theophrastus

15 ms·

91.
by theophrastus 10y ago
I'll regard this 'request' as a bit of wry sarcasm ;) ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/bl... )
92.
by theophrastus 10y ago
Purely for the esoteric linguistic amusement: tokamak is a Russian acronym where the "toka-" comes from тороидальная камера or toroidal chamber/cabin. So a spherical tokamak would be a 'spherical toroid', and a bit
93.
by theophrastus 10y ago
albeit at 125mm height that's a relatively gigantic nixie tube as compared to those in the old spectrophotometer in my grad school lab.
94.
by theophrastus 10y ago
If speed of convergence is what you seek, i've yet to discover a more impressive case than a surprisingly simple method attributed to Gauss using the geometric and arithmetic means of two numbers. Three times around the loop and it&#x
95.
by theophrastus 10y ago
There is one conceptually simple issue often missing in such nicely presented write-ups (and which appears to be missing here): error in the abscissa ('x-axis') values. Things like time-series tend to dominate such analytics and
96.
by theophrastus 10y ago
me too. i finally got to ask a professor at an agricultural college that question. all i can do is give you the non-definitive answer he gave me: "there are access roads between all those circles for planting, harvest, and, maintenance
97.
by theophrastus 10y ago
If i had a supply of lidocaine i'd be sore tempted to dig out some superficial lumps (lipoma). There's one which removed would probably provide a decent void for some nifty implant.
98.
by theophrastus 10y ago
Just think of the nice bit of historical symmetry in that what is seen to have been the first programmable machine was a loom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_loom#Importance_in_co...
99.
by theophrastus 10y ago
There is even an old theory that modern day humans are neotenous products of a proto-ape-man. A list usually follows of those characteristics that humans share with infant modern apes: less hair, larger head to body ratio, shorter arms, le
100.
by theophrastus 10y ago
Probably a much trickier study, (involving autopsies?), but it would be informative to compare the distribution of the cochlear hairs among various groups of people. To what degree the arrangement is in logarithmic series [1] [1] http:&#x
101.
by theophrastus 10y ago
I had a Swiss professor on my committee who would halt any discussion of evolutionary process if someone hinted at 'purpose' or 'intention'. He would pop up and shout in a thick Swiss accent "noO!dis iz da fallacy
102.
by theophrastus 10y ago
This was from code originally from about 1978ish, which compiled on a Microsoft Fortran compiler from the 2000s. It looked something like (without indents): DO I=1,10000 ... IF (QQQ .LT. RIX70) THEN CALL IXNARF(
103.
by theophrastus 10y ago
I have a buddy at US Fish and Wildlife where they do river flow modeling with Fortran routines from the seventies formerly compiled on Windows machines. He was finding it increasingly difficult to get his all-powerful shadowy IT division to
104.
by theophrastus 10y ago
yes, and the relative merits of well defined substances versus macerated hot water plant extracts will be discussed to the end of time. just don't ascribe magical 'vital' properties to either one. by the bye, drink enough w
105.
by theophrastus 10y ago
This reminds me of a student's comment: "oh but that's only true within the confines of logic". That is, i'm sure a 'vitalist' would argue: "oh that's just chemistry, what of beyond chemistry?
106.
by theophrastus 10y ago
no... my analogy would be fundamentally a different analogy if i compared a bottle of vitamin C to a whole piece of fruit (quite "apples and oranges" in fact). I wanted to underscore that two pure substances, one synthetic and on
107.
by theophrastus 10y ago
Please just be cautious not to fall into the trap of the 'vital principle'[1]. If you had a bottle of L-ascorbic acid ("vitamin C") in your right hand synthesized in a laboratory and a bottle of L-ascorbic acid in your
108.
by theophrastus 10y ago
For myself this is the money quote of that worthy posting: "There are effectively three string types in the Python [3] world: bytes, Unicode strings, and strings. And there are inconsistencies among them. For example, sys.path() return
109.
by theophrastus 10y ago
Someone already knows the answer to this, (but not me): if you examine a statistically representative set of ancient books, (both pre- and post- Gutenberg) what is the average line length? And doesn't that partially depend on "s
110.
by theophrastus 10y ago
If a nearly pure wad of space iron became molten on entering ancient earth's atmosphere and buried itself in relatively soft crust/clay, some sort of planetary "shot tower"[1] effect is out of the question? (and/or
111.
by theophrastus 10y ago
Shall we add more hypotheticals to a hypothetical ;)? Pardons may include stipulations. Suppose this one exacted an agreement that no further germane information ("currently in possession of the putative pardonee") will be made
112.
by theophrastus 10y ago
The wild conjecture is out there that as one of the final acts of his presidency, Obama will pardon Snowden. Mostly to get this messy matter off the table of the next president. I really don't know where to place the likelihood of th
113.
by theophrastus 10y ago
In my experience (teaching in Germany for about three years) it is not uncommon for Europeans to look on in astonishment at the dubious rulings of various governing levels in the U.S. and I can sympathize. But I can offer up a few random i
114.
by theophrastus 10y ago
The bronze age in that part of the world was around 3300 to 1200BC. Tutankhamen ruled from 1332 to 1323. From that alone we might suppose why a bit of proper iron was more valuable than gold. (the Hittite secret of iron wasn't for ano
115.
by theophrastus 10y ago
Some materials scientist must have already done their thesis on this problem: optimally span two spatially separate beams with a homogeneous material transmitting some impedance designated force between them and subjected to increasing mas
116.
by theophrastus 10y ago
VAX 11/780
117.
by theophrastus 10y ago
12,000 years ago when 10BaseT still roamed the earth we had things called X-terminals. All the X-terminal had to do was to run an X server, while all computing was done on the large (for the time, typically DEC or IBM) computers some-where
118.
by theophrastus 10y ago
Should the blueprints to variola, (a single linear double stranded DNA genome 186 kilobase genome sequence), be destroyed too? It wouldn't take too much effort to generate 186 kilobase DNA sequence ("longest gene made by us >23
119.
by theophrastus 10y ago
Statistics has, of course, grown from its beginnings as a means to summarize social/population conditions (the median number of serfs per farm, average bushels per acre, etc), yet: "estimating an accurate metric, (for example a &#
120.
by theophrastus 10y ago
There's some rather odd terminology use with this one. A "microbe" is any living organism too small to be seen with the naked eye; so mostly single cell eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Prokaryotes don't have mitochondria.

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