mcswell

32 ms·

751.
by mcswell 5y ago
I once worked for Boeing Computer Services, a now defunct part of the Boeing Company. (And this was decades before the 737 MAX, thank you.) I wrote a computational grammar of English, which together with a LISP-based parsing engine develo
752.
by mcswell 5y ago
Master Foo and the Programming Prodigy http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/prodigy.html
753.
by mcswell 5y ago
And literate programming. Well done by Knuth, done by a few other people, but a joy to read when done well.
754.
by mcswell 5y ago
1 point by mcswell 0 minutes ago | edit | delete [–] “Aren’t you a star any longer?” asked Lucy. “I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu... “In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your wor
755.
by mcswell 5y ago
No one has suggested one possibility: that this was the art work for an idea some Assyrian Beltway Bandit was trying to sell. 1000 units of Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus for the armies of Tiglath Pileser for the low price o
756.
by mcswell 5y ago
If you're shooting, or dumping burning oil on your enemy, or even throwing rocks at them, being a bit higher than they are is a significant advantage, if for no other reason than the fact that you can see them better than they can see
757.
by mcswell 5y ago
No, it goes into your lungs and provides buoyancy for as long as you hold that breath. Some of the oxygen gets taken into your bloodstream, where it no longer provides buoyancy, but that's compensated by an (approximately) equal amoun
758.
by mcswell 5y ago
Perhaps you could begin by explaining what's wrong, rather than citing a book (or actually not even a book, rather a page linking ten or so publications), with no indication of what part to read. I am of the opinion that you are the
759.
by mcswell 5y ago
I used to be a scuba (SCUBA) diver, and yes, that is not so incorrect as you imply. See my post a little higher suggesting that the bladder could contain a couple cubic feet of air, which would give you a couple-three minutes. The real pro
760.
by mcswell 5y ago
IIRC, the average air consumption is about 1 cu. ft./ min. at atmospheric pressure. Assuming the bladder is not pressurized, at a guess it could hold ~2 cu. ft., so maybe a couple minutes worth of air. If you could manage to submerge
761.
by mcswell 5y ago
The air in the bladder will be at exactly the same pressure as the water around it. Therefore if the diver were underwater with the bladder (a thing which I doubt, for reasons others have mentioned here), the air in the bladder would be at
762.
by mcswell 5y ago
Seems like one of the typical arguments of the form "change the denotation, but retain the connotation." I had an on-line discussion with a pro-abortion person a few months ago, in which the central point turned into a debate ove
763.
by mcswell 5y ago
This is not new, is it? There have been lots of claims over the last few decades that during the 1960s, the sugar industry pushed the idea that eating fat was what made people fat, rather than eating sugar-like carbohydrates. Disclaimer: I
764.
by mcswell 5y ago
It doesn't.
765.
by mcswell 5y ago
You can OCR if you're using a Latin script with few if any accent marks. Depending on your OCR engine, I suppose you could do Cyrillic too. Other scripts, not so much. (And yes, I'm a computational linguist, so we deal with non
766.
by mcswell 5y ago
Ah, no wonder I couldn't find it--it's in Russian. Thank goodness for machine translation, and thank you for the links!
767.
by mcswell 5y ago
I know about helium balloons, but hydrogen is really cheap compared to helium. And it's nowhere near as dangerous as it's made out to be. The Hindenburg burned, it did not explode.
768.
by mcswell 5y ago
Hmm, looks like the sendkey.c thing might work. Although the documentation on XTestFakeKeyEvent() specifically says "This extension is not intended to support general journaling and playback of user actions", which is what (I thi
769.
by mcswell 5y ago
Might be a good solution, if it can output multiple keys with a single keystroke, but unfortunately my keyboard can't travel with me. In particular I can't plug it into my work computer.
770.
by mcswell 5y ago
If you're talking about Windows apps that keep me from switching to Linux, I have an oddball one: it's a keyboard re-mapper that I wrote back in Windows 3.1 and still use. It does the same re-mapping in every application (excep
771.
by mcswell 5y ago
John Campbell, the (in)famous editor of Analog Science Fact/ Science Fiction mag in the 50s-60s (and probably some years before and after) had a theory about tobacco smoke and fires. He reasoned that for thousands of years, people had
772.
by mcswell 5y ago
Like Mr Fusion? runs on beer, from what I've seen.
773.
by mcswell 5y ago
"Hydrogen is very corrosive and hard to work with" Corrosive compared to what? You can put it in a rubber balloon and hand it to a kid. "T is radioactive hydrogen": True, it emits low energy beta radiation, which is an
774.
by mcswell 5y ago
I looked at the Wikipedia article on that ship, and several other articles, and could find no mention of that. Are you sure it wasn't the Kirov?
775.
by mcswell 5y ago
I read it, but I can't say I enjoyed it. I worked on a US Navy ship in the early 1970s, with 1200 psi 975 degree superheated steam. A couple years before I came aboard, that ship had suffered a boiler explosion, killing the four men
776.
by mcswell 5y ago
Ronald Reagan agreed with that, and thought MAD was truly mad.
777.
by mcswell 5y ago
In some of these universes, the LHC did indeed spawn a world-destroying black hole. And in our universe, the LHC failed several times when they were first starting it up (the Quench Incident, for example), causing a year's delay--which
778.
by mcswell 5y ago
IIRC (it's been a long time), first generation stars were very low in "metals" (which term astronomers use to mean any element heaver than helium), and what they did have was mostly (maybe entirely) lithium. They may not hav
779.
by mcswell 5y ago
I suspect you're right, but I've also wondered at the fact that while Homo sapiens has been around and intelligent for at least 45k years, within perhaps 3000 years at least three and possibly six civilizations independently inven
780.
by mcswell 5y ago
"We already had moon rocks on Earth, blasted off of the moon by bolide strikes." True, but they (and any other meteorites) were likely sterilized during passage through the Earth's atmosphere.

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