te_platt

From http://wordsmith.org/anagram/hof.html

Clint Eastwood = Old West Action

Madam Curie = Radium came

It's good fun to go find anagrams of friends and family. One of my nephew's comes out Alpaca Tits. He's not real happy about it but the rest of us think it's pretty good.

I've heard that many times but I wonder if it's true. The article cites studies but I didn't bother to check the studies themselves. It cites some contemporary anecdotes but I didn't bother to check if they were accurate. It seems to confirm my experience so I'll accept it as reasonable.

The article is clearly trying to put Trump in a bad light and other comments here are applying it to other politicians and corporations. I think the important point is that repetition doesn't discriminate truth but can be dangerous because it can seem like it does. On important issues there is no substitute for research and accurate methods to interpret new data.

So I had the page translated to English. I think the jokes might be funnier in Russian. Still there is something funny in knowing there is a joke in there ... somewhere.

I sure miss the good old days where if you read it on the internet you KNEW it was true...

It's pretty painful. I love using Xamarin and don't often need to use a native library but when it comes up it is the worst part of the Xamarin experience. There is a tool to help the process on Ios ,objective sharpie, but it's not the easiest thing to use either.

Surprising may be a bit subjective. I know that I am all too often surprised by my opponent - and not in a good way. This may be a good way to study what kind of patterns have interesting weaknesses.

I cut cable tv 5 years ago after being a heavy user my whole life. The strangest part was transitioning from watching what was on to choosing what to watch. At first I thought it would be obviously better but it was uncomfortable for a while. After a few months the benefits kicked in and now if I'm ever somewhere with other people watching tv there are a few things that stand out:

Commercials are incredibly intrusive. I am amazed at what I was willing to put up with for so long.

Sports commentary is offensively vapid. Actual comment from the Olympic coverage this last year: "This routine is so difficult it's been called incredibly difficult". Even allowing for getting a little tongue tied on live tv it was painfully bad.

Most other commentary is awful. Listening to explanations filtered through what a reporter is willing to take the time to understand just doesn't compare when are so many good sources from real experts in so many fields online.

Maybe I'm just to the point where I want to yell at kids to stay off my lawn but I don't see how the "TV ecosystem" survives much longer.

I'm doing some research into handwriting recognition. In particular transcribing older documents. Do you see a way of applying your work here in that direction?

Funny, but I've been in design meetings at least twice as silly as that.

Hmmm... When I posted this the only other comment was "yes". I thought we could just vote this out to determine what the "correct" answer should be.

no

Get Xamarin. You can start doing OS X apps with C# right away. They have a lot of tutorials on their website.

I started converting some c# code to f# as a learning exercise about a month ago. After a few fits and starts, something clicked and I am amazed at how much I like it. I have been following the articles on "F# for fun and profit" and highly recommend it.

I'm reminded of an old story about a man trying to fill a job for driving a stage coach. He asks each applicant how close they can drive to the edge of a cliff without going over. The first few applicants brag about being able to right up to the edge. The job goes to the first to respond "I don't know, I try to stay as far away as possible".

Maybe, but not on purpose. Nasa goes to great lengths to sterilize probes going to Mars. http://mars.nasa.gov/mer/technology/is_planetary_protection....

I've been looking forward to this for while now but my first reaction is that I don't think I need a new laptop. And I really wanted a new laptop.

It looks nice, the last model looks nice too. The touch bar looks like it could be nice, 95% of my time I use an external keyboard. The new display looks really nice, 95% of my time I use two large external monitors. The USB-C ports will in the long run be more convenient, right now I'm looking at > $100 in adapters.

I'll check them out at the store but I may just look for a good price on the last model.

Well, once again my intuition completely fails in a probability problem. My thinking was the more rolls you make the more uniform your distribution of the number showing becomes. In the limiting case as number of rolls -> infinity you are guaranteed to have 1/6 of the rolls be a 6. So the probability of at least 1/6 is less than 1 for a small number of rolls but approaches 1 the more rolls you do. Intuition is like a good friend who likes to mess with me at weird times.

I agree that we should use caution in setting up solar panels. That said the ecosystem in most of northern Chile is dirt. Not sagebrush or cactus with a few insects, or dormant seeds waiting for the next rain. Just dirt, sometimes rocks. If ever there was a place for solar panels it's northern Chile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert#/media/File:Ata...

I think your reference to the NRA is a bit misleading in this case. The NRA had similar concerns as people who repair and sell used pianos. That is there is a large existing inventory of guns and pianos that use ivory. A total ban would make criminal many otherwise innocent transactions.

See:

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20140305/ivory-ban-fact-shee... http://www.ptg.org/scripts/4disapi.dll/4DCGI/cms/review.html...

Oh... Fins not Finns. The story makes more sense now.

This reminds me of the book "The Perfect Wrong Note". The book is focused on learning to play music but the principles it teaches apply to learning just about anything. The core message to not be afraid of mistakes during practice. Little kids fall over when they learn to walk, you'll have moments of confusion learning new things. There's a time to get things done well, like playing at a recital or releasing production code. There also needs to be time to practice and part of practicing is the expectation that there will be mistakes.

When first watching the video I thought the frames were some kind of combination of Mandelbrot Set images with the Hubble telescope image of the Eagle nebula pillars. From wikipedia - https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTkrY20...

I thought that was pretty cool but after reading the article the actual way it was done was much more interesting.

Funny. He actually calls it Damascus Foil in the video.

Did you ever use Lotus Notes? I agree that iTunes is poorly designed but you can't just toss out "worst UX design ever!" without old Lotus Notes users taking exception.

Exactly. A good example would be a set of co-linear points. Even for N=1,000,000 if all the points are at (n,0) on the plane then it's pretty trivial to find the solution.

Yeah, that was a bit awkwardly written. I tried looking up more info on it but got worried the article itself was some kind of meta test to measure human intelligence and decided to just move on...

Many years ago I was asked how to convert a .gif file to a .wav file. I remember taking the time to patiently explain that it just doesn't work that way. Looks like I owe someone an apology.

Very nice. Although opening IE and trying to go to http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98 gave an error. Go figure...

This is a great writeup on a simple bit of math that violates common sense expectations. Consider you need to go on a 100 mile trip and want to average 100 miles per hour. Conditions are bad and for the first 50 miles you only average 50 miles per hour. How fast do you need to go to average 100 mph for the whole trip? Clearly 150 mph, right? Except of course you are too late and would have to go infinitely fast as you need to complete the trip in one hour and have already taken an hour.

From the article: "But while there’s a lower bound to how “under” the median a step can be – a step can’t take negative time – there’s virtually no upper limit to how much over the median time a project can take."

So when one step takes a little longer than expected most people fall into the 150 mph trap and get frustrated when they don't meet the false expectation.

One movie I've always had a hard time categorizing is Groundhog Day. I went through the 37 plots listed and still don't see a good match. Does achieving enlightenment count as a plot?