zbyszek

12 ms·

61.
by zbyszek 16y ago
I have been carrying a pocket watch for over a decade. They need not be that expensive; I bought one as a gift a couple of years ago for about £25 (~USD40). I guess it depends on the amount of niceness you require. They are readily avai
62.
by zbyszek 16y ago
No smell, though? I once lived in a tenement block where somebody emptied their bowels in the stairwell and I didn't have to go near it to know that it was the genuine article.
63.
by zbyszek 16y ago
When I moved to the US from the UK a decade ago, I went to the shops to kit out my apartment and fondly imagined that the country that put men on the moon and invented the internet would have some kind of amazing high-tech laser-powered rob
64.
by zbyszek 16y ago
That's the trouble with exciting phrases like "This seems to violate the second law of thermodynamics". It is known that Maxwell's demon does not violate anything, and the article does explain this later. But that's not quite the point. I
65.
by zbyszek 16y ago
I imagine the Iranian government might express similar sentiments about anonymous internet mobs. The power they wield might be used to all sorts of ends, some of which we might admire, and some which we might find distasteful. Would a wor
66.
by zbyszek 16y ago
I was wondering what was so bad about the badges you pin on (point 6), before I remembered that most conferences I have been to were academic rather than business oriented. Physicists' are apparently confident that their clothes will not b
67.
by zbyszek 16y ago
This is on the back of an TV ad campaign in the UK, so it would be interesting to see how the numbers sustain.
68.
by zbyszek 16y ago
I have seen the advantage you point out in action in my former life in computation quantum field theory. When I started, code was jealously guarded as a "secret weapon" in the global competition for publishable results. Then the MILC group
69.
by zbyszek 16y ago
The equations describing a field theory contain terms which are the product the field, the thing it couples to (could be another field) and the strength of the interaction. When a field couples to itself, there are terms non-linear in the
70.
by zbyszek 16y ago
Personally, I like the idiom T* t = malloc( sizeof *t ); It's no big deal, but it's just one less thing to change if you need to change the type. (I once had to go through some code changing longs to ints to make it run on a 64-bit
71.
by zbyszek 16y ago
"good ol’ Scottish Whiskey"? It's Scottish whisky, and Irish whiskey.
72.
by zbyszek 16y ago
I think it's all in the freshness. My parents grow their own fruit and vegetables which taste amazing. The ones you buy in the shop, having probably been left in cold storage for who knows how long, are dull and uninspiring in comparison.
73.
by zbyszek 16y ago
But it is not obvious that a theory can be expressed by a program. I am prepared to believe that there are fields in mathematics or genetics or something where this is not problematic. In physics, theories often describe a world which is b
74.
by zbyszek 16y ago
By "The Rules" I think we mean an accumulation of techniques and practices developed and refined by many people over time because they have proved useful. If one has any interest at all in the ones art one will surely be aware of its histo
75.
by zbyszek 16y ago
Think of a sentence containing "at the end of the day". Now remove that phrase. Does your sentence convey any less information? Unless the time of day is actually germane to what you are saying something (e.g. "At the end of the day I dr
76.
by zbyszek 16y ago
Something similar happened to me in the US, but then again I've been stopped by the police in the UK too while out for a walk. In the latter case it was about 4 a.m. and I must have looked suspiciously sober.
77.
by zbyszek 16y ago
Oh dear. There are black-and-white photos of my childhood. I didn't think I was that old -- until now!
78.
by zbyszek 16y ago
Indeed, but in my experience, students regard a problem as "meaningful" if and only if it will appear in the exam. Were they forced to work in a manner designed to stimulate their intellectual curiosity for the subject, many would complain
79.
by zbyszek 16y ago
I worked in a canteen kitchen at the dish-wash end. The diners would put their trays on a conveyer belt and we would scrape the leftovers into the waste disposal, sort the dishes, cutlery and glassware into their allotted crates which we t
80.
by zbyszek 16y ago
I used to have facsimile editions of Defoe's novels, replete with these long s's, and found that the unfamiliarity soon fades and you cease to notice them.
81.
by zbyszek 16y ago
It has. French was the language of the aristocracy in England for several centuries after the 1066 Norman conquest, giving rise to a sort of linguistic duality of French and Anglo-Saxon words in English mirroring the social divide. Thus S
82.
by zbyszek 16y ago
Your point is well made, but if the large, relevant problem can be broken into small sub-problems, and if one of those consumes a significant amount of compute time, then that might (just might!) be worth optimising in assembler. My experie
83.
by zbyszek 16y ago
An anecdote in a similar vein: I was involved in writing (Fortran) code for Crays in the 90s. For the T3D, we speeded up the code with the usual set of tricks -- loop unrolling, array padding and so on. With the later T3E, it turned out t
84.
by zbyszek 16y ago
I'm not convinced by some of your examples. While Darwin's work was controversial, he was buried at Westminster Abbey -- hardly a rejection by the establishment. Can a man who was Master of the Royal Mint and President of the Royal Society
85.
by zbyszek 16y ago
But he did get one for his equally novel explanation of the photoelectric effect, so I wouldn't feel too sorry for him. Nobel prizes tend not to be given for theoretical work until there is a good deal of supporting experimental evidence.
86.
by zbyszek 16y ago
Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? I suspect so. They are tasks where goals are long-term and less quantifiable, and where the financial rewards are modest, so someone motivated by th
87.
by zbyszek 17y ago
a free way to "help save some children". Free to whom? I don't know how much it costs to make a regional UI alteration to Facebook, but I suspect that Mt Gamble doesn't either, and I doubt that it's free. I presume it can only help to sa
88.
by zbyszek 17y ago
Ditto.
89.
by zbyszek 17y ago
What a fantastic way to extinguish through overanalysis any joy that might have been had from the simple pleasure going for a quick drink after work. I realise that drinking cultures might vary enormously but I just don't recognise the fra
90.
by zbyszek 17y ago
If by "effect" you mean a superposition of quantum states, then it doesn't matter how long it lasts, you still cannot "see" it. Once you make the observation, you will see just one of the states. The distribution of results from repeated

More ›