Interesting question, a lot of search engine results claim that John Von Neumann was presented with the problem and quickly solved it by summing the infinite series instead reframing it as a constant speed for an easily calculated duration. Plausible, but sounds apocryphal. Here's the oldest reference I've found and verified by reading scans[0] of the source book:
Initiation Mathématique (1906) by Charles-Ange Laisant (1841--1920), number 53. Le chien et les deux voyageurs.
The setup here has two pedestrians walking in the same direction with a dog running back and forth between them. One of them starts out some distance ahead of the other but, because the one behind walks faster, they eventually intersect. It briefly mentions a variation where they are walking toward one another, as in the typical trains & fly version of the problem. Best of luck finding older, I wouldn't be surprised if it's out there!
Good recollection of the title! Looks like it's from 1970 and written by Jo Freeman[0]. This subthread is also reminding me of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[1], which I didn't realize had expanded beyond the original essay into a book.
Nice, love a good grenade glitch! I owned and played a bit of GTA II, but never knew about this. I like the grenade glitches in the Command & Conquer series where, if you click again to retarget during the grenadier's windup animation, they will ignore the range check and can throw arbitrarily far.
I agree with the sentiment, and the specific wording of your comment made me want to link to the classic bash.org quote[0] which has consistently been in the top 5 for a long time, but I just learned that we lost bash.org... :(
I'd like to read the accounts of contemporary curmudgeons bemoaning the way young Greeks are clamoring for mom's mirror, and how you should limit your kids to no more than one twelfth of a day of mirror time, setting the clepsydra if necessary.
Hey, with the appropriate overclock, that could be audiophile-grade [0]! I want to see an appliance that takes DSD input and uses it to drive a 2.8224 MHz musical Tesla coil.
This reminded me of a Kurzgesagt video from a few months ago on the same topic [0]. I see that the author, Karen Lloyd, was one of the experts they consulted when making that video.
