The_suffocated

3개월 전discuss

In terms of temperature rather than length of daylight, the peak of summer depends on geography (and latitude in particular). In where I live (Hong Kong), July and August are the hottest months and so it makes sense to me that Summer begins in June.

The_suffocated

3개월 전discuss

Not all men, but all men over 17 and under the age of 45. This still seems draconian, though.

The_suffocated

3개월 전discuss

I like this more than most modern designs.

The_suffocated

4개월 전discuss

I have longed for this feature. For me, it is useful in many scenarios, such as:

  * reading two distantly separated sections of a long article on two split tabs;
  * reading a research paper on one tab and typing a question to StackExchange on the other;
  * reading a scanned book written in French on one tab and using a dictionary on the other.

The_suffocated

4개월 전discuss

The article is well written but its title is a click bait. Although the film portrays mathematicians in a negative way and the allegedly hard problem on the blackboard is actually an easy homework exercise that every decent first-year student is able to solve, I don’t think the film has ever gathered any hatred among mathematicians.

The_suffocated

7개월 전discuss

  > The muster roll for the garrison of Calais in 1357 shows not only the names of men-at-arms and archers but also the support roles needed: mason, locksmith, fletcher (a maker of arrows), bowyer (a maker of bows), plumber, blacksmith, wheelwright, cooper (maker of barrels), ditch digger, boatman, carter and carter’s boy. One record belongs to a tiler – Walter Tyler. Was this the future rebel leader of 1381, Wat Tyler?

I didn’t know that the surnames Cooper, Carter and Tyler were originated from different kinds of artisans. I didn’t know that there are names for makers of arrows, bows and wheels either. What is carter’s boy? A bellboy for a cart?

The_suffocated

8개월 전discuss

Do people these days call robbers ‘thieves’? When I read the title, I thought the article was about pickpockets.

The_suffocated

8개월 전discuss

A wild guess: perhaps it was the Russian authority, not the site owners, who blocked the traffic. Collective action is usually inefficient. If something suddenly happens in a large scale, more often than not it is caused by a few influential entities.

The_suffocated

8개월 전discuss

> Evidently, the missing feature of all e-readers is the addition of bellows.

Nah. I'd say the missing feature of all e-readers is multiple screens bound as a pamphlet that allows users to compare the contents on different pages easily.

The_suffocated

9개월 전discuss

> Math in its core has always been abstract. It’s the whole point.

I don't think so. E.g. there may be some abstractions in numerical linear algebra, but the subject matter has always been quite concrete.

The_suffocated

9개월 전discuss

Discussions of this sort can easily get chaotic, because people tend to conflate intuitiveness and concreteness. Sometimes the whole point of abstraction is to make a concept clearer and more intuitive. The distinction between polynomial function and polynomial is an example.

The_suffocated

9개월 전discuss

Somewhat tangential to the discussion: I have once read that Richard Feynman was opposed to the idea (originally due to Karl Popper) that falsifiability is central to physics, but I haven't read any explanation.

The_suffocated

작년discuss

Personally I don't find greek letters problematic. In contrast, I was traumatised by upper-case Fraktur font in older abstract algebra texts.

The_suffocated

3년 전discuss

I may be wrong but this seems inaccurate. In WWII, the cryptanalysis of the Enigma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptanalysis_of_the_Enigma) was related not to number theory, but to group theory. Number theory became relevant to cryptography only since the 1970’s/1980’s when Diffie and Hellman published their paper on public-key cryptography. Although number theory was related to cryptography in the past (e.g. in shift ciphers and block cyphers), it was the Diffie-Hellman paper that placed number theory in the central role.

The_suffocated

3년 전discuss

Just out of curiosity, what was that classical mechanics textbook?

The_suffocated

Submissions

Test flight of yet another clone of Möwe, the wing used by Nausicaä [video]

UK's last gravity-fed industrial aerial ropeway (2021) [video]

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