thisrod

49 ms·

451.
by thisrod 14y ago
This is too short to be worth reading. Instead, buy McGee's On Food and Cooking , and read a random page or two when you feel interested.
452.
by thisrod 14y ago
Actually, representative democracy started with the English Revolution, in 1688. It was carried out so competently that no one got shot, and hardly anyone has heard of it.
453.
by thisrod 14y ago
This post set me thinking about why I prefer acme to vi. They're both derived from ed, and nowadays they both know about the mouse. So how do they differ? Vi splits insert and edit modes by time: you hit keys to toggle between them, letti
454.
by thisrod 14y ago
Yes. If you live in a poor country, you're likely to die some other way before you get cancer.
455.
by thisrod 14y ago
"a fellacious piece that described, in dulcet tones ..." More likely freudian slip than inspired coinage, but it's a word English could use.
456.
by thisrod 14y ago
I contacted people at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and even had an in person meeting with someone at the offices of Fortune. Why not 4 Corners or Panorama ? Investigative journalism might not have a capitalist business mode
457.
by thisrod 14y ago
Where I live, the answer might run as follows. For fifty thousand years, the local hippies avoided starvation with a one-hour workday. Now that the place is full to bursting point with slaves of some massively efficient system, they have
458.
by thisrod 14y ago
Let's turn this around. Suppose that an American citizen believes they're on the list, and the president is plotting to kill them. In what circumstances should it be legal for them to assassinate the president? The president is supposed t
459.
by thisrod 14y ago
As a counter-example, everyone in Australia knows that our Prime Minister is at least agnostic. It might well be a point in her favor, to the very slight extent that people care.
460.
by thisrod 14y ago
A literal translation, the Stoics having doubtless written in formal Latin, it being so concise, might appear more as riddle than prose to English speakers.
461.
by thisrod 14y ago
In Kay's Smalltalk, humans never saw code like that in the article: they defined classes, variables and methods through a graphical interface. The verbose syntax was for computers to read, when you saved code on one machine and loaded it o
462.
by thisrod 14y ago
> The magic threshold is at about 150 dpi Is it really so low? That's 20 dots per 10 points; surely you'd notice if a glyph was supposed to be symmetric, but it actually had 10 pixels on one side and 9 on the other. Also, Metafont doe
463.
by thisrod 14y ago
I'm intrigued that the police let this happen five times, and then put out a press release. After the second time in two weeks, I would have put up a sign: "This is not the road to Mildura. Go back and turn left at the highway."
464.
by thisrod 14y ago
I also learnt the hard way that answering a message differs from returning from a closure. And I was using Smalltalk, whose designers chose distinct syntax for those actions, a good idea that was apparently broken when Smalltalk became Rub
465.
by thisrod 14y ago
I can dump their services and go with a competitor Says who? Or, more to the point, whose army? When the corporations that hold your email and bank statements refuse to be dumped, you'll need someone to break into their server rooms, wi
466.
Autonomy analysed(brontecapital.blogspot.com.au)
1 points by thisrod 14y ago|0 comments
467.
by thisrod 14y ago
Remember who Dr Pike works for: "real computation" means updating the Page rank of the World Wide Web, adding up America's phone bills, and other things from the don't-try-this-at-home category.
468.
by thisrod 14y ago
This is the kind of technology that's hard to distinguish from magic, even after they explain how it works. For instance, many science museums have an apparatus with parallel mirrors, where you stand in the middle and see your reflections
469.
by thisrod 14y ago
Forcing rooms of teenagers to factor cubic polynomials for hours on end is pointless, of course; these essayists fail to consider that pointlessness might be the point of school, as it is of boot camp. Read John Gatto instead.
470.
by thisrod 14y ago
> It is my belief that this sort of immediate feedback is needed in other technical subjects ... Perhaps different methodology, or differently structured theories The traditional feedback method is teamwork: the next student, or colleag
471.
Dutch artist turns dead cat into a helicopter (latimes.com)
2 points by thisrod 14y ago|0 comments
472.
by thisrod 14y ago
Pulse oximeters work by looking at the fingernails, and they're the usual way to measure a pulse. There's a lot of blood flow in the face - try bumping into something sharp - so this isn't too surprising.
473.
by thisrod 14y ago
I wonder what happens when a low light camera meets a laser pointer. Does anyone know?
474.
by thisrod 14y ago
Try telling that to the Indonesians.
475.
by thisrod 14y ago
Hold that thought: http://www.ycombinator.com/ I'm a traditional university type. If pg can drag the Zuckerberg set out my physics department, that's fine by me.
476.
by thisrod 14y ago
I think the parent is right. Russell was presenting the ten commandments that he would teach, in constrast to those taught at sunday school. There's also the legendary section of his C.V.: Awards and honours 1950: Nobel prize for literatur
477.
by thisrod 14y ago
Kay's mob must agree. Their current research language, COLA, handles Smalltalk messages with Scheme methods. I haven't seen much code, but the screenshots are impressive.
478.
by thisrod 15y ago
There's a data structure to solve this problem: the length 3 string. Google "trigram". Russ Cox has even indexed regexp searches this way.
479.
by thisrod 15y ago
You'd want a truck rather than a bag to carry all that! For a serious discussion of wilderness travel, read Ray Jardine's Trail Life . http://www.rayjardine.com/ray-way/Trail-Life/index.htm
480.
by thisrod 15y ago
As these devices get smaller, I can imagine morse code returning to fashion. Seriously: is there any better way to input text to a wristwatch? I'd much rather a morse key than the text entry systems dumb phones have today.

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