madcaptenor

To be presented as a talk track to the Gettysburg Powerpoint: https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

There's also only one T in "Atlanta". (For some people there are none.)

I predict this will end at 9 AM Pacific Daylight Time one morning next December, when the sun still hasn't risen in Vancouver.

Apparently it's also known as the Greek citron, but I don't see it under that name either.

Is this an example of a Big Noun Page?

OK, I'll assume they meant that when they really meant US Eastern time and I'll be six hours early.

I am a slightly more complicated man. I see Game of Life in the title, I upvote the post. I also upvote this comment.

The US is sort of intermediate here. In a few cases state borders are time zones borders, but in practice they're determined by which big city people are most integrated with and that often oesn't line up well with state borders. For example the bit of Indiana that's closest to Chicago is on Chicago time.

My theory on why people use "xST" is that the word "standard" time sounds like it is the fancy official time.

When people say EST and mean EDT I'm tempted to just show up an hour late, if it's a meeting I don't want to go to.

Me too. Who are these people whose kids' sleep schedules are regular enough that this makes it noticeably worse?

(There was one year where the time change in March did actually have a noticeable effect on my kid... and a few days later, just when she had gotten back to "normal", everything shut down for COVID.)

I live in Atlanta (western edge of US Eastern time) and permanent DST sounds horrible - the sun would rise at 8:45 in early January. Honestly I'd prefer we be on permanent standard time. Call it permanent Central Daylight Time if you must.

On the other hand, I used to live in Boston (eastern edge of US Eastern time) and those 4:15 sunsets were pretty depressing. Permanent DST sounds reasonable there.

Update: episode 188 just dropped.

Still in production. The most recent episode was released 2025-12-31, and it looks like he's lately been putting them out every two months. (I subscribe to the Patreon; there are bonus episodes interspersed between the regular episodes.)

I've seen this recommended a few times here, and I've listened since the beginning. I'd recommend it. But it would be hard to catch up after nearly 14 years and 187 episodes (probably averaging an hour?) - I wonder if there's a shorter history of English somewhere.

Frankly I'm surprised Randall Munroe hasn't done this. (I assume he hasn't because nobody has linked to it.)

Would be nice to have a link to the music itself, both recording and sheet music.

This is the E minor prelude - I happened to recognize it by key but not by number.

See e.g. the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prelude,_Op._28,_No._4_(Chopin...) which has a recording embedded, although there are surely better ones.

Sheet music from IMSLP: https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/3/3c/IMSLP319636-PM...

The short version of "I am not interested in reading something that you could not be bothered to actually write" is "ai;dr"

I remember coming across this when I was studying for similar exams in a math PhD program at another university. It helped me realize that I didn't have to know everything in order to pass. (And I didn't! And I passed.)

We also tried to have a web page like this but I didn't bother writing up my exam - after it was over I just didn't want to think about it.

From Leningradsky station you can go to St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad); unsurprisingly, that train arrives at Moskovsky station.

Exactly.

Wiggling feels more like a second-derivative thing to me but that's discussed too - Chebyshev polynomials max out the second derivative as well as the first.

There is a book of exercises, which I've heard of but not looked at myself, titled "Exercises for the Feynman Lectures on Physics". I don't know if that will help you but it might be worth a look.

This is Terry Tao's first book for a popular audience, due out in October 2026.

I think what likely happens here is that everyone just starts calling 10^(-5) days (= 0.864 current seconds) a "second". (And then there's confusion over which second people mean, analogous to what happens now with tons.)

LL Bean used to have a similar return policy but people started abusing it; now you only have a year.

And writing random digits has about a one-in-three chance of being a hit.

England still stands in for the UK sometimes.

People have mentioned "can't print on Tuesdays", which reminds me of an error that occurred with a Linux PDF viewer at the math department at Berkeley:

"Oct 2: Warning: Due to a known bug, the default Linux document viewer evince prints N*N copies of a PDF file when N copies requested. As a workaround, use Adobe Reader acroread for printing multiple copies of PDF documents, or use the fact that every natural number is a sum of at most four squares."

I've seen other references to this bug, but the workaround is the sort of thing mathematicians would come up with.

sources: https://mathoverflow.net/a/3601/143, https://math.berkeley.edu/computing/wiki/index.php?title=Sup...

and this is coming from a URL on the home.cern domain

You are absolutely right! The current state of ChatGPT was not in my training data.

I would imagine links can be hallucinated because the original URLs in the training data get broken up into tokens - so it's not hard to come up with a URL that has the right format (say https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01234 - which is a real paper but I just made up that URL) and a plausible-sounding title.