mcswell

29 ms·

511.
by mcswell 3y ago
The "long format (32-column) periodic table" is the one that makes the most sense to me. The ones that put the alkalis (and hydrogen) over on the right don't make sense to me, and putting helium in the same column as berylli
512.
by mcswell 3y ago
Airplane manufacturers--which means Boeing--not airlines.
513.
by mcswell 3y ago
A decade or so ago, there as a website called "Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog." It was a sort of present day Chaucer, compleat (one might say) with variant spellings, and full of anacronyms like "for the Pardoner himselfe hath
514.
by mcswell 3y ago
Have you heard of the short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster"? The loophole turns out to be on Webster's client's side.
515.
by mcswell 3y ago
Before we dream about not working, we should ask people who don't work how it goes for them. And there is one segment of the population that does not work (in the sense of going to a regular job or school, even if that job is mostly w
516.
by mcswell 3y ago
One of Lafargue's critiques: "Suppose that a commodity is overproduced, so that its supply outstrips demand. Its price will fall. To compensate, factory owners will cut costs or slow production. And that means they will pay their
517.
by mcswell 3y ago
For DARPA (and IARPA) projects it's usually large teams that get selected, generally a university or a large federal contractor--or sometimes consortia from several such organizations. Unless you know how to make a tricorder, your cha
518.
by mcswell 3y ago
There is also a triage nurse in every ER, whose duty it is to decide who gets treated first. However, of the three triage categories, one hopes in an ER that few if any patients will fall into the category of "dies even with help&quot
519.
by mcswell 3y ago
Yeap. And that's of course why it's called triage, instead of diage (or would it be biage?). People are divided into three groups: those who will get well without help, those who will die even with help, and those who will die u
520.
by mcswell 3y ago
But boy do they have midichlorians!
521.
by mcswell 3y ago
If you move overseas, it's pretty hard for the IRS to collect on you.
522.
by mcswell 3y ago
Like orbital-decay says: intuitive matters not at all. Convenience is what matters. I don't use a modal editor, but I do have the control keys on my Windows keyboard mapped to cursor control keys: the control-H, -J, -K, -L keys all c
523.
by mcswell 3y ago
This in no way contradicts Chesterton's point, in fact he explicitly brings it up. He is not calling for an end to fence demolition, he is rather calling for common sense investigation into why the fence is there.
524.
by mcswell 3y ago
"impossible to meet", "more often than not", "none of those aspects are documented": These are huge generalizations, and I very much doubt that they are generally true, or that anyone--including you--has done a
525.
by mcswell 3y ago
And ET couldn't phone home, either.
526.
by mcswell 3y ago
James Nicoll said, "English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." For example, geyser (Icelandic), ski (Norwegia
527.
by mcswell 3y ago
"whenever people do they fail them": I assume the antecedent of "they" is LLMs, not people.
528.
by mcswell 3y ago
The conclusion may be obvious to you and me (although it's hard to know for certain, since these available LLMs are black boxes). But it's definitely not obvious to everyone. There are plenty of people saying this is the dawn of
529.
by mcswell 3y ago
I forgot, we also used word2vec to build an embedding space based on PubMed abstracts. We found lots of variant spellings (including hyphenated, unhyphenated, and space-separated), acronyms and abbreviations for chemical and biochem names.
530.
by mcswell 3y ago
Cross-language embeddings, where you create an embedding space in each of two languages and then use a seed dictionary to align the spaces, has potential (actual?) applications in cross-lingual search and probably MT.
531.
by mcswell 3y ago
There's a simple solution to at least the text problem: software control. On most web browsers you can embiggen or ensmallen the font with Ctrl-Plus or Ctrl-Minus. And every app has a way of controlling audio volume, and often the
532.
by mcswell 3y ago
I'll take your special gripe and raise you one. My gripe is not being able to get rid of the icons in favor of the text labels. There's a reason alphabetic (and similar) writing systems won out over hieroglyphics, and why we don
533.
by mcswell 3y ago
Dunno, but I've heard that tongues can weld themselves to icicles on Earth.
534.
by mcswell 3y ago
All your base are belong to us.
535.
by mcswell 3y ago
"Neural machine translation... doesn't hallucinate..." I've looked at neural MT output from Arabic and Russian, and there was lots of hallucination.
536.
by mcswell 3y ago
FWIW (not much, admittedly), I once wrote a morphological parser in Prolog (mostly, there was some C code for dealing with bit-level operations). About the time I finished the project, the version I was using (Arity Prolog) went out of bus
537.
by mcswell 3y ago
That's even the name in Goa'uld! As I verified that, I discovered that the actor who played Ba'al in Stargate SG-1 died a couple years ago. No word about his symbiont.
538.
by mcswell 3y ago
Adding Basque to your list, the word is ur. (I don't know Basque, just looked it up.)
539.
by mcswell 3y ago
This isn't the same thing, but: in most indigenous languages of Latin America where Spanish is the national language, the word for cat is something like 'mees' (or 'mis' if you use the Spanish-like spelling). This
540.
by mcswell 3y ago
Sign languages absolutely have words, they're just formed out of finger and/or hand positions + finger and/or hand movements, and sometimes facial or other body movements, rather than out of sounds (phonemes). And yes, these

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