thisrod

33 ms·

271.
by thisrod 10y ago
Thank you. It's a relief to know that I don't need to invent it.
272.
by thisrod 10y ago
When I tried out Prolog, I was struck by the inelegance of is/2. There has to be something like it, because no one knows how to write an interpreter for arcsin(X,Y) :- sin(Y,X). However, MetaPost can do that for linear expres
273.
by thisrod 10y ago
The classic is Ten Lectures on Wavelets by Ingrid Daubechies. If anyone can recommend a more recent book, I'd be interested too.
274.
by thisrod 10y ago
Many tourist towns in New Zealand do the same thing. By the way, if you're going tramping in New Zealand, then join the New Zealand Alpine Club. They run a separate system of accomodation for the serious outdoors people. In many of t
275.
by thisrod 10y ago
You're both right. When Newton's third law is applied to a wing, the equal and opposite forces are pressure. No one tends to think about the pressure of the wing on the air, but it happens.
276.
by thisrod 10y ago
This looks like the ACME editor color scheme, but in reverse video.
277.
by thisrod 10y ago
I started working on a Matlab command to export plotted data as Metapost paths, and to generate a script that draws the plot. The idea being that you would edit the script to get the style you wanted. The proof of concept worked well for l
278.
by thisrod 10y ago
Note that this title has a queer reading, which is almost the opposite of the straight one. I find it about equally funny and true.
279.
by thisrod 10y ago
Someone should teach this immigrant the language already. :-) http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/O/orthogonal.html
280.
by thisrod 10y ago
The humanities should get a chance here too. There's a wonderful quote from Peter Berger. Roughly, he said that sociologists had so far escaped public attention in America, except perhaps among the few southern racists sufficiently l
281.
Does Whittaker and Watson have a modern equivalent?
1 points by thisrod 10y ago|0 comments
282.
by thisrod 10y ago
I guess you're old enough to remember when everyone felt sorry for those people whose jobs required them to carry pagers.
283.
The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1991)(www3.austlii.edu.au)
2 points by thisrod 10y ago|0 comments
284.
by thisrod 10y ago
Do a search for "Lorentz attractor". It's the result of an early numerical weather model. The weather is a particular point on the twisted surface; it is impossible to calculate what point you'll reach at a given time,
285.
by thisrod 10y ago
TL;DR: The railway from Ethiopia to Djibouti failed because no one could afford to maintain it. A few years later, the Djibouti government took out a loan for the value of 9 months production from the entire country, and paid some Chinese
286.
by thisrod 10y ago
Does anyone know how often airliner flight controls get drenched in coffee, and how well they resist it? You never hear about it happening, and there are enough planes in the sky that things often go wrong in much less obvious ways.
287.
by thisrod 10y ago
> I think the best one of those I encountered was an SF story where the navigation for FTL was done with slide rules. As in, you're impressed that someone writing in the 1950s predicted information warfare?
288.
by thisrod 10y ago
This is an interesting counterpoint: http://brontecapital.blogspot.com.au/2017/01/valuation-and-i...
289.
by thisrod 10y ago
There is a reason for this: it's getting to be so hard to sell cigarettes in Australia that the tobacco companies have stopped trying, and they're going after the Indonesians and Timorese instead. Four Corners reported on it a few
290.
by thisrod 10y ago
No one has mentioned Singapore yet. It's easier for most people to get there than to Australasia. And, in the scheme of hereditary fascist dictators, the Lees are comparatively sane ;-)
291.
by thisrod 10y ago
Two centuries of peaceful transfers of power? How time flies: I would never have guessed that it was 2065 already. :-p
292.
by thisrod 10y ago
The computing part of this sounds fairly straightforward to me; if the psychological things described in the article are real, then no doubt you would be able to measure and exploit them in the ways described. But the psychology strikes me
293.
by thisrod 10y ago
A more plausible model is that doctors help sick people a lot, and are totally useless to healthy people. From that point of view, consider the American system of providing great health care to people with stable lives and good jobs, and sp
294.
by thisrod 10y ago
I think the long term answer is to copy the rules for aviation, where a Private Pilot Licence is different from a Commercial Pilot Licence, and the rules about what the holders can do are clear and widely publicised. "Uber for planes&
295.
by thisrod 10y ago
The key word is an electron. The total angular momentum is conserved, but the way the electrons share it between them is not. As I recall, actual atomic Hamiltonians have terms like σ₁·σ₂. The reason involves some tricky correspondence
296.
by thisrod 10y ago
> true innovation is really hard and takes a lot of time and resources It's like Bell Labs, but instead of helping the phone system make money, we help free software take over the world. That's a really interesting idea. I wo
297.
by thisrod 10y ago
I've always thought that AWK's most important feature is its self limiting nature: no one would ever contemplate writing an AWK program longer than a page, but once Perl exists the world is doomed to have nuclear reactors driven b
298.
by thisrod 10y ago
I use Google to introduce my new rock climbers to the principle of "Climb the cliff, not the guidebook." A group of 20 year olds are standing around their cars. "All right. Does every car have someone who knows the way to t
299.
by thisrod 10y ago
No, sorry, I can't explain the theory of relativity in one paragraph. It takes a book. Spacetime Physics , by Taylor and Wheeler, explains it very well with only high school level maths.
300.
by thisrod 10y ago
This is a really good description of the measurement problem. It takes all the sides of the debate seriously, which is hard for most physicists to do. If you think about quantum mechanics all day every day, you're almost bound to sett

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