates (cos θ , sin θ ) with the stereographic projection h = tan ½ θ = sin θ / (1 + cos θ ). Converting ba
44.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
The biggest problems were various supply shocks associated with the pandemic and its aftermath and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Biden admin brought down inflation much faster than even optimistic economists predicted, while maintain
45.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
I hate that people keep trying to add LLM spam to Wikipedia, imposing extra work on the volunteers trying to write articles. I hate that people keep posting LLM spam on social media sites that at some point in the past mostly consisted of h
46.
by jacobolus 1mo ago
The Antikythera mechanism is 4 centuries after Thales, during which time there was extensive additional study done by Greek astronomers. Evidence of old solar eclipse predictions seems pretty sparse; I can't figure out when the first s
47.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
Sorry, typo: 585 BC
48.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
Thales' supposed prediction of a solar eclipse is not considered plausible by experts in the history of astronomy. At the time and for long afterward there was no sufficiently accurate data / theory to predict solar eclipses. Ther
49.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
"Original Cast" is a record label that sells records of obscure musical theater shows. Usa is a city in Japan, and according to the internet the "Made in USA" thing is a joke or myth. As far as I can tell both of your sp
50.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
> overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education People benefit greatly from external human feedback, but 1:1 tutoring (with a good tutor) is roughtly an order of magnitude more effective and efficient
51.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
This will possibly help region-central cities keep a small proportion of the jobs that have moved to the biggest national/international cities. It's not going to help rural villages.
52.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
He made a previous video about washboarding: https://practical.engineering/blog/2026/6/2/why-roads-get-wa...
53.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
Larry Sanger's "life's work" is trying to destroy or undermine Wikipedia. He needs to give it up. He was involved in the project for a very brief time. He immediately despised the volunteer community, couldn't handl
54.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
The login gating on Twitter was relatively recent (within a year or two, IIRC) before Musk took over, and also relatively mild. Non-logged-in users could still read most tweets, conversations, lists, etc. It was annoying and user-hostile th
55.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
It's a cute little optimization puzzle they made for people to solve, with lawn mowing as a graphical hook to make the problem more approachable and fun. Similarly, my kids have a physical logic puzzle where the theme is putting plasti
56.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
You can have high information density and still not have words running into each-other. Taking all of the space out from around text and information graphics makes them less legible, even for experienced "power users". I think t
57.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
Yes, it's "number of prescriptions" (but not "number of people prescribed" or "number of doses"). One person could be prescribed an antibiotic (or multiple) several times a year. I'm amazed that there
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by jacobolus 2mo ago
The "hornworm" caterpillars leave amazing poops behind. They look like (not so) little green grenades. Their moths are important pollinators of some nice native flowers.
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by jacobolus 2mo ago
Strunk and White promote all sorts of prescriptivist nonsense, taking arbitrary personal preferences and elevating them to sacred rules (including many which they themselves constantly violate because they don't accord with idiomatic E
60.
by jacobolus 2mo ago
As you say, the current profoundly corrupt Supreme Court majority will make up whatever justification they need to get the outcome they want, case by case, and don't believe in the concept of precedent, even their own. The only thing t

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