wcarey

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151.
by wcarey 7y ago
I've long suspected that K-12 math was designed as vocational training for the job "computer", which was a common job in the defense industry prior to its replacement by electromechanical and digital computers. For example, t
152.
by wcarey 8y ago
I detected a pattern in an arithmetic sequence I was working on (we were adding six each time), so I went from 28 to 28+6. Apparently that was incorrect. When I protested that it was definitely another way of writing 34, the animated tutor
153.
by wcarey 8y ago
Fabius was dictator after Trasimene, but before Cannae. Although his tactics were effective, the Romans cared more about virtus than effectiveness and replaced him with Varro and Paulus, who engaged with Hannibal directly at Cannae. The a
154.
by wcarey 8y ago
Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan by Giangreco is a comparison of the American plans for the invasion of the Home Islands with the Japanese plans for their defense. It talks through the cost in live of such an invasi
155.
by wcarey 8y ago
Would the quarter million casualties of the Franco-Prussian war push it into the category of "serious, bloody" conflict?
156.
by wcarey 8y ago
Some hypergolic fuels don't even contain any carbon. For example, hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. Mostly what you're interested in rocket fuel is an oxidizer and lots of hydrogen.
157.
by wcarey 9y ago
Another fun one: *FALSE: A coordinate that looks like 15 45 38 is Degrees, Minutes, Seconds. (Sometimes it's degrees, decimal minutes. Happily, the maps in question had some "seconds" values greater than 59, which tipped us o
158.
by wcarey 11y ago
The employer is probably liable under the doctrine of respondeat superior, whose considerations are: - Was the act committed within the time and space limits of the agency? - Was the offense incidental to, or of the same general nature as,
159.
by wcarey 13y ago
It'll be interesting to see what the court does with this. I wonder what statute he's being charged under? From the Georgia Code: > A person commits the offense of theft by taking when he unlawfully takes or, being in lawful po
160.
by wcarey 13y ago
Things that get integrated into the cockpit tend to be hard to change and have long legacy lifetimes. If you ever want to gouge your eyes out for an evening, peruse the spec for CADRG, which is the file format used by military cockpit in
161.
by wcarey 14y ago
I suspect the driver for the new full-size iPad is the lightning connector. Now all of the iOS devices (except the iPad 2?) use it.
162.
by wcarey 14y ago
We've also run into some interesting documentation fragmentation points. Let's say you make an app for relatively technically unsophisticated users. You need them to drag some files to a folder on their SD card (the files are so large that
163.
by wcarey 14y ago
Niels Abel of abelian group fame ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Henrik_Abel ) proved this for x^5.
164.
by wcarey 14y ago
To be sure. But it is useful in this particular case, so why wouldn't we use it? Similarly, you can write every multiplication or natural numbers as a summation, but we don't because multiplication notation adequately handles the case whe
165.
by wcarey 14y ago
Who's the target audience for that explanation? It seems like the initial question can be solved much more easily by rewriting x^2 + x = 6 as (x)(x+1) = 6. Seeing that x can be two seems intuitive, and that x can be -3 a bit less so. I wond
166.
by wcarey 14y ago
It would be interesting to understand how "school mathematics" displaced "actual mathematics" in our educational system. I suspect that part of explanation has to do with computers. The word "computer" was originally a job title (see, for e
167.
by wcarey 14y ago
Beyond the politics (which the Board of Visitors appears to have handled distressingly badly), there's an interesting analogy to software design lurking in the story. It seems like the philosophical conflict that drove Sullivan't dismissal
168.
by wcarey 14y ago
The idea that there are laws of nature proven beyond a doubt doesn't accord with the history of physics. Newton's conception of natural law was held to be "true" until it was upended by Einstein. Karl Popper actually proposes a nice criteri
169.
by wcarey 14y ago
This is a surprisingly different algorithm from Douglas-Ramer-Peucker. Visvalingam's algorithm gradually removes detail, while Peucker gradually restores removed detail. I'm really curious, too, how Visvalingam performs when the variance of
170.
by wcarey 14y ago
If you're in the continental United States (or Canada), and have a GPS receiver that can handle the WAAS adjustment signal ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System ), you can get a much more accurate signal as quickly as
171.
by wcarey 15y ago
From the FAQ: Can I post homework problems? Absolutely! That seems to encourage academic dishonesty? The stackoverflow community tends to self police homework, so it'll be interesting to see how explicit permission to pay for homework affec
172.
by wcarey 16y ago
I'd disagree that science is about "pushing deeper into the implementation". It turns out that Newtonian gravity doesn't adhere to the interface that Newton proposed (and Newton knew that it didn't; Mercury!). As a result, Einstein develope
173.
by wcarey 16y ago
Let me offer an analogy that (perhaps) paints Christian belief in a more charitable light. Indeed, there are many places where I, as a Christian, say, "I don't want to analyze this further". There are many places too, as a programmer, where
174.
by wcarey 16y ago
While some Christians might subscribe to the sort of faith you describe, there are a great many whose picture of God is perhaps a bit more nuanced. There's an enormous, detailed, thoughtful tradition of systems thinking in Christianity. Tha
175.
by wcarey 16y ago
Rather than an ethics problem, this seems like a unit of measure and communication problem. The comparison to higher education is apt. Prices at community colleges (and many universities) are set in dollars per credit hour. Credit hours, th