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A type can't implement its own 'and' and 'or' operators. (Probably because it is non-obvious how to handle their short-circuiting behaviour.)

At least it circumvents https://xkcd.com/1987/ to some extent. It sometimes feels like half the [python] questions on Stack Overflow are from persons confused about how and where packages get installed and what Python they are actually running.

I believe most makefiles I see these days — pretty much all except the ones I write myself — are the monstrosities that come out of automake. If that is the first impression new programmers get of make, then make is dead, because nobody is going to want to touch it with a bargepole.

Midsomer Murders also feature wine bottles launched from a catapult.

I believe every household in Sweden has at least one set of plastic measuring spoons, like these. You'd think they were issued at birth, or something. https://www.pricerunner.se/pl/461-4127639/Koekstillbehoer/No...

They have a 5ml teaspoon (sv: tesked) and a 15ml tablespoon (sv: matsked). Also typically a 1ml "kryddmått" (literally "spice measure"; no idea what the English equivalent would be), and an obviously-100-ml dl (decilitre). Nobody (well, hardly anyone) uses "normal" spoons.

I'd expect the same. However, reality does not agree. Apparently, the law/rules/whatever state that a death must be reported within 14 days (I have no source for this). I do not know about deaths in general, but for Covid-19 deaths in that Excel sheet on the Arcgis site, the death count takes about 10 days to stabilize. (Why? My guess would be: because public health care in Sweden is managed by the 21(?) regions, each with their on systems for everything.)

It looks exactly like the Dialog (manufactured by Ericsson, or probably L. M. Ericsson at the time) that were ubiquitous in Sweden in the 70s and 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericsson_Dialog .

Oh, come on, all we need to do is to keep the entire world in "summer holiday" mode for a few years! :-)

I live in the outer suburbs of Stockholm and (normally) commute into town by train every day. Every year around midsummer (20 June), the trains start getting noticeably less crowded, as people start going on their summer holidays. Then it takes until late August before the rush-hour crowds are back to normal. Is seems an extraordinary coincidence that it was during this period that Covid-19 essentially petered out in Sweden. Since the beginning of September, the number of positive tests has been climbing again, more or less exponentially. The number of deaths is lagging behind, but there is a definite uptake the last couple of weeks. As usual, deaths seem to be going down during the last week because of lagging statistics. My guess is that the final number for friday 23 october will end around 7, and 30 October around 10 (but I hope I am wrong!). At least this seems to indicate that you do not need a full-blown lockdown to stamp out Covid-19 — "Swedish summer" is a sufficiently low level of activity!

I, too, have a 28S that rarely sees the light of day. Instead it is my older, and much less advanced, HP-10C that gets occasional exercise.

The 28 and 48 series sat in a kind of awkward spot between pocket calculators and "real" computers. The programming language is essentially Lisp turned backwards, but for any task where you actually need that capacity, it must have been easier, even at the time, to just use a PC (in the wider sense, not just IBM PC and clones). The 48 had better communications facilities, so I imagine it might have been useful where pocket carry was actually necessary (it seems to have been popular with surveyors, for example, and I have seen them hooked up with a cable to a total station).

Most people in Europe do not use English as their everyday language, and those who do have neither Alces alces nor Cervus canandensis at hand to look at. Which is probably why they got it wrong and applied the word "elk" to the wrong animal once they got across the pond. They should have asked some Scandinavians. :-)

I remember there was much talk in the local press around 25 years ago about how Kallax/LLA was to be the next big freight hub. It went as far as extending the runway to accommodate bigger planes (making it the longest runway in Sweden, if Wikipedia is to be believed). As far as I know, the freight boom failed to materialize, largely because Russia were not very keen on allowing flights through their airspace.

So we need a map projection that weighs distances by political resistance. :)

I have always been a (Net)PBM(Plus) guy, mostly because pbmplus was the first such software I used, and because I found it easier to keep track of what gets done in which order when it's an explicit pipeline. However, I haven't really updated my opinions in the last 20 years or so. Does Netpbm even still exist?

Does fontconfig support this? I know that you can set boolean flags for some fonts (like old-style vs. lining numbers) using the fontfeature property, but what about the "casl" axis, for example?

For me, dark mode is what you used on old 50 Hz CRT:s, where a light background would flicker so horribly that it drove you crazy in five minutes. If you had the luxury of professional kit, you used black-on-white.

When building a house, there is a considerable difference in effort between making detailed construction drawing and building the house, so it makes sense to make a detailed construction drawing.

In software, there is effectively no difference between making a detailed design and actually writing the program, so it becomes a lot harder to know where to stop drawing and start building.

I guess that many of us have, at some point, thought we had come up with a good design, after spending lots of time on it, only to find that it stumbled on some detail when we actually tried to implement it. This makes it tempting to think "If I must work this out in detail anyway, I might as well do it in code. That way, if I get it right the first time around, I will be done!" Unfortunately, it also makes it tempting to stick with a design after it has proven to be a mistake, because of the sunk cost.

(edit: grammar.)

These articles always give a sense that it's business as usual in Sweden. It isn't. I have been working from home for three weeks now, but I have had to go into central Stockholm a couple of times, and it is almost eerily empty. Restaurants and cafés have a handful of clients, spread out in the corners, at peak lunch time when they would normally be crammed full. Shops are open, but the client-to-staff ratio is close to 1:1, and most have reduced their opening hours. Some article mentioned that cinemas are open. This is technically true -- they haven't been ordered to close -- but the big chain that runs most of them has shut those down on their own initiative.

I don't claim that the level of restrictions is optimal, or that tighter restrictions would not be beneficial, but business as usual it isn't.

You should check out Comic Neue. http://comicneue.com/

That will give you 20 0 14 on the stack (top to the right). After 20 ENTER 8 ENTER you have 20 8 8 on the stack (and the stack lifter disabled). - gets you 20 0; 7 ENTER gets you 20 0 7 7 (and the stack lifter disabled again); + gets you 20 0 14. If you want to compute 20 - 8 + 7, type 20 ENTER 8 - 7 + . As another comment points out, you only use ENTER to separate two numbers. Other ENTER:s are not optional, they are usually downright wrong, unless duplicating the number at the top of the stack is what you want. (Edit: as I am mentioning the stack lifter, I should probably say "bottom" rather than "top". The HP calculator stack was usually visualized as being above the display, with operations taking place at the display, i.e. at the bottom of the stack.)

Wildly off topic, for which I apologize, but whenever I see “Dask”, I think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DASK . You’re not going to manage any large datasets on that! :-)

My general impression is that Finland-swedes often out-swede the Sweden-swedes. =)

This does not apply automatically, but it is true that such restrictions are possible, and that there has been criticism that they are applied in too many cases and for too long times.

Just out of idle curiosity: Why don't they work?

Isn't there an ancient joke about an aircraft manufacturer having problems with the wings breaking off, and some engineer suggesting performating the wing roots, because have you ever seen toilet paper actually tear at the performation?

Trivia: The Swedish Air Force bought a couple of Futuro houses, placing them on top of concrete towers to serve as observation posts on bombing ranges. Here's a document (in Swedish) with several photos, including one of a Futuro being transported by a Boeing Vertol 107 helicopter: https://docplayer.se/97545516-Futurohusen-pa-norans-fore-det...

When I was a conscript in the Swedish army in the early 90:s, this involved some work around masts and telecomms towers (I was in a signals unit) and, under peacetime labour protection rules, that meant wearing an approved hard hat. The army's steel helmet (m/37, i.e, 1937 pattern!) wasn't approved, so we wore standard, bright orange, hard hats, which looked rather funny with our camouflage uniforms. Someone asked whether we could spray paint them dark green, but the answer was a blank no; they must not be modified in any way or the approval would no longer be valid, and our superiors would be in violation of all sorts of laws for allowing us to use them.

"Tell me, Gaston, this machine, how do you attach it to the wall?"

https://twitter.com/joel_kienast/status/859412383650938880

Interestingly, the Stockholm metro system puts compass roses on the platforms (probably intended to provide some feeling of connection to the outside world), but not at the exits where they would actually be useful.

Since Sweden has already been mentioned in this subthread... The case of Sture Bergwall / Thomas Quick comes quite close.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sture_Bergwall