blahedo

My sister and I were talking about this recently (at a funeral in our family). We're in our 40s, and people older than us had largely been to a dozen funerals or more by their teenage years, while people younger than us often went to their first in their 20s or later (or perhaps when their own parents or grandparents died and to no others). We have not-entirely-negative memories of growing up going to funerals, because that's where we saw and caught up with extended family, so funerals are... well, not exactly easy, but they're not traumatic in their own right. For some of our slightly younger friends, though, even attending the wake and funeral in our family, they were having a harder time than we were. And almost none of our cousins brought their kids. For the author, six by 16 probably was a lot more than any of her friends, yes.

It's an interesting shift. A loss, I think.

Timur Latypoff's page (elsewhere in this thread but also: https://latypoff.com/tree-calculus-visualized/ ) shows a graphical view of this; you get to lists first—easy because tree structure is native here—and then a (natural) number is just a list of booleans, of arbitrary length, least significant first. Very elegant.

Just spent a bunch of time with this and had a couple insights that might help (particularly if you have some familiarity with the lambda calculus or formal semantics and are trying to get a foothold on this):

- I had to go down to the OCaml implementation to work out what the small-step semantics were saying, in part because I couldn't see what the underlying tree structure was. In each of the four-element reductions in the definition, put parentheses around the first three to see what is applying to what. Also I think the right-hand sides are under-parenthesised. So:

    (t (t) a)     b       -> a           (1)
    (t (t a) b)   c       -> (a c) (b c) (2)
    (t (t a b) c) t       -> a           (3a)
    (t (t a b) c) (t u)   -> b u         (3b)
    (t (t a b) c) (t u v) -> (c u) v     (3c)

Relatedly, the table is missing some cases because (I think) the authors see them as "obviously" falling out from the associativity of the written syntax, but I think it's helpful to add:

    t             a       -> (t a)       (0a)
    (t a)         b       -> (t a b)     (0b)

Now you can look at an expression with the syntax E E and more cleanly apply these semantic reductions to them.

- So wtf is all this doing? In the same way that working out the lambda calculus is frequently about bundling a lambda to "choose" between two options, this tree calculus is built to "choose" between three options based on whether it's presented with a node that is a leaf, a "stem" (one child), or a "fork" (two children). This is the core of rules 3a, 3b, 3c. If the "function" being applied is a fork whose left child is a fork, we think of the left-left grandchild as A, the left-right grandchild as B, and the right child as C; and if applied to a leaf, we use A, if applied to a stem we apply B to the stem's sole child, and if applied to a fork we apply C to the fork's two children. That three-way "choosing" is going to be how the system builds up the rest of the things you can do with it.

Funny thing about house numbers: they have their own validation problems. For a while I lived in a building whose house number was of the form 123½ and that was an ongoing source of problems. If it just truncated the ½ that was basically fine (the house at 123 didn't have apartment numbers and the postal workers would deliver it correctly) but validating in online forms (twenty-ish years ago) was a challenge. If they ran any validation at all they'd reject the ½, but it was a crapshoot whether which of "123-1/2" or "123 1/2" would work, or sometimes neither one. The USPS's official recommendation at the time was to enter it as "123 1 2 N Streetname" which usually validated but looked so odd it was my last choice (and some validators rejected the "three numbers" format too).

I don't think I ever tried "123.5", actually.

Depends; your example (乇乂ㄒ尺卂) would be a truly stupendous coincidence if it were the only extant example of something and the Chinese characters just happened to be arranged in that way, but would be much weaker evidence if you had gone mining through thousands of characters and cherry-picked one five-character string that happened to match something. It would be an even bigger coincidence if those five characters, in sequence, were found, by themselves, on a document created in an English-speaking or Latin-alphabet-writing region.

So if all of the handful of fragments have marks that look like actual alphabetic symbols that were actually used in that area (later), that's substantially stronger evidence than you're giving credit for.

I bet it's North America bias—we roll our time changes across the continent one TZ at a time, at 2am local time (which also explains why the default is "/2").

Also, generally, the Great Lakes region. I've been thinking for decades now that when the big water fights get underway in the Southwest, the late-21st century megalopoleis of North America are going to be Chicago, Toronto, Milwaukee, Detroit... between "access to fresh water" and "cold in winter, but rarely subjected to catastrophic weather", the whole region is vastly better suited to large-scale settlement than, say, Phoenix or Las Vegas.

Wait times in the US are also ridiculous. A couple years ago I tried to make a doctor's appt, at the clinic where I was regularly a patient, and had decent insurance, but it was for check-up stuff and to ask some questions. I called in July; the first available appointment was December.

On the other hand, when I've gone to that clinic with urgent issues, they see me the same day.

I gather it is much the same in systems with decent healthcare systems; just much, much, much less likely to bankrupt you just for being sick.

It's not a new problem.

"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament!], `Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." --Charles Babbage

They've survived since the bronze age. They're not rotting away to dust any time soon.

Did all this arise because multiple smaller towns with their own survey grids got absorbed into the city at some point, or did the different alignments happen within an already-extant Minneapolis?

Chicago has that, but only in some directions. The south and southwest suburbs continue the city numbering out for a long way; the northwest suburbs all have their own numbering. I think most of the north suburbs are also on their own (but possibly the innermost ones share the city grid). Not sure about west. :)

Yes, by evolving banks to solve some of the problems of lugging around lots of cash and/or stuffing it in a trunk in your house. And assuming you are known at your bank and/or can (eventually) prove your identity there, you don't have the same "lost wallet" problem being discussed here.

> while cyan (#00ffff) is nominally halfway between blue and green, most people's thresholds, averaged over monitor calibrations, imply that cyan is classified as blue

Yes, because (at least for me) the thought went "well that's cyan, it's not really blue but if forced to pick, cyan is more like blue so I'll click that". It's like rounding up at 0.5.

Man oh man, I remember wanting an Atari so bad in the mid-80s—my friends, at least the ones with older siblings, had 2600s—and my parents managed to get me a 5200 right in the window where that was the thing they were selling. And nothing ran on it. I think the 7800 may have even been out by then, which just added to the disappointment. (Fast forward a couple years and we got a Nintendo and have been a Nintendo household ever since ;)

> Can you elaborate on what would be bypassed by "patrolling?"

Well, we saw this play out in the last couple years in Texas—they set up their laws so that abortion enforcement was performed by civilians (i.e. not cops, not the government), specifically to throw sand in the gears of any countervailing judicial efforts (i.e. making it impossible to sue anyone to force them to stop it, because it's just a game of whack-a-mole at that point).

In Chicago (I assume also other places) the leading bus will sometimes announce "after this stop this bus will run express to Western" (or wherever) "if you need a stop before then, transfer to the bus behind this one". I wish they'd do it more often, it really helps to de-bunch the bus routes.

I'm remembering the ISBN switch, which I thought would throw off some older systems—and it probably did, but it took so long to happen that the transition ended up being pretty smooth. The key element was that for a solid ten years or so, every book had both an old-style and a new-style ISBN (and possibly some still do).

I'm hoping that behind the scenes they really are looking at a better plan than just "work around it", but the workaround can buy them time; and if their operations plan is strong, they'll be able to roll it out very slowly in parallel while all their back-end stuff gets upgraded. (This would require some aspect of the new system to make it immediately distinguishable from the old one, e.g. three-letter airlines or whatever, but that's a minor detail compared to all the other stuff they'd have to work out.) Bonus points if knowing the "old" number lets you algorithmically derive the new one somehow, and vice versa, to make the transition period easier. :)

Another piece of elegance: by putting the uppercase letters in the block beginning at 0x40 (well, 0x41) it means that all the control codes at the start of the table line up with a letter (or one of a small set of other punctuation: @[\]^_), giving both a natural shorthand visual representation and a way to enter them with an early keyboard, by joining the pressing of the letter with... the Control key. Control-M (often written ^M) is carriage return because carriage return is 0x0D and M is 0x4D.

> A 45 yr old grandparent is an able-bodied helper. A 65 yr old is a dependent....

What are you even talking about? My mother's parents were 74 and 76 when I was born and they were routinely my caregivers several times a week (while my parents were working) until I was about 6, and occasionally after that. That wouldn't work in every family, but the idea that "a 65 yr old is a dependent" is utterly unfounded as a general rule.

My Happy Hacking Keyboard—which I bought comparatively recently, maybe 2017 or so—uses a mini-USB connector! Really solid piece of hardware, and I guess they just didn't see a need to update a design that worked.

This is really a different notion of "density" than the gp is talking about---it averages over the whole country, including a lot of very empty areas.

Not disagreeing with the overall point here, but there definitely were some high schools with computers and programming classes by then---my mom was teaching programming (FORTRAN) in a Chicago high school starting in 1967. I think she was one of the first dozen or so high school programming teachers in the country but I don't think she was _the_ first.

> I can tell you the last time I had to write a singly-linked list implementation though. October 17th, Nineteen Ninety Never.

The point of writing (and working with) linked list implementations in a CS2 course is not because linked lists are something you'll have to implement yourself later (although there are certain areas of systems programming where return values of various system calls are, effectively, linked lists).

The point of working with LLs in CS2 is because they are an extremely simple data structure that you can inspect the entire implementation of; and their use of references/pointers gives practice with that concept before upgrading to the concepts of trees and (linked) graphs; and their fundamental structure and properties are so different from array-type list implementations that they provide a good first example of two different implementation strategies that can produce exactly the same output/result but with different space and time usage properties; and the parallel implementations are also a motivation for abstracting interface away from implementation and keeping data private and interface public.

So, that's why I teach linked lists in CS2. I try to be very up-front with my students about that; sorry to hear that your professors maybe weren't. I pretty solidly agree that a LinkedList per se is not particularly useful to a working software engineer; but that's not why we teach them.

The German is "die Brüder Grimm" and early English translations preserved that order, which is unusual but not completely unknown in English; then it stuck.

I don't buy tickets from them. I'd like to go to shows, and I do go to some smaller shows where I can buy tickets directly from the venue. But I don't support Ticketmaster. So I go to less shows than I like.

...does that make me more morally qualified to complain than other people? Why?

Hey Pascal!

> Spivak pronouns

Yes, also formative (I was extremely comfortable with gender-neutral pronouns by the time they went a bit more mainstream).

> Kelly ... inherited the perl scripts from

It was indeed! And we're still in touch—she got married to Lee (also from Agora) and both of them are still working doing tech stuff. Probably not many perl scripts though. :D

I was heavily involved in various Nomic games (of that posted list, Agora and the Fantasy Rules Committee, and to some extent Internomic and I think Ackanomic as well; my site from grad school is one of the dead links under Agora) for a bunch of years during college and grad school, and it was deeply formative for me in terms of understanding how rules and systems work. And precise language. Agora was also the reason I learned Perl, when I got elected as the one who kept track of proposals and votes and inherited the perl scripts of my predecessor and had to read the man page (just one, it was Perl 4, excellently written but verrrry long) to learn the language to edit them. Which was also highly formative, come to think of it.

Agora still seems to be alive and well, though, and coming up on 30 years old, at agoranomic.org .

Oh! The street lamps on my campus didn't come on tonight when it got dark—it didn't occur to me then but this could totally be why.

This line, buried deep in the article, is what completely boggles my mind:

> We tell customers to wash their outerwear, regardless of whether it has PFAS or not, after every three to five significant uses and to re-waterproof every three to five washes.

Their outerwear? So we're not talking about inner layers here. All of them? Every three to five uses?? I have jackets and coats that are decades old, in active (seasonal) use for the whole time, that I have never washed. Is this unusual? How would you even wash them? For some of them, it seems like just throwing them in a washing machine would damage the surface layers, make the lining lumpy, shrink them, or do some other problematic thing to them.