todd8

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541.
by todd8 7y ago
The gum tree or Eucalyptus tree of Australia is an example of a plant that needs bushfires to propagate. The seeds are normally sealed by a resin that must be melted by fire to allow them to sprout. Eucalyptus trees make up most of Australi
542.
by todd8 7y ago
This is hardly a new revelation. Edward Tufte, whose books about the presentation of data are well known, wrote a thin pamphlet around over 15 years ago that was essentially a rant against the use of PowerPoint presentations. See: https:&#
543.
by todd8 7y ago
What a clever idea! By the way, there are over 400,000 naturally occurring species of beetles. Beetles make up 25% of all animal forms according to Wikipedia.
544.
by todd8 7y ago
Biden’s comment was really quite a foolish thing to say, but he really didn’t have much to do with education spending in coal mining areas of the country. According to [1], federal funding for high schools represents around 7 or 8 percent o
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by todd8 7y ago
A number of claims here and in the original article are inaccurate interpretations of the almost random walk that we have made to get to our modern processor designs and the C programming language. Instruction level parallelism and out of o
546.
by todd8 7y ago
It's not just tackle football. Other college sports, played in many countries, have significant risk of concussion. Rugby, soccer, and ice hockey look quite problematic according to [1]. [1] https://completeconcussions.com&#
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by todd8 7y ago
This app sounds like a great idea. I had to do a number of silly school science projects with my daughter while she was growing up, things like a bridge made of toothpicks and glue. These projects, while not really serious science, were exp
548.
by todd8 7y ago
The plane vs car analogy is one I'm going to remember!
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by todd8 7y ago
Yes, you might be right. I don't do top secret work, but I do want to protect my personal, business, banking, etc. information so I fiddle around with various approaches to generating passwords. I actually bought a small, very cheap, P
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by todd8 7y ago
I’ve always worked in very technical fields so I feel that my university education was always essential to my ability to do the job. Engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians are usually expected to know more than what 4 months of
551.
by todd8 7y ago
TLDR: Keyboards are best for professional developers. Mice are still best for manipulators--photo editing, etc. Trackpads are best for consuming content like browsing and reading email. From the article: > Keyboarders only think they are
552.
by todd8 7y ago
My wife and I mostly work at home and our kids are avid gamers so loss of internet access causes havoc, especially for the IT guy (me). I solved most of my problems by just getting the fastest service from Spectrum and a medium speed backup
553.
by todd8 7y ago
I have a clear box of about 50 colorful dice on my desk. I can shake the box anytime I need a strong password. Dicewords.com word lists are an easy way to generate strong passwords completely off-line. If that isn’t a requirement, a SHA256
554.
by todd8 7y ago
So in the 80s I worked at IBM, and they had an interesting policy. If you made an official suggestion that they adopted and saved money for IBM you received some percentage of the first years savings (5% if I recall). People could make $200
555.
by todd8 7y ago
The problem with systems like Adobe Indesign is that they are “What You See Is All You Get”. For a company brochure with special typography and particular Pantone ink colors used in offset printing there may be nothing better. However, I’ve
556.
by todd8 7y ago
Back in the 80’s I worked as an OS software architect. I used to do a mental exercise occasionally. I would imagine how I would design things if processors were infinitely fast. Back then we were still following Moore’s law, even for single
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by todd8 7y ago
The predecessor of all these diff and patch systems/UIs is the ancient character terminal based curses library. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_(programming_library)
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by todd8 7y ago
While taking a class on hydrospace vehicles (ships, submarines, hydrofoils, and hovercraft) I discovered that submarines have an efficiency advantage over surface ships; they don't have drag induced by the generation of the wave system
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by todd8 7y ago
## Computability Turning Machines are a simple, purely hypothetical, machines that have allowed computer scientists/mathematicians to conclude very profound properties of computation. Although they are mentioned with some frequency h
560.
by todd8 7y ago
> This is in contrast to all modern turbines, those built after ~2005, which is to say, well over 99%, it can take over 15 seconds for a blade to sweep through one revolution. Getting hit by one of these blades is unfortunate, but causes
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by todd8 7y ago
In my first required digital design lab I picked as a final project the problem of building a Nim [1] playing circuit. I almost used an acoustic delay line to hold the game state. This was long before the days of RaspberryPi or any other mi
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by todd8 7y ago
Others have already described TeX quite well. One important feature not mentioned is that it is virtually error free now and is frozen at version 3.14159... (yes pi) Donald Knuth decided that there is value in having a system that for all t
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by todd8 7y ago
I’ve had to do this, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. One just has to get the first card or two to load into some memory location. Usually this is filling a device register with an address and setting the PC to a location that has the ROM
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by todd8 7y ago
Yeah, in this case it wasn’t a blood test but a breathalyzer test, and the major concern was the time between arrest and testing—she might have been sobering up or she might have been absorbing the last drink and she was a few minutes from
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by todd8 7y ago
I was selected for jury duty on a DUI case. Interestingly, there was also a lawyer selected. After hearing the case we were all moved to a room to deliberate. After electing the lawyer as foreman, we proceeded with a preliminary vote on how
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A 'Big Short' Investor's New Bet: Climate Change Will Bust the Housing Market(vice.com)
3 points by todd8 7y ago|0 comments
567.
by todd8 7y ago
No, not like Amsterdam. I love Amsterdam, but I'm so tired of it being used as an example of how we should all be on bikes. It has a very temperate climate. The weather in most of the US isn't as mild and cool as Amsterdam. There
568.
by todd8 7y ago
Its gotten ridiculous, I just wish that we could move away from the tipping culture that we have here in the US. I almost always tip 20%. I even tip 15% for poor service--I figure that there are likely things going on in the kitchen or with
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by todd8 7y ago
I found this very interesting. I had no idea that these large peripatetic sea creatures, sharks, turtles, seals, etc. meander over such large distances.
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by todd8 7y ago
The CDC report[1] has data that spans the years 2006-2016, eleven years not three. However, all racial groups have greater life expectancy now that they did in 2006. I was specifically addressing the comment's statement that "The

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