cokernel

For the first obvious difference, watch the 'i' in 'login'.

I thought this was certainly interesting as a companion piece (for a decidedly different era of graphics). I can't know this for sure, but I suspect a brief summary of the article -- in particular, an indication that it's not merely lambasting the Super Game Boy -- would have been helpful for folks who were turned off by the article's title.

She has a website for her tesselations (which that Wikipedia article links to), but unfortunately is no longer able to respond to queries: https://sites.google.com/site/intriguingtessellations/home/

There's a nice tiling of butterflies there.

Unless they all picked the barn owl: http://macaulaylibrary.org/audio/50147

> I wonder if the time is ripe for a procedurally generated Zelda game?

The Binding of Isaac is a good attempt in that direction.

> dream of the web

This phrase always reminds me of Abigail's WWW Dream: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/int/abigail.htm

That's exactly right. In the comments Homakov mentions that the $15 and $5 figures have been "adjusted for simplicity".

> I was surprised that with the emphasis on debt and credit in the article, David Graeber's Debt: The first 5,000 years wasn't mentioned.

This is minor, but the article probably didn't mention that book because it wasn't published until about 98 years later.

Thanks for the book recommendation, though. It sounds interesting, as do the ideas about energy backing and "demand rights".

The insult is not that the company is specifically European but that it is non-US. I think the analogy you describe would be more apt if a Californian company were attempting to prevent French people from using the term champagne to describe real champagne from Champagne.

Interesting game. There's a minor typo in the instructions: 'the a' should be either 'the' or 'a'.

I am interested in learning more about this test. Which record store performed this test? When? I guess record stores don't normally publish their experiments, but it would be nice if they did.

As far as I can tell, this is the same game as Unruly[0], which is included in Chris Boyle's Android port[1] of Simon Tatham's puzzle collection.

EDIT: The history is a little more interesting than that. The janko.at page on Tohu wa Vohu[2] names many pre-existing variants: Eins und Zwei, Binary Puzzles[3], Binoxxo, and others. Binary Puzzles are notable for being paper-and-pencil puzzles, but it's not clear whether these were first paper-and-pencil puzzles or computer puzzles.

[0] http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/doc/unru...

[1] https://chris.boyle.name/projects/android-puzzles/

[2] http://www.janko.at/Raetsel/Tohu-Wa-Vohu/index.htm

[3] http://www.puzzle-magazine.com/binary-puzzle-magazine.php

Groupon has indeed filed several trademark applications for the Gnome name, e.g., http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4801:uz6... What is the purported scam?

> you don't have a sense of smell? How is this called?

Anosmia.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/smell.html

Having used both noise-canceling and noise-isolating headphones, I'd recommend going for noise-isolating headphones, at least if you expect office chatter to be your major irritant. Most active noise-canceling systems do best with constant sounds and not so well with random bursts of speech.

I use Beyerdynamic Custom One Pro headphones and am pretty happy with them. They don't provide complete isolation, but they do block out a lot of sound, and I don't need to play constant music to make up for bad noise cancellation.

For a cheaper solution, wear earplugs and just put on some crappy headphones for the visual signal.

There is no license notice in the sample. LibreJS looks for a license notice as a comment in the script: http://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/manual/librejs.html#Free...

There are varieties of compatibilism (the view that determinism and free will are compatible) that do not require the existence of souls. I'd suggest taking a look at Daniel Dennett's _Elbow Room_ for one example.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an article on the subject: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

Yes, "different than" is an Americanism.

I believe that "different from" is most common across all dialects of English: http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxdiffer.html (Note: This only compares UK English and American English, not "all dialects".)

Then the educator should ask.

Here's one place to start for Pakistan: http://tribune.com.pk/story/84402/wikileaks-gilani-open-to-d...

As you point out, this is for drones capable of attack, not reconnaissance drones.

The wording of https://www.aclu.org/translaw certainly suggests that many states do not prohibit discrimination against transgender people.

> Wouldn't that prove that language inherently affects cognition, and thus proves linguistic relativism?

No, it wouldn't. It's not the language that is affecting how the brain works here; it's the other way around. The theory of universal grammar can be viewed in part as an explicit rejection of linguistic relativity.

> I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme of this whole discussion thread.

I was responding to your comment:

> If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.

I had thought you might be interested in more information on what "universal grammar" is supposed to mean. I was not attempting to take a position on linguistic relativism.

A common paradigm in the 1990s version of universal grammar (I have not kept up) is the principles and parameters framework. In this framework, the universal grammar consists of a collection of principles (such as "syntactic movement is always sensitive to hierarchical structure") that can be configured via a collection of parameters (traditionally, these were thought of as binary or ternary switches). A summary of this framework is available at http://web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/CELS.pdf .

The theory is that the principles of universal grammar arise directly from the structure of the brain, while the parameters are set during language acquisition.

From the perspective of an adherent of the principles and parameters variety of universal grammar, the examples of cross-linguistic variation you mention are not all that radical. A much stronger challenge to universal grammar is the existence of the Pirahã language, which (it has been argued) cannot express recursion, which would otherwise be a linguistic universal.

I can't speak for the OP, but there have been studies of appropriate line lengths for reading text on computer displays. See for example https://web.archive.org/web/20020725135307/http://psychology... (found via WardsWiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TenWordLine).

As you might expect, people who can read better can generally read longer lines, limited mainly by the number of words apprehended in a single "fix" or by the reader's visual acuity.

The article I link to references research on both physical line length and characters per line, but the methodology described in the article itself attempts to fix physical size of a character and distance of the eye from the screen.

There is an excellent list of suggestions at http://blog.shrub.com/archives/tekanji/2006-03-08_146 . The short answer is, no, you don't quit your job and forfeit your college degree; you aren't bad for having privilege and "checking your privilege" isn't supposed to make you feel guilty for having it.

The post is a little long, but I think you would get more benefit out of reading it yourself than you would out of my poor attempts to summarize it.

It's hackers all the way down.

In linear algebra, lines are sets of points, but in modern geometry, points and lines remain undefined terms, implicitly defined by their incidence relations (which points are "on" which lines).

You may find the Fano plane (a three-dimensional finite projective space) interesting:

  * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fano_plane (brief description)
  * http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/octonions/node4.html (connections with higher math)

To be fair to the author, he does discuss Robinson's approach to infinitesimals (but not Skolem's) in the very next paragraph.

The two blog posts by Gowers are attempting to provide an exposition of the Razborov--Rudich paper "Natural Proofs" (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.41....).

One way to try to prove that P != NP is to identify some "natural combinatorial property" that problems in P have that problems in NP do not share. The problem (as Gowers explains) is that any such property is either incredibly complicated or actually applies to almost any random problem in NP. Razborov and Rudich state and prove a technical version of this statment, which implies that attempting to use "natural combinatorial properties" to prove P != NP is a non-starter. (Hence the title of Gowers's blog post.)

For another summary, you might look at the relevant article on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_proof). But I'd recommend reading Gowers's writing, which is much clearer.

Thanks, that helped me put the article into better context.