mcswell

22 ms·

421.
by mcswell 2y ago
I won't disagree with that. I was just comparing two theoreticians; I'm not sure what Greek or Roman I'd pair with Wilkinson. We tend not to know the Greek and Roman engineers by name.
422.
by mcswell 2y ago
As Jack Aubrey said, one must always pick the lesser of two weevils.
423.
by mcswell 2y ago
Larry Hogan would make an interesting VP candidate on Harris's ticket. He's a Republican, but was a two term governor in the blue state of Maryland. (Maryland has a two term limit on the governor, so he's now running for Se
424.
by mcswell 2y ago
What issues that were important back then are still relevant today? That's a serious question, not a snide remark. I guess tariffs are, but (I think) for different reasons. Anything else?
425.
by mcswell 2y ago
As I said in a post above, I resemble that remark--at least sleeping in, once in a while a nap. But I tend to stay awake until close to midnight. (I'm also not in my 80s, at least not yet--just hoping to get there.)
426.
by mcswell 2y ago
Hey, I resemble that remark! (Even if I am younger than Biden or Trump.) But all seriousness aside, what makes you think that matters? I'm not going to vote for someone because they're old, in fact to some extent the opposite--I
427.
by mcswell 2y ago
"They've also normalized the idea of 3rd party software (even games) requiring Admin access to run..." They have? Like what?
428.
by mcswell 2y ago
And Enceladus doesn't have a no trespassing sign.
429.
by mcswell 2y ago
Aristotle was a poor replacement for James Watt.
430.
by mcswell 2y ago
Sort of related: I was at a restaurant last night where a sports channel was playing a poker tournament. Paint drying would have been more interesting; it was hard to tell if one of the players was even alive.
431.
by mcswell 2y ago
That would be a long time between joystick commands, seeing as Mars varies from four to twenty four minutes away at the speed of light. Double that for round-trip (video to Earth, command to Mars).
432.
by mcswell 2y ago
Must have come from Io. Lots of sulfur volcanos there.
433.
by mcswell 2y ago
Yes, but who cut the cheese?
434.
by mcswell 2y ago
> Do you think this footage falls under any of these categories? Without knowing the details surrounding the talk, it's hard to say, but given that the NSA (not the Library of Congress, or the National Archives, or DEC, or some univ
435.
by mcswell 2y ago
Are there microphones that would let you "listen" to bats? We have bats fly around our house at dusk, it would be interesting to know what they "say", especially when two of them come close (unclear whether that's
436.
by mcswell 2y ago
Guinevere: What else do the simple folk do To help them escape when they're blue? King Arthur: They sit around and wonder what royal folk would do. (long before early modern England)
437.
by mcswell 2y ago
Most (not all) EVs still have a 12 volt lead-acid battery: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a38537243/electric-car... . I understand 12 volts, but why not a 12 volt Li battery? I don't know.
438.
by mcswell 2y ago
> projected scaling trends aren't an inevitability Reminds me of a projection I read back in the early 1960s (I think). The author charted the rise in speed of human beings over ten or twenty thousand years, where that speed had i
439.
by mcswell 2y ago
"... physical attributes more common in this group that are conducive to an energy-efficient gait, including... a high ratio of leg length to torso." I wonder how much the added height of the shoes mimics (or exaggerates) having
440.
by mcswell 2y ago
Ok, that almost certainly means you can't hear the difference between the aspirated and unaspirated allophones. That's absolutely typical of native speakers: they can't hear the difference between allophones. Now try standin
441.
by mcswell 2y ago
Elongating the voice is exactly what I mean by an allophonic difference. As for 'hamster', no one (that I know of) pronounces the /m/ as a glottal stop, although people sometimes epenthesize a voiceless consonant [p] (by
442.
by mcswell 2y ago
This will be a bit off-topic, but I can't resist. "The person inside Nasa who fought for the commercial program side (Kathy) instead of being rewarded... got taken off Human Exploration and Operations and Exploration Systems Devel
443.
by mcswell 2y ago
For dialects that have this (not all English dialects do), the difference in time for the two words is precisely the difference in time for the two vowels.
444.
by mcswell 2y ago
We're talking about allophonic differences here, which are notoriously hard for native speakers to hear. How well do you hear the difference between the /p/ sounds in words like pill, pat, punk vs. spill, spat and spunk?
445.
by mcswell 2y ago
That's one; I've used that several others over the years, including gb4e and Covington packages. But yes, expex is probably the best now. Not quite relevant, but we actually composed our grammars in a variant of DocBook XML, then
446.
by mcswell 2y ago
Friction comes up--although not under that name--in The Mythical Man Month. (People do still read that, don't they?) One example Brooks gives is the hard drive that goes bad, perhaps losing code, but also preventing people from doing
447.
by mcswell 2y ago
There was a sci-fi story decades ago (probably in Analog) on this theme. A very realistic war game was set up, which two real-world opposing nations decided to use in lieu of losing real men. The friction caught them off guard. The one i
448.
by mcswell 2y ago
I have heard that there is much less of this in the Russian army than in NATO countries' armies--and before that, less in Eastern European countries' armies. The Ukrainian army apparently had to be trained out of that (although I
449.
by mcswell 2y ago
Then why does this web page use indentation to clarify who's replying to whom, instead of {}s?
450.
by mcswell 2y ago
Several commenters here mention math formulas (and I'm guessing other math constructs) as a reason to use (La)TeX. I'm not a mathematician, so that reason doesn't work for me. But there's another reason for me, which i

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