twangist

If you don't have an eye you shouldn't be doing this stuff except under duress. Asking for rules is asking for an algorithm that would let you "design" (ok, lay-out) mindlessly and sightlessly. Mostly, people don't want to behold those results, and editors don't want to reformat every document. Of course there are guidelines, best practices, a history of what's known to work/look cool and of what's known to not work/suck/look crummy.

In fact, a tutorial in the author's design taste. I bailed after the first step, on reading "we can do better" for my font choice. It seemed at least as good and appropriate as the author's, whose justification amounted to "I say this is better" (it isn't!)

> Coming from an academic background, hand-written sites with no css nor js are a strong marker of ultra-high quality content.

Those non-features are also a hallmark of a site that hasn't been updated in 25 years -- or at any rate, a site whose tech stack hasn't been. The average quality of web content was probably higher in the 90s, if 'quality' means density of accurate information.

time.com, pages simply didn't appear -- at least this was the case in recent versions of FF, can't swear it's so in latest. Other sites can lack "Search" buttons that appear in Chrome & Safari, or their forms don't work in FF but do in other browsers. It's a real problem.

There are no "obsolete sounds".

Well, it really rather isn't. Punks aren't renowned for musicianship and appreciation of finely crafted instruments. Most 'punks' would have little idea of what to do with a Brian May model Gretsch. But making your own guitar is rather garage, if you'd asked me, as garages are often workshops.

"Mad scribblings" (WaPo title) is terrifically offensive – and misleading. If they were incoherent and inconsequential, why review the new book that collects his late notebook writings? The review is favorable. I'm guessing someone other than the reviewer wrote the headline.

The doctoral candidate didn't "dedicate their life" to the topic, merely wrote a thesis on it. So, just an intense part of their life. Perhaps they'll remain focused on bells, perhaps not. Probably all PhD theses are 'hyper-specialized', unless they're surveys by an author who won't be continuing as an academic researcher. It's not surprising that people would want to understand these complex inharmonic sounds we've been making for centuries.

You're assuming there's such a thing as "historical Jesus". There's basically no evidence.

Pascal might not be weird but it is unpleasant. It has many inconveniences to offer the modern programmer. In its day, in comparison to C -- by programmers for programmers -- Pascal was derided by one computer scientist as "a police-state language" for its many strictures and missing affordances.

Thank you, this is not easy to find in its entirety.

> FYI, matrices transform between vectors within a vector space.

Square ones do, but m x n ones represent linear maps from an n-dimensional to m-dimensional vector space (over the/a field containing the elements of the matrix).

Assange ought to know. He's just jealous.

Thank you for the link to Messiaen's book!

Yeah, but they were when thinking about what to work on.

Can't wait to ignore his forthcoming 2022 volume too. This ethics-free "thinker" can't be taken seriously.

Confirming this: FF 94.0.1 can't upload an image. Same error: no such thing as navigator.sendBeacon().

The title should also drop the "the", which makes you brace for a document by a non-native speaker.

This seems like a flawed approach. These days, $8 bottles are a mass-produced affairs, generally full of additives for body, color, 'legs', and other attributes. They're very consistent affairs, as consistent as Bic pens or Cheetos. They are not charmingly rustic bottles from small struggling vintners.

(Not sure where you live, but in major US cities $8 will get you only the most mass-market stuff - Frontera, Yellow Tail, etc.)

Given that it was posted on the eve of the Super Bowl, and that the title promises to examine a dimension of "football" that hardly exists in futbol aka "soccer", I think your point is disingenuous.

There are no mentions of Trump in the first two paragraphs.

In the first, the author likens Suetonius, author of "The Twelve Caesars", to Michael Wolff, author of a book about a Trump WH scandal and intrigue.

In the second, he references Mar-a-Lago.

If these comparisons to the present "detract" from the "interest" of the article for you, rest assured that's a personal thing.

I get nothing but "Error code 422: Server error", even on input "Hello", in FF, Safari and Chrome.

> Wonder if people who eat chili pepper generally consume less food because of the spiciness.

No, we don't (consume less food).

>> “You can think of the roots of a polynomial as negatively charged particles that repel each other with a force that decays when the distance increases,” Breuillard said.

> No, you can't.

Well, yes, you can, and a professional mathematician just said so, yet it seems you insist that mathematics is all about dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Thinking of the roots in the way described is exactly what Dmitrov did: he explored this analogy, worked with a formalized version of it, and used it to prove a significant theorem.

I agree that the article writer's intro takes the analogy much too far, to the point of being just false — mathematicians don't look at the number line and see "forces" at work maintaining the distances between the integers.

People who are that far removed from "what is going on" aren't going to think about it at all. This is a popular article about math which uses a suggestive analogy. Analogies are not "misconceptions", and are not infections that anyone is "allowing" to "fester". Your concern for the quality of our discourse is admirable, but your handwringing is not. I don't think the cult-prone read articles about polynomials, ever; and I don't believe that misunderstanding such articles makes one more susceptible to QAnon, flat-Earth, anti-vax, etc.

"Oracle's DB2" - Do you mean Oracle's DBMS? DB2 is an IBM product.

I hope merely satire. I don't find it convincing at all, so I wouldn't suspect malice, nor of course a serious attempt at forgery :)

Oh, hardly. This is nothing like good, in the sense of "successful forgery", let alone "really, really good". Did you write the program?

At a distance of 10 feet, the document the program produces seems to nail the form and appearance of a math paper, probably because its template is a real paper. The formulas exhibited are or might be well-formed, but even at 5 feet away, it's clear that you've never see expressions that use so many obscure LaTeX glyphs.

But try to read it, and it's immediately clear that no two sentences in a row even make use the same terms, and that every single sentence is sheer gibberish.

The program is quite good at generating fake-math terminology, and knows more than a bit about naming conventions (e.g. coming up with "Perelman" as an adjective).

But if, for example, this definition passes muster with you:

> Definition 5.1. Let u_{l,V} be a Noetherian algebra. A homomorphism is a homomorphism if it is elliptic.

then I wouldn't want to read your thesis either.

Addendum: A for effort :) but F for the hype.

Unfortunately, this is behind a paywall.

What language is the author trying to write in? Not off to a great start, with that headline.