taserian

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Who gets to define "good"?

8 jaar geledendiscuss

One of my favorite stand-up routines talks about the infamous bumper sticker philosophy, and what happened when the person moved from a left-leaning location to a right-leaning one. https://youtu.be/pKBKLeTZbM4

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

&& precedence mans that the && arguments are bound first, so:

    .where(p -> p.getCategory == 2 || p.getCategory == 5 && isProductUnderDiscount(p))

is equivalent to:

    if (product.getCategory() == 2 || ( product.getCategory() == 5 && isProductUnderDiscount(product) );

The extra set of parentheses are not needed due to precedence, but have been included for clarification.

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Hiya, Scott! I recently heard the first episode of Rationally Speaking podcast episode where you were the guest (yes, I'm catching up with the RS Archives during my long commute). I've also started reading QCSD (hey, if it's going to be our decade's GEB, we may as well give it an acronym. :: grin:: )

I've already corrected my very mistaken understanding of how QC works, as in the tagline of your blog. Are there any other concepts that we need to shake off that would make explaining these concepts easier for the layman? Do you have any words of wisdom for the masses?

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I can speak from my own experience; even though English is my first language, I entered as a grad student and TA in a public US university as a foreigner, since my undergrad degree was done outside the US. After they determined that I was capable of speaking understandable English, they actually made me an instructor of record for a 300-level course that none of the active faculty was available to teach.

It was quite an experience.

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Thank you for this! I've always wondered if there was anything similar being done.

I will say that this is quite a large collection of papers. Do you have any pointers as to which of these papers I should start with as a foundation?

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I've always wanted a page where it would have the translation of "I'm sorry, but I don't speak a word of X" in perfectly enunciated X for all X in [Languages].

I guess this is the next best thing.

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

That's a totally different issue. There are multiple products on Amazon that develop a "following" (either because the product is ridiculous on its face, or because it's so ordinary ), and manage to accumulate all sorts of reviews, from funny to poetic. See https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-amazon-reviews/ and https://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Dairy-Whole-Vitamin-Gallon/dp/... as examples.

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

A lot of the "rarity" with baseball cards was that they weren't inherently rare on release, but that the player on the card became a standout for the team afterwards, and therefore, owning the "rookie" card for them (when they were relatively unknown) was a game of patience and luck. Also, baseball has a avid fanbase that is focused on statistics, and the back of the cards would have the player's stats. I don't doubt that the statistics were available in published manuals back then, but having them on a card made straight comparisons across players easier than flipping across multiple pages.

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I have a small velvet bag that I use to keep my cell phone safe from scratches in my pocket. You can keep the fingerprint sensor on, but drop it in a similar bag with the sensor at the bottom; that way, you keep the fingerprint security, but there's an extra step involved before you can use it.

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

My experience with coding was using the old BASIC books (like the ones at https://www.atariarchives.org/ ), and stubbornly typing my way to make these games work.

When they didn't, I found it enormously satisfying to find out how to work around the problem being expressed in print; there were enough variations in BASICs for different machines that the listing for a TI 99/4A program wouldn't work in straight AppleSoft BASIC, for example.

But the time between typing all the code and finding out if it worked was grueling. I'm not sure if the students of today would be satisfied with that large a report-back loop.

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I lived in New York until the early '80s (I was 11 at the time), and I recall the commercial "Take the Train to the Plane". I always thought that they were part of the MTA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkL1LIUsmqc

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

It's a funny after-dinner speech (where some of the attendees aren't experts in coding theory), providing a somewhat tongue-in-cheek biography of Alice and Bob.

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Also a concept used in the game Endgame: Singularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity

taserian

8 jaar geledendiscuss

What I feel is most important is reducing the amount of "friction". if the OS is a GUI Linux with Python, it's just a matter of:

- opening a terminal

- `python`

- `print "mikestew"`

The friction to get over is the Terminal ("You mean I have to type to get the computer to do something? Why can't I use my mouse?", and the situation if the above fails because you were using Python 2 or 3.

taserian

9 jaar geledendiscuss

One of my favorite quotes from James Nicoll:

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

taserian

9 jaar geledendiscuss

A dear favorite of mine was Baldor's Algebra. Everyone else in high school was scared of it, but I found it to be very methodical and easy to follow from one topic to another.

Picture of the cover, with text in Spanish: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lgebra_de_Baldor

taserian

9 jaar geledendiscuss

Slightly off-topic, but is there a resource that collects the music cited in Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach"?

I've never been good at reading music notation, so those sections of the book (which I need to re-read sometime soon) are glossed over, and I feel I'm missing out.

Submissions

Jupyter meets MathBox2

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