svat

48 ms·

511.
by svat 4y ago
A practical reason: The internet makes it possible for those of us interested in Sanskrit to communicate with each other, and feel a part of a community. Two decades ago, if you were interested in Sanskrit you were always conscious that you
512.
by svat 4y ago
From the title I thought this was about a math problem posed in Sanskrit (of which there's a lot, but no "unsolved" problem AFAIK), but "Sanskrit problem" here is a problem about Sanskrit itself! For more on the dom
513.
by svat 4y ago
If you haven't seen it, here's Hugh Laurie telling a story of attending John le Carré's 70th birthday party: https://youtu.be/0es0XnqpXyM?t=1442
514.
by svat 4y ago
I actually thought it was very tightly structured: early in the essay (fourth paragraph) it sets out four character types ("the private detective, the comedian, the flâneur, and, most recently, the social media poster") and then p
515.
by svat 4y ago
Also useful for describing accents: see "lexical sets" https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lexical_set&oldid... Of interest here are: • The LOT set (stop, sock, dodge, romp, possible, quality) (+ s
516.
by svat 4y ago
This was very satisfying. The format works well, and makes sure you as reader are doing at least a minimum amount of thinking about the topics being presented. Even the pops and dings (if you have sound on) are fun :) This seems like a good
517.
by svat 4y ago
I'm the author and I just meant I had left behind a small uncommitted diff back when I stopped working on it, and I didn't bother to read the diff before committing. I actually understand it just fine, on second look… Overall, at
518.
by svat 4y ago
This is really wonderful, thank you! It's great to see someone focusing on the internal structure of PDF files (the "Syntax" chapter of the spec), and doing things with a focus on browsing the internal structure etc. (I had a
519.
by svat 4y ago
Great story, thank you :) This one seems to precede Bell's writing, though: it's mentioned in the 1911 Britannica biography https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britan... and this 1905 book:
520.
by svat 4y ago
The brilliance of Édouard Lucas: see "Lucas primality test" (for general N, when you can factor N-1) and "Lucas–Lehmer primality test" (for Mersenne numbers N). Both work for M_67. There's a nice account somewhere o
521.
by svat 4y ago
I've already left it as a comment (actually, three comments!) on the OP's MathOverflow (self-)answer. I'd like to be a little more sure that I've understood everything perfectly (e.g. implement the algorithm myself), an
522.
by svat 4y ago
Yeah this story originates from E. T. Bell, who I'm now fairly convinced just… made it up. (Possibly based on a kernel of truth about the conference presentation involving a lot of calculation, and ending in applause.) He is known for
523.
by svat 4y ago
Oh wow, funny this should turn up here. I had of course read the story in Men of Mathematics , and when I saw this question posted on MathOverflow in 2015, I decided the existing answers were inadequate (for me at least), so I went super d
524.
by svat 4y ago
Meanwhile, at the other extreme, in many proportional fonts the widths of letters vary so characteristically that clever readers can decode a text mostly just from the widths: see Donald Knuth's "N-ciphered texts": https:&#x
525.
by svat 4y ago
A couple of the author's talks are also online: • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BIP_N9qQm4 [FOSDEM 2015, "Introducing SILE: A New Typesetting System"] • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_kk
526.
by svat 4y ago
The 66-page "Breaking Paragraphs into Lines" is a research paper, and much of it is is the "complexity" of the problem itself, rather than TeX's elegant solution in particular (e.g. pages 48–59 are about history). I
527.
by svat 4y ago
TeX is a program for typesetting, and IMO if one is a programmer, it is best used as a target or output format: do all your "document" stuff somewhere else (don't use LaTeX), and use TeX just for typesetting. You can have you
528.
by svat 4y ago
Yeah you're right and good point, and my earlier comment was partly misleading anyway, because there isn't much difference even among typographers between "apostrophe" and "right single quotation mark". A bette
529.
by svat 4y ago
All managers should know everything relevant; all people should be perfect. But meanwhile, no one is, and this post is useful advice for reality. I cannot claim to know everything I "ought to" know for my job, and I don't exp
530.
by svat 4y ago
(2021). Other posts from the author on related topics (all are helpful): https://jvns.ca/#career---work
531.
by svat 4y ago
I know you said “most people”, but I always type these typographically correct quotes manually (no automatic substitution or “smart” quotes involved). It's Opt+[ (etc) on macOS, for example. So the name is disorienting for me at least,
532.
by svat 4y ago
About your middle paragraph: note that ASCII doesn't have left and right quotes; at 0x60 it has GRAVE ACCENT ` (not a left quote), and at 0x27 it has APOSTROPHE ' (not a right quote). Unfortunately for many years, fonts and term
533.
by svat 4y ago
All good, but what makes you call this a competing take? What view of the article does this compete with? It seems to agree with it, more or less.
534.
by svat 4y ago
And as expected, this one is covered by Knuth in his "Bitwise Tricks and Techniques" section of TAOCP (pages 133–202 of Volume 4A, which start with "Now comes the fun part"). Specifically, this one is equation (84) on pa
535.
by svat 4y ago
Yes fair! Sorry about that; I was focused on the comment I was replying to and forgot about being fair to you; I've now edited my post to change "without understanding" to "without bothering to integrate with" (and
536.
by svat 4y ago
TeX was designed even earlier (in 1977), and most of the weirdness is from people trying to do things inside TeX — the actual "writing math" part is still mostly fine. (E.g. people don't run into much of the weirdness when
537.
by svat 4y ago
I'll agree that not the posted article but your comment does sum up the way many users experience LaTeX (without taking a few minutes to understand what's going on), and it's interesting to think about what factors of TeX&#
538.
by svat 4y ago
To actually quantify how "surprised" we should be, see e.g.: • Gauss-Kuzmin distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gauss%E2%80%93Kuz... • This post: https://11011110.github.io&#x2
539.
by svat 4y ago
:-) Here's something else, almost entirely unrelated, that I like: we can prove that any two Fermat numbers 2^(2^n)+1 have gcd 1; this gives a proof (different from Euclid's) that there are infinitely many prime numbers: https:&#
540.
by svat 4y ago
While this fact about gcds is true, your link goes to a proof (incidentally, happens to be mine) that does not use this fact. :-)

More ›