vmilner

12 ms·

121.
by vmilner 3y ago
Evolution of enough intelligence to use stone as a club, or make an edge on flint for cutting?
122.
by vmilner 3y ago
Hipgnosis did original hitchhikers novel cover: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_...
123.
by vmilner 3y ago
Possibly because I’m not from the US, but the first thing I think of when hearing of the Federalist Papers is Mosteller’s work on deciding the disputed authorship using Bayesian techniques rather than the constitutional significance.
124.
by vmilner 3y ago
It must be tough to be the brother who hates maths and just wants to play football.
125.
by vmilner 3y ago
I remember a conversation with some using an in-house file transfer system “Oh you won’t be able to send more than X GBytes, at that point the chances that the base64 encoding contains a banned rude word become too high, and the transfer wi
126.
by vmilner 3y ago
Originally described here: http://www.monochrom.at/turingtrainterminal/Chalcraft.pdf From the Cambridge University maths magazine: https://archim.org.uk/eureka/archive/Eureka-53.pdf
127.
by vmilner 3y ago
There are two editions of the book, but I believe each book covers the whole course.
128.
by vmilner 3y ago
I remember visiting Lincoln Cathedral and realising that when it was built in 1311 it was the first new tallest building for 3900 years... (160m as opposed to the 147m of the great pyramid) though the spire collapsed 238 years later.
129.
by vmilner 3y ago
Is it worth putting a link to the “lectures on computation” and “lectures on gravitation” books on the site? Unless I’ve missed it they don’t seem to get a mention.
130.
by vmilner 3y ago
I assumed that was to help get a reasonably long sound level check for the recording.
131.
by vmilner 3y ago
I think the audio recordings were added more recently than the text. I used to have to listen to my commercial CDs of the lectures while reading the online text.
132.
by vmilner 3y ago
I really like the extra audio bits before and after the lectures proper - they were removed on the commercial CDs. (“Why don’t they turn up on time!”)
133.
by vmilner 3y ago
It took me a surprising amount of time to work out where (Ciren) they were talking about after moving to glow-sester-shire...
134.
by vmilner 3y ago
Very basic words in english (eg water, man, milk, drink) tend to have Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) roots whereas newer more abstract words tend to have come in after the 1066 Norman Conquest, with French words eclipsing their Anglo-Saxon equivale
135.
by vmilner 3y ago
‘I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s: "Have you noticed how the word 'intellectual' is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include
136.
by vmilner 3y ago
It makes sense if Google believe the Eu appetite for fines is greater than the UK’s.
137.
by vmilner 3y ago
https://dspinellis.github.io/oral-history-of-unix/index.html
138.
by vmilner 3y ago
I noticed today that in the Uk a cheeseburger at Five Guys (nothing else) costs roughly the same as working for an hour as standard crew at Five Guys.
139.
by vmilner 3y ago
Child: “Is 100 million the biggest number?” Teacher: “Well, there’s 100 million and one” Child: “I was pretty close then!”
140.
by vmilner 3y ago
I’d really love to have a Proper Uk ordnance survey map of Sodor - I’d thought about doing it myself but unsure if the required “toolkits” are available for imaginary locations.
141.
by vmilner 4y ago
What’s the current best guess for when access to IA (or at least the contested parts) will disappear?
142.
by vmilner 4y ago
April fool?
143.
by vmilner 4y ago
I remember in the uk that Babylon 5 was available on VHS around 1994 for about 12 pounds (about 20 dollars) for two episodes...
144.
by vmilner 4y ago
I’m not a big Git/GitHub user but presumably distributed version control is still superior to Systems like Subversion that don’t provide a full clone of the repo, as you can still work during GitHub downtime and then use the good bran
145.
by vmilner 4y ago
Thankfully I won a Multiface memory snapshot device in a magazine competition and could bypass all this stuff...
146.
by vmilner 4y ago
Author interview: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lbbQdwu1djc
147.
by vmilner 4y ago
Gooey blob!
148.
by vmilner 4y ago
The ZX spectrum tapes were great near the end, though you realised that top price games were reaching the magazines so quickly that it clearly _was_ near the end.
149.
by vmilner 4y ago
Yes - certainly the Uk experience in the Thatcher era was to reduce income tax by increasing sales taxes. (The overall tax burden for the average family increased slightly over Margaret Thatcher’s administration). Subsequent labour governme
150.
by vmilner 4y ago
I’ve never understood why left leaning governments don’t get rid of it. Or why the EU is so pro it.

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