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GeorgeRichard

107 karma · joined May 27, 2015

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GeorgeRichard··on Iran-linked hackers breach FBI director's personal email
Are you suggesting that he was targeted before he became the director of the FBI? That seems unlikely. Once he became an obvious target surely the FBI should have secured his past, present and future communications. But I have no idea what protocols there are for such things, I'm just going off common sense, a notoriously sketchy starting point in the crazy world of the current US administration.
GeorgeRichard··on Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri
>>decorum and professionalism Yes, the hallmark of the Trump administration.
GeorgeRichard··on London Underground hosts tests for 'quantum compass' that could replace GPS
Surely it can only calculate its current position, calculating its future positions would seem to require a divination machine.
GeorgeRichard··on Draw an iceberg and see how it will float
This is great fun--and accurate. My lettuce floated just like the picture I drew when I tested it in the bath.
GeorgeRichard··on The Crusader-Era Knights Who Volunteered to Fight World War I
Yes, the article does seem a little sketchy:

> Even by the standards of 1914, Russia was a backward country. Most of its citizens were serfs, often tied to the land they worked, like serfs in the Middle Ages.

Russian serfdom was abolished in 1861, more than 50 years before the start of the First World War.

GeorgeRichard··on A nuclear weapons lab helped crack a serial-killer case
> NUCLEAR WEAPONS laboratories don’t often help solve serial-killer cases.

Because mass murder is their specialty...

GeorgeRichard··on Weaveworks is shutting down
This is a world that I have no knowledge of so I expect my comment is commensurately naive, but it does remind me of the days when I was an avid race-goer. If I bet on a horse to win that's all I wanted it to do; if the horse and jockey expended all their effort and won, fantastic, if they lost, better luck next time. Slow and steady may win the race in some circumstances but it's not the tactic most punters are hoping for. The analogy would be more complete if the loosing horses were sent to the knacker's yard and their stable hands all dismissed with only the trainers living to try, try, try again.
GeorgeRichard··on Victorian Glass Fire Grenades (2020)
The rather good YouTube channel "Our Own Devices" has a couple of interesting episodes about these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNhjfk9BTNA&pp=ygUcb3VyIG93b...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWA-M590bhY&pp=ygUcb3VyIG93b...

GeorgeRichard··on Tech startups selling to police
Fair enough, I must remember to wake up properly and think before I type. I suppose it was the lack of a preposition that threw me. The jibe about the quality of their journalism was gratuitous nonsense and which I regret and apologise for.
GeorgeRichard··on A Man Who Transformed American Theater
This is the second time that I have notice a title change in HN where the original article has "The Man..." or "The Woman..." changed in the HN title to "A Man..." or "A Woman...". Why is this done?
GeorgeRichard··on Clothing designed to confuse facial recognition software
I don't know anything about facial recognition software so I'm probably underestimating the difficulty of alerting the system and it's operators to the interesting possibility of giraffes and zebras wandering around the urban environment.
GeorgeRichard··on Writing: A misunderstood activity
> propelling you to a flood of potentials

I've been looking for this for a long time, the exquisite, electric pleasure of bathing in a flood of potentials...

GeorgeRichard··on Toxic squash syndrome
Your wife loves you very much and/or your nasty food poisoning had very nasty external effects.
GeorgeRichard··on Two envelopes problem
Why is it a thought experiment? After all envelopes, cash, experimenters etcetera exist. It could be a real experiment. On the other hand what theory or hypothesis would it be testing?

What’s the problem with Monty Hall? The solution (switch to the other door) is demonstrably true. I believe it’s called a veridical paradox.

GeorgeRichard··on Two envelopes problem
> Imagine you are given two identical envelopes, each containing money. One contains twice as much as the other. You may pick one envelope and keep the money it contains. Having chosen an envelope at will, but before inspecting it, you are given the chance to switch envelopes. Should you switch?

Unless the imaginary “giver” shows you what was in the other imaginary envelope you’ll never know. We don’t even know if this imaginary person is telling the truth. How do you know that “One contains twice as much as the other?”

I have never been offered a choice of cash containing envelopes in my life – maybe because I have never worked in a job where bribes could be usefully employed.

The whole “problem” is about as worthwhile a subject of contemplation as, say, “Do flying pigs taste more like partridge than earth-bound pigs?”

Does anyone know of a paradox that works/exists in the real world? I mean something a bit more substantial than whether some random dude claims to be a liar and you supposedly bother to wonder whether or not he’s telling the truth.

GeorgeRichard··on Unofficial firmware upgrade for Dyson V6/V7 vacuum battery management system
Hackaday has an interesting article about this: https://hackaday.com/2022/05/23/fighting-back-against-dodgy-...
GeorgeRichard··on My Life as a Mentalist
> I probably acquired close to a thousand books on mentalism

I'm surprised/skeptical that so many books on this subject exist.

GeorgeRichard··on Machine to Play Game of Nim (1940) [pdf]
At the 1940 New York World's Fair Westinghouse displayed a machine, the Nimatron, that played Nim. From May 11, 1940, to October 27, 1940, only a few people were able to beat the machine in that six-week period; if they did, they were presented with a coin that said Nim Champ. It was also one of the first-ever electronic computerized games. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nim&oldid=1056951...
GeorgeRichard··on Ocean drone captures video from inside a hurricane
> the first video footage gathered by an uncrewed surface vehicle (USV)
GeorgeRichard··on Former college professor accused of serial arson is denied bail in California
Bolshevism has nothing to do with "an onslaught of random chaos". Maybe you have it confused with a crude understanding of Nihilism.
GeorgeRichard··on I just learned I only have months to live. This is what I want to say
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a short novel by the Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962. The story is set in a Soviet labor camp in the early 1950s and describes a single day in the life of ordinary prisoner, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_Denisovich

GeorgeRichard··on A Spectre Is Haunting Unicode (2018)
"A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism." The Communist Manifesto
GeorgeRichard··on Gravitricity – Fast, long-life energy storage
Yure credebility as en xpert is somwat deminished if you cannot spell weight or axle. Yup, yeah.
GeorgeRichard··on Bitoduc: A French dictionnary for CS related words
English: dictionary

French: dictionnaire

HN: dictionnary

GeorgeRichard··on Declining eyesight improved by looking at deep red light
You might find this of interest - it seems to be a cottage-industry spectrometer selling for £67: "The i-Phos can see wavelengths from approximately 420 - 980nm and their relative (though not their absolute) intensities." http://chriswesley.org/spectrometer.htm
GeorgeRichard··on 84-year-old alligator rumored to have been Hitler's dies in Moscow
> he escaped when the zoo was bombed in 1943. His whereabouts were unknown until 1946, when British soldiers found him

Extraordinary that an alligator could survive for over two years in wartime Berlin. Where did it live, what did it eat?

GeorgeRichard··on Low-cost ventilator wins Sloan health care prize (2019)
I know nothing about this field, however when I looked up "invasive mechanical ventilation" Wikipedia told me: "Mechanical ventilation is termed "invasive" if it involves any instrument inside the trachea through the mouth, such as an endotracheal tube or the skin, such as a tracheostomy tube. Face or nasal masks are used for non-invasive ventilation in appropriately selected conscious patients. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_ventilation]

The device is pictured here https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ES5Skn-X0AAkn3j?format=jpg, according to another comment, and it has a "Face or nasal mask" and is therefore non-invasive. The gloomy death rate cited in the Lancet article not be relevant to this machine and it might be a genuine lifesaver in the care of COVID-19 patients.

GeorgeRichard··on Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-server windowing systems (2013)
"One of the great white hopes of the part of the Unix world that never liked X Windows was Sun's NeWS."

I searched Wikipedia and found that "Great White Hope is a nickname or epithet originally applied to boxers who were the hope of the "White Race" to beat African American boxer Jack Johnson."

That seems an odd way to characterize the situation.

GeorgeRichard··on People leave molecular wakes that may give away their secrets
"The East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) ... buil[t] up a massive archive of people’s smells. Started in 1979, the collection was kept across East Germany, collected and evaluated by the Main Department XX, responsible for monitoring the East German cultural and media scene and the repression of the political opposition."[https://www.deutsches-spionagemuseum.de/en/sammlung/odour-ca...]
GeorgeRichard··on Show HN: I made online community for unusual people
Is this a religious (Christian) site? Some of the thumbnails and the name "holy..." seem to indicate it is. That's ok but if it is you have to be upfront - lots of people with mental health problems are atheist (like me), Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, etc, etc, etc. I'm always interested in attempts to get us together but this looks like there's a hidden addenda. Maybe I'm overly suspicious but, you know, that's part of the way "we" are.
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