retrac

12 ms·

121.
by retrac 10mo ago
I, too, love the potato. I like to boil them with broth, oil, lemon juice, and garlic and spices, then lightly roast to finish. > I read once that humans can live on a diet of potatoes and milk Protein is not a monolith; it's nine d
122.
by retrac 10mo ago
That presumes that languages with little morphology do not have equivalent structures at work elsewhere doing the same kind of heavy lifting. One classic finding in linguistics is that languages with lots of morphology tend to have freer wo
123.
by retrac 10mo ago
This is the 4th documented transplant incident with rabies in just the United States, with cases in 1979, 2004 (four deaths from one donor), 2013 and now this one. In at least the 1979 [0] and 2004 [1] and also this recent case, it seems li
124.
by retrac 10mo ago
The article sort of has a point; in a healthy economy this kind of labour would be done with capital equipment. A sawmill is much more efficient than a bunch of individuals chopping wood with axes. (Safer too, probably, when talking about
125.
by retrac 10mo ago
Perhaps because I'm a layperson and haven't studied the topic enough, but I find there to be an almost incomprehensible gap with the emotions and psychology of classical antiquity. Most of us learned in school that the ancient Gre
126.
by retrac 10mo ago
The Visi-On API provides a handle-based memory manager. Handles are a kind of managed pointer that allow memory blocks to be moved around even though the hardware does not have virtual memory. So long as the program always follows the rul
127.
by retrac 10mo ago
Processes on modern operating systems are a type of virtual machine. On Linux or Windows, processes are provided with the illusion of infinite memory. And there is the illusion of infinite parallel threads of execution, bounded only by st
128.
by retrac 10mo ago
Very impressive hack. Looking at this I now think I may have overpaid for my Palm Pilot back in the day! For the Pixter Color in 2003 I found a price of $80 US at release. The specs aren't directly comparable (less RAM and I bet less
129.
by retrac 10mo ago
I recently skimmed a grammar of Faroese [0]. Not much has been written about the language in English; only a couple books, and an English-Faroese dictionary was only first published in the 1980s. It's spoken by about 50,000 people in
130.
by retrac 11mo ago
Write something. My usual suggestions (although I am biased) would be an operating system or a compiler. Or both! When I was in school those were typical course projects in a CS program. (The program I took was more to the circuit and e
131.
by retrac 11mo ago
Here in Canada, nothing. Thanks to the retroactive copyright extension which increased the copyright period to 70 years, nothing will enter the public domain in Canada until 2042.
132.
by retrac 11mo ago
Bandwidth and storage. The Viking landers (1975) were very sophisticated with robotic arms and mass spectrometers, adorable little anemometers, digital colour cameras, the whole deal, with 5 megabytes of digital tape storage. The downlink r
133.
by retrac 11mo ago
LLVM includes an equivalent to binutils, with a macro assembler, linker, objdump with disassembler, library tools, handling formats like ELF and raw binary etc. LLVM-MOS includes all of that. It is the same process as using LLVM to cross-a
134.
by retrac 11mo ago
Presumably it would be straightforward to port the GB code generation to the Intel 8080 / Z80. There have been a few attempts for LLVM for those CPUs over the years. But none which panned out, I think?
135.
by retrac 11mo ago
> (and ally?) Oh right. The rest of the world. It exists. USA is only 6% of global land area. Oft forgot in these conspiracies. It would require not just cooperation and secrecy in the United States government/military over 75 y
136.
by retrac 11mo ago
This is so conjectural as to be more in the realm of science fiction but here goes. There's little to no hard evidence that there's anything particular to the human brain that makes our way of thinking unique to humans. No doubt
137.
by retrac 11mo ago
It's open in the sense that anyone can use it. Without restriction. And there's no way to be banned from it. Since anyone can just drop off an anonymous letter in the post. You don't have to enter a service agreement. Ju
138.
by retrac 11mo ago
Sorry you're right I was mistaking this with the civil service that was offered as an alternative to military conscription.
139.
by retrac 11mo ago
I must completely misunderstand the purpose of the German system of conscription. I thought the point was to train the reserve populace in relevant skills to defence and public functioning, not just to extract labour.
140.
by retrac 11mo ago
All my silly pet projects which are otherwise quite useless, were nonetheless very useful as didactic exercises.
141.
by retrac 11mo ago
www.gov.mb.ca www.gov.nb.ca www.gov.pe.ca www.gov.ns.ca www.gov.ab.ca www.gov.bc.ca www.gov.on.ca www.gov.nf.ca www.gov.yt.ca www.gov.nt.ca www.gov.nu.ca Some redirect. Sask. and Que. break the pattern, but both have various government sit
142.
by retrac 11mo ago
There's an interesting property to thermal storage, as a consequence of simple geometry. Consider a cube. volume = n³ and surface area = 6*n². Surface area increases more slowly than volume. The ratio of surface to volume decreas
143.
by retrac 11mo ago
A single iron atom can be a magnetic domain. So a surface coated with single-atom domains, spaced a few atoms apart. I would posit that's close to the 2D limit because of physics. They can't be directly next to each other or i
144.
by retrac 11mo ago
Heating a ferromagnetic material lowers it coercivity -- the heat softens it and makes it less magnetically "springy". And if heated enough it fully loses its magnetization. So, to write, zap the area with a laser to heat it up.
145.
by retrac 11mo ago
No, you're right. The attack on the Death Star sequence, in Star Wars (1977), is one of the very first use of 3D computer graphics in film. The tie-fighters and Death Star were drawn as wire-frame. And it was all wire-frame until abo
146.
by retrac 11mo ago
Not bad writing. Framework for a decent thriller novel. An additional proofreader might be helpful.
147.
by retrac 11mo ago
> raw XY it or soft modem How about analog raster scan? a.k.a. slow-scan TV? [0] Like how they returned the live television images from the Apollo missions. (They only had 1 MHz of bandwidth for everything - voice, computer up and dow
148.
by retrac 11mo ago
x86_64 is the only official Arch Linux. All other ports are unofficial. They are community projects where many of the members are the same as the main Arch Linux. I think it's basically for the same reason as why they dropped 32-bit
149.
by retrac 11mo ago
If the device can run PostmarketOS with a mainstream kernel, then it can run any Linux distribution. (I put Arch ARM on such devices, since I like that distro.) That's the big hurdle though - mainstream kernel support. For most device
150.
by retrac 11mo ago
Many cetaceans show similar dependency on their parents. They're also some of the few species where the females undergo menopause, like humans. (Elephants might have menopause, too.) Perhaps not coincidentally, maternal elders are v

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