kwoff

Einstein was mentioned in the link as having published a paper on Brownian motion in 1905. For more context, 1905 is known as his "annus mirabilis" (miracle year), when he published (four groundbreaking) papers on three different topics: the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity. His Nobel prize in physics only cited the photoelectric effect, which to be fair was important for quantum physics. But Brownian motion, where he argued that there are ATOMS, and the special theory of relativity, which revolutionized our understanding of space and time (and he's most famous for, E=mc^2), were swept under the rug of "his services to Theoretical Physics".

If you Inspect the names of Whiteread's images, some of them have Hirst's name (hirst-chess2.jpg for example). I'm not sure about the AI part rather than it just being a mistake by a fatigued person maintaining a long list of things.

Reminds me of https://science.nasa.gov/asset/hubble/runaway-black-hole-nea... A supermassive blackhole drawing in dust on such a scale that it's creating new stars in its wake as it zips by. (The picture is my desktop background. I think it nicely illustrates three fundamental shapes of the universe: 1) spheres (gravity dominates), 2) disks (angular momentum winning over gravity), 3) straight lines (no gravity))

Susskind's book does also mention that the event-horizon shenanigans are due to coordinates and not a physical thing. Certainly I'd trust what he says rather than me, so sorry if I was misleading.

(If anyone has the book, it is chapter 6 section "Interchange of Space and Time Dimensions at the Horizon" and the following section points out the singularity is a time (and you can't escape it (in a Schwartzschild model at least) just like you can't escape time). I'm sorry if my wording is still incorrect.).

Or read Susskind's "The Theoretical Minimum: General Relativity". For a non-spinning blackhole at least, not only is the singularity not a point, it is a surface in time, not space (as the book explains, the space and time coordinates switch places as you cross the event horizon).

I play a self-playing game with sites that do that. I click the Block Site (Firefox extension) button, and the site never appears again. Talk about easy mode! :)

Obligatory: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4234491 (tchrist's "Oh Yes You Can Use Regexes to Parse HTML!", which refers to https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/459233 "TONY THE PONY, HE COMES" (I won't risk copy-pasting the "corrupted-looking" version, heh))

In the 1800s recycled wool called "shoddy" was invented, or at least began being mass-produced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycled_wool "Rag and bone men" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rag-and-bone_man would go around collecting scraps to sell to shoddy factories. Anyway, if you encounter any shoddy code... :)

(I can't find a source, but I thought a similar thing happened in Shakespeare's time, except I remember it being children going around collecting old scraps of clothing. And in my head it's related to act 1 scene 1 of Hamlet, the famous quote: "But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad". A mantle was a kind of cloak, and russet was the cloth it was made from which was originally reddish (though eventually "russet" was just this rough cloth of various colors). So I think maybe "shoddy" is a kind of evolution of "russet".)

Exactly. Before google came out in I think 1998, I had several bookmarked sites like excite.com, altavista, dogpile, yahoo, and yes askjeeves. You kinda had a feeling for which one would be good for which kind of search. But then google came along...

> Without them making a statement of how long they will provide security updates

They said this:

  What version of Android will be supported?

  Communicator will run Android 16. We’re comfortable committing to 2 years of Android updates and 5 years of security updates.

Perl's "decline" means there is some metric to measure how high Perl is. It was higher, but now it is lower. I don't think the metric is well-defined, though.

I hope this doesn't come off as argumentative. You said that with Python "In two days I had what I wanted", but another way of looking at it: in a week of not succeeding in Perl plus those two days in Python, you had what you wanted.

https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/#:~:text=Declining,analysi... so you apparently have to opt-out of consenting to them tracking you...

  - weird sigil rules where the 0 element of @x is $x[0] not @x[0]

'@' and '%' indicate containers, while '$' is a scalar (which containers can contain). So '$x[0]' is referring to a scalar within the '@x' container. If you operate on a container, like 'push @x, 2', it uses the container sigil.

I guess "weird" triggered me a bit, heh. I know it's subjective.

11 em dashes

Not sure if it counts as "really works", but on Windows with PowerToys you can enable Keyboard Manager and 'Remap a key'. (Might want to remap right-Ctrl to CapsLock, in case it turns CapsLock on.) There's also old Registry hacks to do the same thing.

(re OG physics) Sheldon Glashow is still around, I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheldon_Glashow

I haven't incorporated Anki yet, but I guess a similar idea would be Memrise. My experience with that for Korean was that it was too intense in the beginning, since it was throwing random (though basic) phrases of like 9 syllables at me, and I couldn't keep them straight. I am considering trying Memrise again, since I've gone through A2 level on Busuu since then, and know more basic phrases and grammar. I do think I should be building my own Anki set by this point, but I've been too lazy.

Helping with language learning is one of the things I think ChatGPT is excellent for. I have a long-term conversation only about Korean, and I can ask questions like "how would a Korean understand [some grammatical structure]?" and it gives very insightful answers, and even refers back to vocabulary that I've already used or other discussions about similar topics.

"However, De Vos (2005:59) points out that try and may not be preceded by both: " [example] "John will both try and kill mosquitos."

Then the next sentence has "try and is available only when both try and the verb following and are uninflected". (only when "both try and") I know the italicization of "try" and "and" makes it a different thing grammatically, just thought it was amusing.

It's kinda ironic, since one of the three "virtues" of a Perl programmer is hubris, heh.

(re nobody codes in Perl: I still do professionally, and I'll probably never understand why it draws so much hate)

"This also strongly suggests that sleep and hunger are both tied to mitochondrial function and energy balance (the latter was already pretty clear!), and that aerobic organisms are constantly adjusting for both fueling their mitochondria and giving them (especially the ones in the central nervous system) some down time for repair and recovery. As the authors say, rather eloquently, “electrons flow through the respiratory chains of the respective feedback controllers like sand in the hourglass that determines when balance must be restored”. There could well be many other functions that have since joined in with the sleep cycle (such as memory consolidation), but the authors hypothesize that mitochondrial function is the process that underlies all of them. If you need oxygen, then you need sleep!"

yawn :) I was wondering if sleep and hunger are tied to mitochondrial function, then wouldn't breathing be affected? If you're hungry, you're not getting enough glucose for respiration. If you're suffocating....

"He also helped to create an advanced physics course for M.I.T. freshmen with more than a rudimentary knowledge of the subject. He and Robert J. Kolenkow wrote a 2013 textbook for the course, “An Introduction to Mechanics.”"

I used Kleppner/Kolenkow's intro to mechanics (copyright 1973) in 1993 or so, not at MIT. Seems 2013 is referring to the 2nd edition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kleppner#Books Maybe the 1st edition was created for the "mechanics for masochists" MIT course.

"She wrapped her arms around my shoulder and said, “My father too.” She gently reached for my hands and introduced me to the group. “She’s a third-generation sirhyangmin (실향민). She’s traveled across the ocean to join us here today. She is a jebi (제비).”" - who's cutting onions?

That was hilarious. Also kudos for paying a person instead of using AI to generate it.

Dlang always makes me think of two things: Walter Bright, resident of Hacker News. And awesome games I played on Linux in the 2000s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABA_Games

There's a paper that suggests that de-oxygenation might happen in around a billion years, so before the sun swallows the earth: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-021-00693-5

"MCP is very nearly just a vague set of ideas, a hallucination of a specification, appropriate to the current era, where even the constitution is just a suggestion. A ~~ vibe protocol ~~."

Oh, goodie.

"Carnot’s book was largely disregarded by the scientific community, and he died several years later of cholera. His body was burned, as were many of his papers." Poetic? albeit depressing.

I know it's about programming, but I have a thought experiment I think about occasionally. Imagine a universe with one point particle. There's no time or space. Add another particle. The particles can either be separate or at the same point. So in some sense there is time, since we can go between separate and together states. There still isn't space, I think? Is this a philosophical subject I can read about?

Oh man, we have a certain email template at work, and the marketing team wanted to redesign that email; for some reason (broken communication, things out of the blue by company who bought ours, blabla), the designer thinks it's appropriate to just give us a Figma link that has no connection with the existing template or even any HTML. As a backend dev, I have no idea what to do with it. For an email, I'd expect something that someone actually made the HTML and sent the email to test it, like with hardcoded values that I could replace with variables, logic, etc, but I can't even understand how they think the Figma design was appropriate. They might as well have sent me a watercolor painting. I got them to export HTML, but it was completely useless since it's placing everything at specific pixel positions. I have no idea how to replicate the design in the email template. Anyway, I don't blame Figma or anything, just ugh, venting...