> "It's not an actual trapezoid that describes the shape of a field, or some configuration of the planets in space," Ossendrijver told Live Science. "It's a configuration in a mathematical space. It's a highly abstract application."
> "Actually, this particular tablet has ugly handwriting," Ossendrijver said. "It's slanted. It's like cursive if it were written very rapidly. It's very abbreviated. He left out everything that is not absolutely necessary to follow the computation."
> a modern boss is tolerant, he behaves like a colleague of ours, sharing dirty jokes, inviting us for a drink, openly displaying his weaknesses, admitting that he is “merely human like us”. He is deeply offended if we remind him that he is our boss – however, it is this very rejection of explicit authority that guarantees his de facto power.
> This is why the first gesture of liberation is to force the master to act as one: our only defence is to reject his “warm human” approach and to insist that he should treat us with cold distance. We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude.
I got a copy of the first volume in this series (After Man: A Zoology of the Future) when I was 5 years old, and it was one of my favorite books growing up.
They are not brainwashed to the same extent that the people of North Korea are brainwashed, but the majority of them do get all of their news from (State-owned) TV channels and uncritically subscribe to the ruling party's ideology.
> [instead of referring to "Mom" as an example of a non technical user] ideal nouns will refer to non-human or purely technical categories, such as cat, non-technical user, Ubuntu user, or “newbie.”
The persona for which you are designing your software is a cat? Are they going to chase the cursor? Are they illiterate? Do they lack color vision?
Similarly, "newbie" means something completely different from "my mom". A newbie is new to your software, or perhaps this class of software, but may be quite technical otherwise.
An Ubuntu user is far more technical than average.
This is an absurd level of political correctness that gets in the way of design by forcing designers to use language that's inconsistent with their thoughts. If this is really such a big issue, you can create a male persona and use his name to refer to this class of users.
> Describing software or algorithms as “sexy”, “hot”, etc.
Describing someone or something as sexy is by no means male-specific language.
The hypothesis presented in the article is that of an ancestor simulation. A future post-human civilization may very well be interested in the brains of their ancestors or creators.
This doesn't measure your personality, but the content that you choose to share on Facebook. I work out regularly and am very hard working, but I choose not to post about those things. Does this mean that I am less conscientious?
The list of words used for the Extraversion trait is all slang and poor grammar. Is it not possible for someone to be extroverted while typing status updates in complete sentences?
I think that it's supposed to demonstrate how inaccurate the Mercator projection (the one that's used on Google Maps) is at conveying relative size of continents. For example, Greenland looks enormous whereas it's actually quite small, while Africa looks much smaller than it is in reality.
Google uses this projection because it's best at preserving angles and shapes.
> But unlike a standard Mercator projection, you can substitute any point on earth as the "pole". (The initial view shows Boston as the pole point)
> Furthermore, this map cuts of much, much closer to the poles than normal, allowing you to see many more orders of magnitude of distortion.
> Because this yields a map several times taller than it is wide, it is shown sideways from its usual orientation.
> The Mercator projection is infamous for its distortion at high latitudes. This distortion gets exponentially worse as you approach the poles. It is in fact impossible to show the poles on a Mercator map — they are infinitely far away.
> Any Mercator map you've ever seen must cut off the top and bottom edges at some arbitrary point. The map stops short hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the poles.
> But I've often wondered what lies beyond those cut-offs... to make a map that didn't cut off but simply kept going. As the distortion progresses towards infinity, you would eventually reach the scale of cities, houses, insects, atoms...
> But of course that'd all be on a featureless expanse of ice. No map service even publishes image tiles for such extreme latitudes.
> To make things actually interesting, we must artifically shift the pole of the project to a more interesting place. Imagine the earth encased by a rigid cage of latitude and longitude lines. We rotate the earth while leaving the cage fixed until a new point of interest has taken the place of the North Pole.
> This is called an oblique Mercator, and is normally used to shift an area of interest onto the equator of the map to avoid distortion. But whereas others avoid distortion, we embrace it.
> Note how strange the oblique Mercator looks even without the increased cutoffs. The standard Mercator is so ingrained in the public consciousness that we perceive it as 'normal'. But once you shift the pole its ubiquitous distortion is laid bare.
> Lastly, increasing the cutoffs produces a map much taller than it is wide. So it is presented sideways here for easier viewing. (set the pole to the North Pole like usual to see this most clearly)
I usually discover web content through social sites like Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter. On mobile, such sites have built-in browsers, and I suspect that most "app" traffic is actually of this nature.
GTA players kill hookers. But they also kill police officers, businessmen, joggers, and old ladies. In the upcoming game they will also kill animals. The only thing they don't kill is children, because they don't appear in the games (if they did, they wouldn't be any safer).
This has nothing to do with sex workers' otherness.
> There aren’t consequences for these actions. You can always load a previous save, or you can always wake up at the hospital after you reach five stars and lose the chase.
What separates the real world from a game is not that one has consequences, but that in the game you are killing simple computer programs, whereas in real life you'd be killing real people, like you.
Moreover, the games we're discussing are RPGs. When you play them, you are playing the role of a villain. This is analogous to reading a book or watching a film with an anti-hero, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
> In the context of Judaism it's generally used to means Haredi Judaism, but can sometimes include other conservative groups.
That's actually a common misconception.
While all "Haredim" (ultra-Orthodox) are Orthodox Jews, the majority of Orthodox Jews do not belong to this group. In fact, nearly all Jews in Israel are technically Orthodox (that is, they have their Bar/Bat Mitzvas in Orthodox synagogues, have weddings performed by Orthodox rabbis, etc.), even if they are almost entirely secular.
In the US and Western Europe, there are two other popular denominations— Conservative and Reform.
http://www.livescience.com/53518-babylonians-tracked-jupiter...
> "It's not an actual trapezoid that describes the shape of a field, or some configuration of the planets in space," Ossendrijver told Live Science. "It's a configuration in a mathematical space. It's a highly abstract application."
> "Actually, this particular tablet has ugly handwriting," Ossendrijver said. "It's slanted. It's like cursive if it were written very rapidly. It's very abbreviated. He left out everything that is not absolutely necessary to follow the computation."
You can read the details here:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6272/482.full
The supplementary materials give a full transcript of the tablet you linked (one of several):
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2016/01/27/3...
> 1 The day when it appears: 0;12, until 1,0 days, 0;9,30.
> 2 0;12 and 0;9,30 is 0;21,30, times 0;30
> 3 is 0;10,45, times 1,0 is 10;45.
> 4 After completing 1,0 days, until 1,0 days 0;1,30.
> 5 0;9,30 and 0;1,30 is 0;11, times 0;30 is 0;5,30.
> 6 0;5,30 times 1,0 days is 5;30. (erasure) 10;45 and 5;30 is
> 7 16;15, the total. From appearance until station the motion is 16;15.
The actual trapezoid is mentioned in another tablet, which is also translated.
To see how the numerals actually work, just look up Babylonian Mathematics. It's a pretty simple base-60 system.