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True, but this discussion is being used as a lens for the greater social justice movement, where it would be hard to make the same generality (especially when their uniting quality is that they denounce privilege).

I love that example! But I don't think it won any awards, because it's fairly easy to extend.

> What did you take the car driving the man who brought the book that I didn't want to be read to out of up away in for?

Almost-untangled form:

> For what reason did you take in the car driven away by the man who brought up the book that I did not want anyone to read words out of [the book] to me?

Although if you are being very specific, I think some syntacticians might treat the "out" in "out of" and the "up" in "bring up" as a different word classes than normal prepositions (the "out" is modifying another preposition's direction, and the "up" is a particle in a phrasal verb [1]). And I think that's one of the reasons the original form is so compelling is that you have some variance in form giving you clues -- the directional modifier, the question-inversion/wh-fronting, the salience of "bring up" -- that make it tantalizingly close to natural. Whereas mine just becomes a churn of words, at least in my reading.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb#Examples_of_Phras... (see the notes on distinguishing between particle & prepositional phrasals)

True, though Munroe has been quite liberal about word derivations, and '-ment' is a somewhat salient morpheme in English, despite not being very productive.

But still I'm surprised the article didn't pass the updated validator. Perhaps an editor actually made the change?

I think the implication is that the 1st phone is the sender and the 2nd phone was the receiver, to parallel how you generally label 1st/2nd/3rd-person or -party.

But I definitely had a laugh about someone holding a crazy 5-phone contraption just to copy images.

It only takes a little bit of steganography before everything looks like a secret communication channel!

Cool experiment. The biggest surprise to me is that the fluctuations of the real whistle appear to be a fairly constant frequency; I would've expected more chaotic behavior.

EDIT: While we're near the topic, does anyone have any recommendations for acoustics texts/resources? In particular, I'd love something from the approach of analyzing real-world sounds & instruments.

I've yet to see a payment app reach any major usage in my social network, which is extremely fragmented among Google Wallet, Snapcash, PayPal, Square Cash, Popmoney, Simple, bank-specific apps i.e. Chase Mobile... (Weirdly enough I don't know anyone using Venmo, though I'm familiar with it from HN and the like.) It seems like everyone wants a simple payment app, but there's a huge 'sign-up fatigue' from the fragmentation, and no single app has reached a useful saturation. I wish I were seeing the "viral spread" others see and don't really even care much about feature parity. :\

As someone with no networking experience, that example slide and the following paragraph could be parody for all I know.

That said, I really enjoyed RFC 1925: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925

It looks like the page header/navigation got lost in time. Archive.org shows a lot of now-missing content [1], perhaps in the move to GitHub Pages?

In any case the download page does still exist: http://mentat.za.net/supreme/download.shtml

Which leads to the repo: https://github.com/stefanv/supreme

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140204102520/http://mentat.za....

The problem is that the text is actually two identical layers, the tashkil/diacritics residing on an upper layer with a hints-only font and absolute positioning. You can fix it by giving that layer "width: 100%".

Assuming it's RGB, it comes out as (what I perceive as) a pretty mid-range skin color, #c79170:

http://imgur.com/zzOUnRn

I'm curious if the asymmetry has anything to do with the "computational" component, e.g. in solving a system of equations (like estimating distance across multiple sensors), it's best to have an independent basis. If the sensors were arranged in a perfect grid pattern, then comparing some sets of sensors (i.e. colinear ones) wouldn't give you as much data as others?

...or perhaps I'm letting my understanding of computer vision/geometry/linear algebra run away from me...

Yes, and to be perfectly clear, the color matrix is all identity except for the alpha row [0 0 0 21 -9]. This is stretching the alpha range so that many of the semi-transparent areas outside of the original blob that were generated by the gaussian blur are now completely opaque. (It's similar to a thresholding operation, but there are some middle values that survive.)

If you can insert the ESC character, u001B, it's easy. (Though note that it appears as the two characters ^[ in the blog post, so your code should start ESC[5m with only one bracket.)

Unfortunately Sublime wasn't happy with me trying to type it through the Mac Unicode Hex input, but I was able to copy-paste it in, and I was also able to enter it directly in other programs, like GitHub desktop.

I recall playing this a couple times in college, to vastly different results. One 'ended' as a weird race to infinity, where the point values exploded and the winning value increased exponentially every turn. Another created a weird microsociety with social castes and jobs. I created a website for that one and years later found mention of it on the site for another Nomic game that had grown to the point of establishing 'diplomatic relations' with other games.

If anything it belongs in a class of "game" alongside things like D&D...it's a very minimal goal-oriented storytelling structure, albeit with one that leans heavy towards legal and procedural creativity.

I'm not certain there is an actual paper yet; I suspect from some of the phrasings that it was merely an announcement that their program succeeded, but a formal paper will take a while.

I did find this reddit post by Dr. Mann [1] where he says:

> We were just in the process of debugging and optimizing the code when our new example was found. Because we are in the early stages of the computational experiments, we were surprised to find this example so quickly. We are hopeful of finding more new examples as we proceed.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/3fe347/15th_pentagon/...

This still happens to me frequently on my Win7 laptop.

> imagine an AM radio transmitter that transmitted on every frequency of the AM band

Forgive my weak physics background, but aren't lasers generally known for having narrow frequency ranges? So if this is just creating white additively using RGB lasers, won't it be more like 3 frequencies, not a full spectral band?

It sounds like it's only 'white' from a human standpoint, not a physical one...

Just saw http://signup.metroia.com/ today in the public Game Development slack.

A lot of people have hypothesized that autonomous vehicles will drastically change the economics such that daily car sharing/rental will be cheaper than car ownership, and similarly convenient. This might in turn lead to a decline in car culture and personal car ownership. With a larger percentage of vehicles being owned by companies (or at least by individuals who are often loaning out their vehicle to the network), the distinguishing factors in the market may shift away from personal taste and lean more heavily on efficiency and safety and gadgetry.

A lot of hypothetical guesswork in there of course, but those are the kind of ideas I've heard lately on the matter.

The preconnect relationship is intriguing; I hadn't been following the adoption of resource hints.

Sidenote: I find it really interesting that the current spec suggests preconnect and its siblings accept a probability attribute estimating how likely connecting to different resources is.[1] Something funny to me about making the directed-graph/state-machine nature of the internet finally show through the markup.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/resource-hints/#hint-probability

Well I'm not sure of iagooar's intent, but there is an important distinction here that only community members have the actually power to save a language. It isn't their 'fault' by any means because they have to balance the conformative expectations of the larger (usually oppressive) society with the desire to keep their culture alive, and none of us can really say which is the 'right' choice.

The important battleground here is misinformation. A lot of people think teaching their children a native language will impede them from learning the matrix language, but tons of evidence shows that this is not the case. Bilinguals might think slightly differently than monolinguals, but on most tests they actually perform above average. If we could make sure they know that, and provide resources to record media and train educators directly in the communities, a lot more languages would survive.

Google partnered with several research foundations to back http://www.endangeredlanguages.com/ It's not as specific as a dictionary, but it does provide a simple way to find particular languages and upload source material for them.

A little too awesome unfortunately. (It's NYC) https://goo.gl/maps/p4UKe

Nice wrapper. That said, the standard Web Speech API really is pretty straightforward if you want to play with the raw API.

I'm surprised Firefox doesn't support any part of the API. Granted, it's a Google-pushed spec, but they seem to have been working together on the now-defunct Text-to-Speech API. Plus, the speech synthesis aspect is merely handled by the OS (unlike the recognition aspect which is probably handled by Google for most users). I don't really follow web spec stuff though, so I'm pretty out of the loop.

The voices come from your OS' voice services, so it depends on what your OS ships with. That said, both Mac and Windows have been quietly improving their speech synthesis over the years.

I had to return here because I got whooshed by your comment. (I see now some have picked up on it.)

I have no notable background in physics and cannot identify whether this experiment is a valid analog of Hawking radiation, but it's amazing to me that one could substitute that many conceptual components and still have a strong result.

Then again, the whole process of a billionth-of-a-degree condensate flowing at high velocities to create multiple distinct internal sound barriers that could even approach an effective model of an event horizon is a testament to the patience and creativity of the physicists involved. And when you study something so difficult to observe, you definitely need creativity and patience, right?

It's simply plotting 'seconds' over 'items'. Neither axis is a compound unit.

The classification of the less-divisible "free-form" signs (especially those seen in narrative and spatial arrangements) is definitely a challenge to linguists, but that doesn't mean that they don't consider them to be constructed out of semantic or phonetic units at all. For example, different objects and methods of description are frequently represented using the same classifier handshapes, despite how varied their placement and combination can be.

On a similar note, the linguistic meaning of "word" is much, much fuzzier than native English speakers expect (letters surrounded by spaces). Trying to pin a particular level of structures across language categories becomes very difficult due to morphemic, phonetic, and syntactic processes that can break down word boundaries. (Even consider contractions in English for that matter. What makes don't one word when do not is two?) So the issue is, frankly, a mess, and many linguists tend to avoid using the term "word" cross-linguistically.

It parallels the emergence of verbal pidgins -> creoles very well. "Recently born" languages frequently lack the grammatical structure that "mature" languages do. Sometimes levels of phonotactic structure are absent as well.