mcswell

46 ms·

1. 871.▲
   by mcswell 6y ago

   and especially if you live where people don't tan, they rust. Mind you, Seattle is the only city I've ever really liked, and I wish I could live there now.
2. 872.▲
   by mcswell 6y ago

   ...which is of course why the patient got better when they went off the Vit D.
3. 873.▲
   by mcswell 6y ago

   I think the problem is worse than this. There is no universal coordinate system, no 0x0x0 coordinate to measure everything from. The Earth is moving wrt the galactic center, the galactic center is moving wrt...what? The Andromeda galaxy?
4. 874.▲
   by mcswell 6y ago

   The what scrolls? Burned Red Sea? I'm guessing you mean Dead Sea scrolls, but I haven't heard of any that were burned.
5. 875.▲
   by mcswell 6y ago

   And after the geese, there are the scientists: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/5418462023483022/
6. 876.▲
   by mcswell 6y ago

   So can ravens, but all they know how to say is "Nevermore."
7. 877.▲
   by mcswell 6y ago

   JA WOHL!
8. 878.▲
   by mcswell 6y ago

   Still no way to make Maps put north at the top while you're driving. Grumble, grumble.
9. 879.▲
   by mcswell 6y ago

   Have you ever looked at the output of an OCR engine? Character (T) at position 1.03409 38.953934 Character (h) at position 9.89402 38.927831 etc. And hypothesized line, para etc. boundaries that (at least in my experience) might have
10. 880.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    EBCDIC; EBCDIC... Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
11. 881.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    You're unlikely to find "chairman's" in a dictionary. Spell checkers (which at least for languages like English usually use table lookup) often succeed with common apostrophe-s nouns, but fail with less common ones, bec
12. 882.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    This won't help you any, but we were doing OCR and then parsing a PDF dictionary. The vertical space between entries was usually enough larger than the vertical space between lines within a dictionary that we could distinguish these.
13. 883.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    True story: a few weeks ago, I was trying to debug my Python program, which was reading PubMed XML. It was choking on 'None' as a first name. If you know Python, you know that it uses the keyword None to represent a null element
14. 884.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    I've thought about it, but haven't tried. As an experiment, we once tried converting an OCRed dictionary (this one: https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/10969 ) into an XML dictionary database. (There
15. 885.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    We looked at the xml->xsl-fo->pdf route, and decided instead to use dblatex->LaTeX->pdf (starting from a slightly modified DocBook XML, which therefore required additional rules in dblatex). We were very satisfied with the resu
16. 886.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    I started at a company in 1984 where VMS was pretty standard, running on 80x25 terminals. (They also had Xerox Stars, some people ran 1980s-era Macs, and there were a few LISP machines.) Then someone introduced me to a sort of minimal unix
17. 887.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    Nit: "as Newton put it, inertia is why an object at rest tends to stay at rest." No, what Newton said is that an object in motion tends to continue in motion at the same velocity (and an object at rest tends to remain at rest, i.
18. 888.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    I couldn't read most of the original article because paywall. This https://www.onlinefinancenews.com/why-the-baltic-states-are-... is not behind a paywall. It also seems to be (machine?) translated.
19. 889.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    Wow, I hadn't heard of that. I need that kind of search a couple times a week. It may leave a lot to be desired, but it's like democracy: the worst possible thing of its class, except for all the rest.
20. 890.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    Reminds me of a story I once read about feeding to an optimizing compiler a program to print out the digits of pi.
21. 891.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    I'm pretty sure your (1) is correct. I think your (2) should be giving you results they think you should want, as in you shouldn't want to search for a conspiracy theory (even if your goal is to see what the other side is think
22. 892.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    Back when I was a teenager, I had a slide rule. I can guarantee that a slide rule is still valid, so long as you're not interested in more than two or three significant digits, and you don't want to add or subtract.
23. 893.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    I think the default is more like AND/OR. If AND were the default, and I put a list of five words in without any 'AND' or 'OR', then I'd expect to get only pages that have all 5 of those words. Now of course g
24. 894.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    You got a little repetitive there, but yes, I agree: "deprecated" means stop using this because it's going away.
25. 895.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    Maybe they should go back to +
26. 896.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    I'll save you the trouble. It's 42.
27. 897.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    I'll probably get slapped on the wrist for this, but: Is this a way to understand the seven day time line in the first chapter of Genesis?
28. 898.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    Like this? https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.htm...
29. 899.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    Then was he 20 years ahead of his time?
30. 900.▲
    by mcswell 6y ago

    My understanding is that on average, a tire loses a molecule's worth of rubber thickness every time it goes around. I would imagine tires lose more with heavy breaking of fast starts. The other day I saw some idiot on a motorcycle pu