vmilner

15 ms·

181.
by vmilner 4y ago
I think early 80s is when it becomes tricky to _legally_ beat kids in schools in the uk. I suspect collective punishment was actually illegal long before that but it wasn’t tested in courts.
182.
by vmilner 4y ago
My Uk school was still doing collective punishment beatings (“Who spoke?” (No-one replies) (30 boys get caned) ) in the early 80s.
183.
by vmilner 4y ago
The ultimate British queue... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xHwUycV6wSY
184.
by vmilner 4y ago
I love it so much. I am sad that the Halas and Batchelor animated version I watched as a kid seems to be unobtainable :-( I _strongly_ suggest searching out the modern Robin Buss translation (Penguin books sell it in the Uk) rather than the
185.
by vmilner 4y ago
This used to be my bible when doing full time C programming around 2000 (together with the standard docs) but I’m out of date with the latest standard updates (as is this) but it may still be of interest. https://c-faq.com/
186.
by vmilner 4y ago
Thanks - it certainly was undefined in the original standard.
187.
by vmilner 4y ago
Is void main() Still non-standard in C?
188.
by vmilner 4y ago
Ironically, Disney would _like_ Scorsese’s beautiful 1997 film “Kundun” to be fake (but it isn’t). https://filmschoolrejects.com/kundun-scorseses-buried-master...
189.
by vmilner 4y ago
http://jdh.hamkins.org/lectures-on-the-philosophy-of-mathema...
190.
by vmilner 4y ago
That footnote confirms the traditional position that a floating point zero need NOT have an all-zero bit representation.
191.
by vmilner 4y ago
Yes. I was porting code to new machines and programmers had assumed it was compliant but it wasn’t.
192.
by vmilner 4y ago
I encountered problems on some platforms in the 90s where zeroing the bits of an array of pointers or floats/doubles did not give you an array of NULL pointers or 0.0 values. The comp.lang.c FAQ file discussed this in detail.
193.
by vmilner 4y ago
How on earth does a list of 40 people that’s never written down maintain any sort of resistance to “Telephone”/“Chinese Whispers” errors?
194.
by vmilner 4y ago
I watch a lot of tutorial channels and almost the first thing I (and I assumed everyone else!) do is sort by oldest first to find the start point... :-(
195.
by vmilner 4y ago
I suspect a common experience for Uk visitors to the US is getting off the plane, going to a hotel bar for the first time, buying drinks, paying for them, and then been told (possibly passive-aggressively) to ** off. [It’s more usual to pay
196.
by vmilner 4y ago
I think anyone starting a lin alg course could do a lot worse than watch all his "Essence of Linear Algebra" series before starting - then watch the relevant (c. 15 min) episodes as you take each lecture.
197.
by vmilner 4y ago
3blue1brown on this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PFDu9oVAE-g&vl=en
198.
by vmilner 4y ago
A noticeable feature of the Sainsbury’s website is that weights encoded in the URLs don’t change with the weight in the webpage as shrinkflation happens. So the following link to 115g of ham still has 125g in the link itself: \www.sainsbury
199.
by vmilner 4y ago
LDPC coding (combined with BCH coding) is now used for most Western Europe digital and satellite TV in the DVB-T2 and DVB-S2 standards.
200.
by vmilner 4y ago
There is a finite field (or Galois field GF(p)) of size p for any prime p. This can be exhibited by integers mod p. There are also finite (Galois) fields GF(p^n) of size p^n (positive integer powers of p) These can be exhibited by polynomia
201.
by vmilner 4y ago
The Orville is kind of an anti-bait-and-switch : it sounds a so-so premise (Star Trek with toilet humour) but rapidly goes beyond that into a really good show with a lot of really likeable characters.
202.
by vmilner 4y ago
Yes, I’m British and when American friends first used the word “Telephone” in conversation I was very confused.
203.
by vmilner 4y ago
The Web of Stories interview is very good: https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/1
204.
by vmilner 4y ago
Yes - I don’t know if anyone tried this again in future episodes - it would be interesting to see.
205.
by vmilner 4y ago
Any excuse to show my favourite prisoners dilemma-ish video... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S0qjK3TWZE8
206.
by vmilner 4y ago
The anonymous "Voice of God" conceit always puts me off The Economist.
207.
by vmilner 4y ago
Quite. Jo Cox, David Amess and Andrew Pennington (a local councillor defending MP Nigel Jones) were all murdered at surgeries. Stephen Timms also survived an attempted murder by stabbing.
208.
by vmilner 4y ago
Or win one of the (up to 4) 100% “New Foundation Scholarships” offered to state school boys.
209.
by vmilner 4y ago
It’s not easily testable if it’a pseudocode that hasn’t been implemented yet.
210.
by vmilner 4y ago
To be fair, there’s a reasonable chance this would have picked up in testing once the pseudocode was actually implemented.

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