interfixus

Since I came across it in its very early days, for nearly three decades the fourmilab.ch site has been the one constant in my weblife. Treasure trove of projects and ideas and book suggestions. Eclectic is the word which pops up in my head right now and insists on being used.

Had a few email exchanges with the man himself. On randomness, on English grammar, on Swedish adventures in The Thirty Years' War, on certain politics (where we didn't necessarily see eye to eye but where there was plenty of room for civilised discussion). Unfailingly polite, informative, entertaining, and of course with cognitive ressources most of us can only dream of.

John Walker, thanks for all the effort and the inspiration. I shall miss your presence.

> Who said women can't do math?

Asimov.

https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/25852/where-d...

Or, as it turns out, even if you do.

For an alternative take developed in a different galaxy, have a look at redbean, https://redbean.dev/

So what? This crazy thing runs fine, albeit slowly, on my 12 year old ThinkPad. It's actually digesting an image of an anteater while I write this. Because of course it plays nicely and doesn't hog the hardware.

Ah yes, Mussolini's famous Norwegian campaign

> A German general decorating with the Iron Cross some soldiers of the Expeditionary Force and two soldiers of the SS, in Denmark, April 1940

Norwegian writing on Norwegian houses in Norwegian town with Norwegian trees in background. So a slight Gell-Mann effect creeps in, although the general outline of Bohr's escape seems well enough aligned with the facts as known.

> During the time I was dead

Semantic correction for this and all similar recollections: You are alive to tell the story, so you were, in fact, not dead.

Or, to be exact, halvfjerds.

Ha, I remember that news item, although from the other end of the world, and not really sure where I read it. The gist was that the first email had been sent to Australia, and I do distinctly remember that Melbourne was the endpoint.

It's not the author who doesn't get it. What is said is decimal gives rise to these round numbers, other bases yield other ones.

I did, not a month ago. Nothing strange about the process whatsoever.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from random noise.

> The actual toilet in which Friedrich Nietzsche realised God is dead

The actual caption which made me wonder if he was wrong.

> Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitaen

Eminently parsable for me. But then, I'm Danish and used to this kind of bolt-on word construction, or wordconstruction as I should far prefer it.

Close encounters of the blurred kind.

If, at some point in the future, we get small, handy, cheap, good quality cameras that people make a habit of always carrying around, then surely the nature of these phenomena will easily be determined.

Oh yes, and David had a room and a machine park I would have killed for. Still would, really. But why and how a Danish cray fish poster on his wall?

More so. Mid-nineties web static images were either jpg og gif. Preferably gifs, which mostly compressed way better for anything but photos. With proper indexing, color limitation, dithering, bitcount, and vigilant observance of proper websafe color palette you could shave amazing extra kilobytes off precious bandwith. Animations were for Geocities.

And great fun how the inevitably interminable top thread without hesitation locks on to the subject of ... job interviews.

That was my thought, too. Day to day, my phone alarm is fine (and I damn well tested it thoroughly before actually relying on it), but if anything life-and-death is scheduled, I'll use at least one independent extra device. And all this even though I always wake up on time and never am late. Likewise, the phone call problem has an easy solution: Assign different sounds to different callers; low and unobtrusive to the unwanted ones. And the delivery: Never trust such a thing without sufficient fallbacks. If you want safety and full control, organise the thing yourself. All in all, I get a vibe that the poster may be a wonderful coder, but really hasn't got the paranoid mindset required for mission critical work.

Such a pool of pluswords, more or less. What if I am sarcastic, impatient, nitpicking, and arrogant? What if you are?

Rats have played smarter tricks on me than any other animals I've seen. Sophisticated stuff involving quite precise guessing as to what my next steps would be. Call it theory of mind if you like. My dog is smarter in a generalised way, but boy can you do interesting things with a brain the size of a pea.

But the octopusses. The most fascinating part is not really their level of intelligence per se, but that it has evolved from scratch completely independent from us vertebrates. Bona fide aliens in our own backyard. Deep lessons on what converges and what doesn't.

> By adopting this standard, users that prefer to have plain, non-colored text output can export NO_COLOR=1 to their shell’s environment and automatically disable color by default in all supported software. If your software outputs color by default, please consider not doing so. If you insist, please implement this standard to make it easy for your users to disable color and then add your software to this list by submitting a pull request.

I have tried NO_SLOPPY_GRAMMAR=1, but I still get meaningless text about users adopting a standard and me not outputting color if my software does.

I live in one of the top four countries on the list. When ongoing EU self-aggrandisement at times reaches unbearable proportions, I like pointing to the other three. Those dysfunctional, non-EU hellholes Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland.

> the Mediterranean (introduced)

But this time, nothing will go wrong.

A few favourites off the top of my head:

The Difference Engine - William Gibson & Bruce Sterling Diaspora - Greg Egan Flashback - Dan Simmons Timescape - Gregory Benford Rendezvous with Rama - Arthur C. Clarke (but the "co"-authored sequels are too terrible for words)

Yes, it's all the way up there. As these coincidenses will sometimes have it, I just dug out my old paperback copy from the basement a few days ago, and looking mightily forward to a reread.

Beautifully written. And myxomyceticolous is an indispensible new word for me to have learned.

> One practical way is to buy your own domain and set up a Google Business account for it

One practical way is to, you know, not rely on any Google account at all.

> I've been battling the Japanese Lady Beatles

You have a Yoko Ono infestation?