gfaure

The appearance of the pages -- filling all empty space -- reminds me of the style known as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui.

eBay leaves the return policies to the individual sellers, so some sellers absorb the cost of returns, some require you to pay postage, and some don't accept returns at all. Naturally some of this probably gets absorbed into the listing price.

@kens: Thanks, long time follower of your work. Are you familiar with the inner workings of the HP Voyager (11-C, 12-C, ..., 16-C) series, and if so, is a teardown/analysis of these something that you'd be wanting to do?

The price of Curtas seems to have gone up over the past 18 months. eBay has plenty of listings for Curta I and IIs, but you'd have to shell out more than US$1000 for one, unless the unit was in bad condition.

I love the artist-provided annotations when they're available, but they really need to take a good look at the low quality of the vast majority of their user-generated content. It doesn't help that so much of it is pure speculation, highly subjective, or plain wrong.

I was lucky enough to see this talk in person at the Vintage Computer Festival West this year.

One of the absolute highlights (timestamp https://youtu.be/_1jXExwse08?t=1903) was the incredible work on a custom disk loader that increased the throughput from 400 bytes/s to 7.5 kB/s! A writeup of that optimisation work, which was only published in 2013, can be found here: https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/gcr-decoding/index....

I assume one reason Apple has made it more challenging to extract the dictionary resources is in order to satisfy licensing constraints with the dictionary authors. I wonder if they'd block an app like this through the App Store submission process, if submitted.

In the Russia case, not their full name -- notice that the patronymic is different for each of the real candidate and the two fake candidates.

English does use clicks, as paralinguistic sounds. The first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_consonant has a couple of examples.

Correct, but it was despite Kumon, not because of it.

If the article is accurate, one Japanese equivalent of this, known as Kumon, is almost its polar opposite -- remembering my own experiences with it as a kid, it was very much about rote memorisation and doing the same sheet of arithmetic as quickly as possible. One of the exercises Kumon made kids do at the age of 5 is to simply place shuffled magnets with the numbers 1 to 100 in order on a 10x10 board.

I can't say that this approach really turned me onto maths: quite the opposite. Past a certain level, the Kumon teachers were essentially just marking from an answer book, without any understanding of the content themselves. They had zero interest (or perhaps ability) in conveying the beauty or applications of maths to the students.

The approach that made me love maths was one where I understood the intuition and purpose behind the methods, ideally enough to develop them from the bare minimum myself.

The composer of the Mario Paint soundtrack, Kazumi Totaka, is still at Nintendo and most recently did the music for Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020).

Steve Mould did an explainer on the pollination cycle of figs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6jJzOc9gaE

Despite all this, I have no plans to alter my fig consumption at this time.

There's a Tom Scott video about this with some further academic references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TDIAObsqcs

Bouba/kiki is most likely a specific instance of the more general notion of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism. Another well-known cross-linguistic association is the one between front vowels and small objects on one hand, and back vowels and large objects on the other.

It was new to me too, but "BOLO" turns out to be US police jargon for "be on the lookout".

Many people I know have bought more games on Steam than they could ever play (a behaviour encouraged by seasonal Steam sales). This strikes me as a great chance for people to discover and play titles that have sat in their collections for years.

I take a little pleasure in the idea that our kids might discover some program I wrote when I was younger, and in doing so, maybe better understand the mind that made it.

This combination is what Germans call a Radler, which translates to "cyclist": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shandy#Radler

Annoyingly, itertools is one of those packages in the Python standard library with wordsruntogether-named functions, so it's really known as itertools.groupby instead.

Whereabouts in RWC? I checked along the rail route and couldn't find any crossing that wasn't grade-separated.

There's a beautiful vector typeface produced from a calligrapher's hand in the SGI collection called Inja Ink: http://graficaobscura.com/sgitype/page014.html

The calligrapher who drew the letterforms is still operating in Palo Alto to the present day. https://www.instagram.com/inja_ink/?hl=en

Similarly, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, a young squire is described as conducting himself "in hope to stonden in his lady grace" (in the hopes of standing in his lady's grace).

Some take this to be a bawdy anatomical pun, expressing the young man's hopes of 'standing' in his lady's 'grass' — a distinction lost nowadays that the pronunciation of "grace" and "grass" have grown so far apart.

(Line 88 of Chaucer's General Prologue, https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0)

Bravery doesn't enter into it -- I used the word because as linguists, we want to refer pragmatically to "whatever Chinese varieties actually are", rather than entering into endless debates about what is a language and what is a dialect.

By the way, I'm a linguist (and a native Cantonese speaker) who is acutely aware of the dialect/language issues surrounding our topolect, so while I sympathise and thank you for recognising that Cantonese would in other times and places be considered a language, using "topolect" allows us to focus on the topic at hand.

No: 尸, the radical of 尻 doesn't mean "flag" -- it means "corpse". Notice that many of the characters with the 尸 radical refer to defilement, excrement or death.

The last point, about Ancient Greek read in the "modern" pronunciation (with Φ, Χ, Θ read as fricatives rather than aspirated stops) reminds me of how Mandarin, which is how Chinese poetry is often read nowadays, is not great for representing the sounds of the poetry as written, since it's lost all final stops (-k, -t, -p) in closed syllables.

Other topolects such as Cantonese preserved them, which makes it a better correspondence if you care about hearing something closer to the Middle Chinese that Tang poetry was composed in.

How do we know so much about Middle Chinese pronunciation in the present day? Check out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME8wzyR6pO8 for a layperson's introduction.

Wow, I'm honoured to hear from someone who loves these old calculating devices as much as I do! I have a Curta II and a number of the HP Voyager calculators from the 80s (11C, 15C, 16C), but the one that takes the pride of place in my collection has to be the Curta. Looking forward to adding a Klein bottle or beanie to my collection some day, too.

He's also a connoisseur and collector of slide rules and the Curta mechanical calculator!

Here's a video of him describing how the Curta performs arithmetic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OynMJB-2J1o — as well as the SciAm article he wrote on them: http://www.mycurta.com/Calculator.pdf

near was the author of higan (https://higan.dev), a SNES emulator which is at the cutting edge of accuracy and emulation research. If you have even touched in passing the field of Nintendo console emulation, it's quite likely you've heard of them or their creations. I hope https://near.sh continues to stay up as an archive of all that they built over the years.

near posted a few words of encouragement when I was wondering whether to start a SNES emulator of my own, which inspired me to build one over the course of a few months. That journey gained me a huge amount of engineering, personal and aesthetic fulfillment.

I hope all the people Near/byuu inspired never forget their contributions to the field either. Rest in peace.

The reason why the Latin prefix for "twice" is "bi-", while the Latin word for two is "duo", is exactly the same sound change (dw -> b) that turned archaic Latin "duenos" into "bonus" in Classical Latin.

Even if they didn't draw specifically for CRT output, I imagine the process to have been iterative -- if something ended up looking bad on end-user output devices, they would make tweaks until the product looked good enough on CRTs.

Or are you suggesting that artists of that era never looked at their art on CRTs at all?