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persevere

Well, it would be redundant to send a user back to the page he or she just came from, i.e. back to the Google home page.

DDG is similarly self-effacing: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=search

bbgon Teaching linear algebra

btilly has come full circle! It's still a great post.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850485

Coincidence that I should see this; I'm not really active on HN anymore, and just happened to click.

bbgon How Mendicant University Works

VaporEdu?

bbgon Giving the F.B.I. What It Wants

Sounds like someone always wanted a big brother.

bbgon The Pathological Altruist Gives Till Someone Hurts

A relentless addiction to indignation

Those are exactly the words I've been looking for to describe my boss.

bbgon New Ubuntu in 9 days, 18 hours, 51 minutes and 29 seconds

For those of us using NoScript, it's 00 days, 00 hours, 00 minutes, and 00 seconds. We get it first. Win!

bbgon How to camouflage yourself from facial recognition technology

So Mike Tyson, the boxer, with his crazy facial tattoo, was just way ahead of facial recognition technology.

bbgon Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)

I'm going to be that guy:

"as a compliment to this paper" --> complement

"no higher complement." --> compliment

Thanks for a cool post.

bbgon Why you can't search for phpBB on Bing

I started using Bing recently and I noticed that I was getting error pages intermittently, and then pretty frequently.

phpbb and topic view are returning error pages for me (on latest ff, cookies enabled).

Another way I'm reliably getting an error page is adding parameter &first=201, e.g. http://www.bing.com/search?q=stuff&first=201

This is the paging parameter, indicating you're at the 20th screen of results.

bbgon Android SDK has the Gravity of the Death Star as a Constant

I'm sure there's some perfectly good explanation for "Gravity on the island", but I don't know what it is.

bbgon Chevy Volt: Is This Our Future?

I want to love electric cars, but I see two big issues: (1) if they go mass market, all that electricity will still have to be generated somewhere. Coal? Nuclear? (2) The batteries need rare-earth minerals, which are brought to market through environmentally-degrading open pit mining. Furthermore, at this point, most rare-earths are available almost exclusively from China.

bbgon A year of non-Latin script domain names

It's been a year already, and still I don't think I've ever visited a non-Latin-script URL. You would think the web would be the end of parochialism.

bbgon The Dangerous Mr. Khan

Interesting. Do you now see yourself as deeply engrossed in history and doing the real work necessary to become a competent historian? If so, then your example is a counterpoint to my argument. If not, then we're talking about two different things :)

bbgon The Dangerous Mr. Khan

Yes, good point. Now that I look over the comments, everyone seems to say the same thing. That's enough to lead me to believe it should be re-examined. Truth is, I once watched half a video but got bored.

bbgon The Dangerous Mr. Khan

+1 for the idea that history is more than an "incoherent torrent of factoids"

I heard Khan say recently on the Colbert Report that he read the Wikipedia article on the French Revolution as his source before making his video on the subject.

That's fine for his purposes, but somewhere up the information food chain someone must actually read the sources, weigh them, interpret, compare, and do all the other work of understanding and transmitting history. It's hard to imagine that those 'educated' by Khan can take up this work, or if they do, that by the time they become competent, they will regard his videos as anything other than inconsequential in their effort.

However, I do think it's overblown to say that Khan is any more dangerous than Cliff's notes or similar supposed shortcut to education. And I suspect his math and finance videos might be quite good, based on the response, and on the fact that he actually spent time in school learning math and finance. (But I haven't watched them.)

bbgon Ask HN: Do Americans stand a chance on freelance sites?

I'm still trying to make a go of it on vworker, but have no ratings. However, this guy seems to be successful with it: http://tbbuck.com/winning-your-first-freelance-job-on-vworke...

bbgon This Guy Has My MacBook

When you've activated the Hidden app, and the computer is taking pictures, does the little green light turn on when the camera is on?

bbgon The men who stare at airline passengers

This reminds me of part of Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, which talks about "trained" employees at Staten Island (or other points of entry for immigrants) in the nineteenth century, who could spot mental deficiency by looking at the shape of the head (craniometry, but without measurement, just eyeballing). I'm writing this from memory, so I can't go into detail, and I don't have a link to this particular passage. But a significant number of immigrants were put on boats back to Europe just because of the snap judgment of these spotters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

bbgon Twitter Updates, the 18th Century Edition

Enjoyed this article.

A similar theme (modern communication technology prefigured in earlier practices) can be found in Victorian Internet, by Tom Standage.

bbgon Project Euler

Similar site (loosely similar):

http://brand.site.co.il/riddles/usingyourhead.html

bbgon Gladiators' graveyard discovered

bbgon I want privacy because I break the law

I recently watched The Judge and the General, a documentary about the bloody rise of the Pinochet regime in Chile (link below), and the recent legal action against it. I recall a particularly chilling moment when Pinochet declared (paraphrased): if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear. Of course, thousands and thousands of people had everything to fear, and thousands lost their lives for the dubious crime of being left wing supporters of the ousted Allende regime. Some things only become 'crimes' in retrospect.

http://www.pbs.org/pov/judgeandthegeneral/

bbgon Locations of Ancient Woolworths Stores follow Precise Geometrical Pattern

If you like this (as I do), you'll love Nacirema.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema

bbgon Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - Meet your Real Neighbours again - Sign out forever

That's the same idea as in this David Brooks' editorial, in case anyone's interested:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/28/opinion/28brooks.html

bbgon Living in a van - an inspirational story of frugality and achievement

Thoreau's cabin was only 45 minutes' walk outside of Concord, however.

bbgon Minnesota dad spoke only Klingon to child for three years

Herodotus 2.2 gives an instance of a similar experiment tried by Egyptian king Psammetichus. Here the children were exposed to no language. Eventually they uttered a word ('bekos') that was deemed to be Phrygian.

http://old.perseus.tufts.edu/GreekScience/hdtbk2.html

bbgon [dead]

I typically leave all my sites "zoomed" with Firefox.

And when I temporarily want something bigger, I use Ctrl + scroll-up (Mac).

bbgon Dulce et Decorum Est

The phrase is from Horace, Carmen 3.2, line 13.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

Whether it's ironic or not is hard to say. It doesn't really sound like it. First he urges a boy to become skilled in war, then he pictures the boy's fiancee begging him not to fight against the enemy's star fighter -- a lion of a warrior. Then the poet says, "it is sweet and fitting to die on behalf of one's country," and goes on the describe the heroic qualities of personified Virtue in face of opposition.

Horace did claim to have himself thrown away his shield and fled from battle when in the service of the republican cause (the side of Brutus) after the death of Caesar. But he's also picking up on a theme used by early Greek poets, like Alcaeus, so it's questionable how much of this confession is literary trope and how much is historical evidence. Furthermore, Horace had been fighting on the losing side, and he later found it necessary to receive pardon from the victor Octavian (aka Augustus), so better to sound like he supported the republicans only half-heartedly. On the other hand, it might well still be true that he ditched his shield and ran.

The poem dates from after his military experience, and belongs to a collection of poems called the 'Roman Odes' that celebrate Rome and the emperor Augustus.

I think that's mostly correct, but it's been a while since I studied these things.

bbgon Barbara Liskov describes how she helped lay the foundation for today’s languages

Best part of this article:

"I don’t work that many hours a day." "I always went home at night, and didn’t work in the evening," she said. "I always found that downtime to be really useful."