vmilner

34 ms·

1. 391.▲
   by vmilner 6y ago

   It's fascinating that in 1983 it was thought that a 768-bit RSA number would take 40 million years to factor. (It actually took 26 - RSA-768 was factored in 2009.)
2. 392.▲
   by vmilner 6y ago

   I have some slight sympathy with the providers, in that they shouldn't have to provide a service for ever, but it's hard to see a strategy to get ex-customers to move, without seeming evil. (Though 6 pounds a month is obviously ex
3. 393.▲
   by vmilner 6y ago

   I'm in the UK and can see it. (Though not via the twitter link )
4. 394.▲
   by vmilner 6y ago

   It always puzzles me that the quantisation matrices don't have symmetry along the diagonal. I guess it suggests the distribution of vertical and horizontal lines in typical pictures differs.
5. 395.▲
   by vmilner 6y ago

   I remember Polo mints going from 4.5p to 5p in ~1975. (I was 7 and such things were important...). It's curious that the minimum possible percentage increase then was 11%, but now, when Polo mints are around 60p, the minimum possible i
6. 396.▲
   by vmilner 6y ago

   Yes, St Michael's Mount in Cornwall seems to have been moved to London... https://www.insecam.org/en/view/845188/#details
7. 397.▲
   by vmilner 6y ago

   The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys!
8. 398.▲
   by vmilner 6y ago

   I always find that name-clash very annoying.
9. 399.▲
   by vmilner 6y ago

   Because of the public domain licensing, some LibriVox recordings are simply copied (with the LibriVox ID removed) and sold on Audible. (Search Audible for Karen Savage - e.g. Pride and Prejudice).
10. 400.▲
    by vmilner 6y ago

    I've done it in the UK (three times) by failing to notice my contactless debit card has not been accepted and walking off with the newspaper/sweets etc. (I've gone back later to give them the money, but this is seems surprisi
11. 401.▲
    by vmilner 6y ago

    This is indeed the case - as indicated in the award-winning documentary "LEGO City Adventures: 3,2,1" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKcR_RMxIBY&t=5m43s ("This is a specially modified rocket engine for m
12. 402.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    In "Learn X the hard way" style, I'm planning to refresh my maths degree fundamentals by working through some of the Cambridge Tripos material at https://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/studentreps/tri
13. 403.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    I went through what I suspect is a common experience in that I had The Hobbit read to me at school at about 8, then read LOTR to get more hobbits. Even though the vocabulary was far too difficult for me, the experience of getting through a
14. 404.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    0.06% is hard to reconcile with 10 out of 712 cases on the Diamond Princess liner proving fatal.
15. 405.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    See also: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06300
16. 406.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    There are such differs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_of_Genomic_Sequenc...
17. 407.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    Hope it has this in... https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt
18. 408.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    I noticed while watching the Athletics World Championships, that the 5000m runner Ben True always had his name shown in the results as: SMITH John True Ben JONES Fred BLOGGS Bill
19. 409.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    The parallel "... of the Empire" series is very good too, and has the colosseum scene from a different character point of view.
20. 410.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    There's nothing like UK election polling for shaking confidence in getting representative samples from the UK population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U... shows that two polls this w
21. 411.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    Testing which country’s paper money is best at transmitting dangerous bacteria, seems perfectly reasonable to me.
22. 412.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    See also (2013) https://metro.co.uk/2013/11/06/faggots-firm-fights-for-its-f...
23. 413.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    BBC TV drama "The Mountain and the Molehill" (1988) at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nANoCftnK0
24. 414.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    The "high water mark aspect" of directory name storage has caught me out before (ext4 filesystem): vince$ mkdir dir vince$ ls -ld dir drwxrwxr-x 2 vince vince 4096 Jul 15 15:27 dir vince$ let i=0 ; while [ $i -lt 1000000 ]; do let
25. 415.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    https://theoreticalminimum.com/ might be a better bet, though assumes some familiarity with calculus.
26. 416.▲
    by vmilner 7y ago

    "Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences, published in 1967—based on his work in the 1950s—went out of print long ago." The third revised edition was the last thing Golomb worked on, and is now available as an e-boo
27. 417.▲
    by vmilner 8y ago

    Doctor Dolittle's Post Office (also Richard Dawkins' favourite, curiously. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-book-th... )
28. 418.▲
    by vmilner 8y ago

    0wikipedia.com
29. 419.▲
    by vmilner 8y ago

    Antoine Joux's book: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=buQajqt-_iUC precis-es this paper in its sections 7.2 and 7.3 and highlights the fact that looking at "Pollard rho style" random functions with in-degr
30. 420.▲
    by vmilner 8y ago

    The asymptotic means for tails and cycles of random functions are in Theorem 3 of https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/3-540-46885-4_...