dhosek

I’m likely moving to Mexico next year, so I’ve switched the temperature reading on my watch to Celsius in preparation. The problem is that bands of ten degrees in Fahrenheit translate nicely to comfort levels,¹ which is not really true for Celsius, or at least I’m still adapting to get a sense of what those numbers mean in practice.

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1. For the record:

below 0: Stay inside, drink warm cocoa

0–10: Only go out if you have to

10–20: Cold, but doable

20–30: Nice winter-sports temperature

30–40: Cold, but you could run out to the garage without a coat if you had to

40–50: Cold, but you don’t need a scarf or gloves

50–60: Cool. wear a jacket

60–70: Cool, wear a light jacket

70–80: Perfect

80–90: Warm, but not too bad. Go to the pool.

90–100: Ugh, hot. Tell your parents that you’ll pay their electric bill if necessary but they need to turn on the air conditioning.

100+: Stay inside, eat ice cream.

I feel confident it would be one of the six permutations of 2, the, run.

I rarely have cause to give people my phone number anymore, but I always like to give it as three billion, 128 million, …

As a writer and amateur linguist I can always spot the people who don’t understand how AAVE works because they seem to think that it’s just “bad grammar” and don’t realize that it does in fact have its own grammatical rules. One that’s not exclusive to AAVE, but is common across most informal spoken English in the US (maybe beyond—I know there’s at least one Genesis song that uses this which suggests it may exist in informal British spoken grammar), is the use of the oblique case when a subject has two or more elements joined by and: “Steve and him went to the store” insted of “He and Steve went to the store.” (Ordering is also subject to different ordering with formal English dictating that the first person pronoun comes last, but informal English putting it first: “Me and him” vs “He and I.”

The other thing I find interesting is that formal English has eschewed the double negative as an intensifier while most (all?) other Indo-European languages employ it. Compare Spanish “No veo nadie” (literally ”I don’t see nobody“ which is the informal English formulation) to English “I don’t see anybody.”

Yep, we do have free OTA television. Basic Cable generally comprises the local free OTA channels plus a number of mostly ad-supported channels.

The basic cable A&E began its life as “Arts & Entertainment” and was originally a mix of British import shows and high culture presentations (e.g., televised orchestra concerts). But much like carcinisation in aquatic invertebrates, for basic cable, apparently channels tend to evolve towards mostly showing Law & Order reruns.

I got that last reference. That episode has the funniest exchange in the history of television:

—He keeps talking about the war.

—Well you started it.

—No we didn’t.

—Yes, you did. You invaded Poland!

I would edit the US item to remove “historical” given the current efforts to reinstate everything in parentheses and add new ones.

It is now.

In earlier versions of OS X, setting your date format to have the day before the month was sufficient to also alter the default paper size to A4, which was really inconvenient for me since I prefer the day-month ordering (and as a consequence of buying a digital watch in the Netherlands which only had instructions in Dutch which I didn’t understand, I developed the habit of using 24 hour time), but I live in the US and only rarely encounter paper which isn’t 8.5x11.

The great thing about the whole Apple ][ system was that it was sophisticated enough to actually do stuff but simple enough that a single person could understand it (largely because it was mostly the work of a single person). To this day, my mental model of how a computer works is the Apple ][.

1:25 with one bonus word on the HN special. I saw that the bonus words are highlighted in orange in the final word list so yes, it was two on the first puzzle.

1:40 with (I think) two bonus words. It would be nice to have bonus words counted at the end. Maybe some way of setting a score based on time plus bonus words.

If you see a letter with only one line coming from it it’s either the last or first letter of a word.

I remember discovering that while writing some code for a job interview. The reason for it is simple, even though in many input systems (like the ABC International I use on my Macs) it’s a two-character sequence to enter ł, there is not actually a combining character for that line through the l. I’m not sure, but I think sqlite’s remove_diacritics works the way that I’ve implemented that functionality in some of my own software: convert to NCD then remove combining characters from the string. I would expect that a few other special cases also behave the same way, such as ħ or ø which also will not decompose.

In fact, the Slavic countries which use Latin are all predominantly Catholic, with Bosnia being an outlier in using both Latin and Cyrillic while also being roughly half Muslim.

My thoughts exactly, what I’d rather have is the ability to integrate other stuff into Apple’s ecosystem (most notably my hearing aids, which despite being MFi can only really stream audio from my phone—I had a pair of Beats headphones a few years ago and the ease with which I could switch them between phone, iPad and Mac was so wonderful and I’d like to be able to do that with my HAs as well.

Saturday vigil masses are rather popular as they cover a Catholic’s Sunday obligation without requiring getting up early.

How do you manage that? I tried setting up a specialized directory of type-related websites and pages back around 1999–2001 and trying to find contact info for websites was difficult then when people still had public WHOIS info most of the time. I can’t imagine any scalable way to be able to connect to the owners of cams where you have little more than an IP address to work from.

(Not sure how much metadata there is on the site since it’s currently suffering the hug of death so I can’t see anything at the moment.)

Worth noting, a lot of times, what people think is proof by contradiction is in fact proving the contrapositive (i.e., if you want to prove, “if p then q”, proving “if not q then not p” will also suffice).

Not really. <img> was a first-class tag if not from the beginning, pretty early on and the same with color.

The problem with DVI is twofold:

First, font support is purely by reference which means that you need some way of connecting the fonts used in the document with the DVI file. Use of the wrong font could produce some spectacularly bad output.

Second, graphical support, other than rectangular boxes is only handled through the xxx opcode which never had any standardized meaning (although I tried). This limitation also applied to colors. Really, it was only with the final victory of PDF as the universal document format that these limitations were finally ameliorated.

There were a number of different ways to write and in Latin. The Vulgate Bible, apparently unhappy with all the vav-connectives in its Hebrew sources uses them all.

Fun fact: The -gh endings of many English words share a proto–Indo European root with that enclitic¹ -que in Senatus Populusque Romani. I remember being skeptical of this when I first heard it assuming that the person was arguing for a shared Latin heritage until I dug in and discovered that it actually went back to PIE.²

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1. For the non-linguists here, an enclitic is a suffix added to a word that either functions as a separate word (here -que means “and”) or as a grammatical modifier like the possessive ’s in English.

2. Proto–Indo European for those of you who don’t do acronyms.

I still find it somewhat fascinating that the Slavs arrived in Europe during recorded history.

C(2n, n) isn’t about permutations, but choosing subsets of a set without order, but as I’ve thought about it, the model here is that there are 2n moves to be made and you need to choose n of them to be down (or right, depending on your preference).

Oh you just reminded me of the joy of making maps for D&D. I only ever played two or three times, but I had notebooks full of detailed maps of dungeons, cities, whole continents.

Which suggests another approach to the solution; you have 20Ls and 20Rs which can appear in any order so it’s a permutation with repetition problem and thus 40!/(20!20!)

That approach has the advantage that it’s easily adapted to non square rectangular grids (n+m)!/(n!m!)

There’s an xkcd for that but I’m on my phone and too lazy to look it up.

Isn’t there a performance cost though with runtime binding of functions? (I’ve not looked too closely at Swift since the first couple of years when Objective C compatibility was essential, so maybe that’s less of a default than it was in the early days).

I used to do things like this when I was a kid (less extreme, never more than a single sheet of paper), where I would create some natural features: a lake shore or river, maybe a freeway or two or a railroad and then start platting out a subdivision in the open spaces. It was a delightfully meditative practice and maybe I should start doing it again.