beeforpork

Why is the Gantt chart rendered in JavaScript on the client instead of right away by the .md > .html converter?

'dark matter' is not a theory, it is the name of an observational problem.

There are many theories to explain dark matter observations. MOND is not a competitor with 'dark matter', because MOND is a theory and it tries to explain some aspects (spiral galaxy rotation) of what is observed as the dark matter problem, which consists of many more observations. There is no competition here. There are other theories to explain dark matter, like dark matter particle theories involving neutrinos or whatever, and these may be called competitors, but dark matter itself is not a theory, but a problem statement.

That's a rooslessly non-native speaker intolerant naming! How am I supposed to buy one of seese?

> All eukaryotes have mitochondria.

To be picky: that's only 99.9...% true, because some have lost them again, like Monocercomonoides and Henneguya zschokkei. And they lost the mitochondria by two different mechanisms!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monocercomonoides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henneguya_zschokkei

EDIT: typo

Hmm -- I do not understand what is the use case for this. For best design, clearly, I'd use a proportional font. So whenever I want a monospace font, there are reasons that exclude proportional fonts. An obvious reason would be a grid that the letters need to be arranged in (for whatever reason). But then, I can only imagine that any smart rearrangement of letters out of their grid box will be unwanted, because it interfere with that grid. Instead, stupidly simple letter placement will be what I want.

I have an idea for an advanced technique that yields much better visual appearance (but that is also not want you'd want, for the same reasons): instead of just focussing on pairs of letters (so primitive!), consider whole words and optimise their letters' shape, width, and horizontal position, but keep the size of box of the word. I call that 'equilibrium texture healing'.

Title is misleading: it's lead chromate (that producers mix into turmeric power) that does the killing, not turmeric.

> English is a pretty dumb language

Don't mix up language and spelling. Spelling is man-made. Language is not dumb.

How did aminoacyl tRNA-synthetase develop?

Newest news are from 2018. Roadmap says 'as of 2021'. Any news since then?

Alternatives may be worse:

https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/full-short-term-ban-on-gly...

Or whyelse is it still not forbidden?

33 Polyhymnia's density measurement may be highly inaccurate, e.g., Wikipedia says:

> In 2012, a study by Benoît Carry estimated a mass of (6.20±0.74)×1018 kg for Polyhymnia based on its gravitational influence on other Solar System bodies. However, given Polyhymnia's diameter of 54 km (34 mi), this mass implies an extremely high density 75.28±9.71 g/cm3. Such a high density is unphysical, so this mass and density estimate of Polyhymnia is considered unreliable by Carry in his study. Because of Polyhymnia's small size, its gravitational influence on other bodies is extremely difficult to detect and may lead to highly inaccurate mass and density estimates. No other study has attempted to determine a mass and density for Polyhymnia since.

Ah, thanks! So code will look normal, but be subtly different. This is even worse than I thought!

Hopefully I never need to review code written with these definitions. It's an awful idea to do this.

The first section shows why some languages have no 'typedef': introducing another layer of aliases is just not a good idea. It's confusing, it changes the appearance to basically a new language. Just use the standard names, instead of redefining your language, like everyone else. This style is almost as bad as '#define begin {'.

Many of the other defs are obfuscations or language changes -- this coerces C to something else. I'd not like to read code written with this, as it heavily violates the principle of least astonishment (POLA).

(As a side note, I don't understand the #define for sizeof. The operator sizeof returns size_t -- it's size_t's definition, so what is this for?)

Yes, that!

And on top of this complexity of life, it took like 4 billion years on earth (that's roughly 1/3 of the age of the universe) from RNA/DNA to intelligent life forms that can talk about this on the internet. And during this time, no catastrophic global event has happened to undo all that development. Comparing Earth to other planets in our solar system (we cannot really compare to other systems, obviously), Earth is really lucky that there was no such catastrophic event. So many factors are important for this -- our sun is just the right size (not too harsh UV radiation (bad for molecules to be stable), not too small to make our orbit so small that rotation would stop (blowing away the atmosphere)). Our moon is unusally large for a planet like ours, yet it was vital for stabilising the Earth's axis (stable axis == stable weather) and slow down its rotation. And for the moon to emerge, a very nearly fatal impact from another body of the right mass (Mars sized) needed to happen at the right time (very early). At the right speed and the right angle. The availability of water and oxygen at the right times in Earth history where also quite a big unlikelyhood. And it goes on and on: Earth is unimaginably lucky.

Taken all this together, I doubt that anyone could multiply the probability of life on a planet with the amount of planets in the Milky Way (or the universe) we think would be Earth candidates, and claim to have a sensible number. The later is an unimaginably large number, but the first is an unimaginably small number and also a very unknown number. So: we just don't know how often life happens.

And also, detection is not trivial: it is not that easy to see other planets (they are far away), or alien space probes (they are small, space is large), other radio waves (they are weak), or any other signs of intelligent life.

In many (or even most?) companies where I live and work, it is not that bad. My boss will not try to interact with me past 5pm. If we have a meeting just before 5pm, he will wish me a nice evening. I would not have taken the job otherwise -- yes, probably that cost me some salary.

If you want to and if you are aware of the dangers of what technology and modern work life can do, you can have a convenient and slow life today. Yes, you might be expected to constantly consume, but you don't have to. Throw out the TV, consistently ignore and switch off ads. I firmly believe that it is possible to enjoy the ease of modern technology life, and that drawbacks and not inherent.

Technology does make my life easier.

One aspect that I think does make life worse today is that families and friends tend to be distributed across larger distances -- too large to decide spontaneously to share a beer in a pub. It is more healthy and convenient to live close to the people you love to spend time with. But I am not sure this is technology's fault.

Can we see '99 bottles of beer' in Birb, please?

I highly recommend trying lacto-fermentation of everything. I like to keep it as simple as possible. So why sugar? Why vinegar? The sauce is perfect (and more versatile) without.

How and to what would the modified titanium be applied? Could it be a coating for implants? Or a cleaning agent for tools and instruments? Or a desinfectant on skin or even wounds?

Hmm, I measured it once (temp increase over time, computed back into watts, compared to a watt meter on the induction cooker), and I found that of the 3,5kW I put in, 80% actually convert to temperature increase in the water. That is not too bad, is it? Are electric kettles more efficient?

OK, the basics. But do not stop reading here if you want to write a parser. There are more modern tools to look at (e.g., antlr).

Warning 1: parsing Unicode streams well is awkward with flex -- it's from an age where ASCII ruled. But handling multiple input incodings may get weird. If it is only UTF-8, maybe it works, because that's essentially bytes. But I find a hand-written scanner more convenient (the grammar is seldom too complex for that). But regexps based on General_Category or ID_Start etc.? Difficult...

Warning 2: for various reasons, usually flexibility, conflict resolving, error reporting, and/or error recovery, many projects move from bison to something else, even a handwritten recursive descent parser. It's longer, but not that difficult.

Soldering 1N4148 so close to the glass body, plus using a thick drop of solder, makes it really easy to overheat the diode. They are everywhere because they are cheap, not because they are robust... The diodes may become unconditionally conductive, so it may not be an obvious bug.

I fried many of them, because my soldering skills were not that good, I did not read the data sheet and so my iron was too hot and I soldered them for too long. Plus by using short wires, all the heat transferred into that fragile glass body.

Yeah. Don't take it too seriously, though. It's probably the same in other branches. You just happen to know this one best.

Try to concentrate on the other stuff in life, maybe.

No, mixing boxed and unboxed types is very typical for garbage collected languages. As the article shows, you can distinguish with a bit whether something is a boxed type or not, so you do that during GC. For many GCs, you typically have another bit for marking (whether you need it depends on the GC technique -- copying GC may not need it). With modern 64-bit CPUs, usually the three lowest bits are free (because every struct will be 8-byte aligned and thus pointers end in 0b000) that you can use for tagging. This will give you 61 bit ints, which work just as described in the article.

OMG, this detail -- it itches already:

> Sugiura suspects that the beetles also use their legs to stimulate the frog’s cloacal sphincter, causing it to defecate. However, he’ll need to run more tests to be sure...

Maybe the same beetle would work. Has anyone tried?

It will probably readjust. And power supply is expected to be dead ca. 2025 anyway.

OK, OK, if the Klingons find it now, then it'd be a shame not to get some measurements. (The cameras, however, are off since decades.)

Every algorithm is now called AI, unfortunately. 'AI' is being used 'exponentially'.

I wonder how to formally qualify for the trained odor panel.

I don't want sweeteners, and yet in some products, my much preferred sugar is replaced by sweeteners, because producers just don't want to have two products. I suppose people who hate sugar are more numerous than people who hate sweeteners, so the artificial product wins. Like sweet-n-sour pickled herring. Delicious. But off-the-shelf, it's spoiled with sweeteners today, instead of good old sugar.