Viewing profile — EdwardCoffin

I can't find it at the moment (edit: found it [2]), but I am sure I read something about Jerome Lettvin [1] doing some experimenting with CO2 but for something like schizophrenia, …

Objekt, Numerik, Logik, Klock, according to Wikipedia [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rekursiv#Physical_packaging

On the other hand, the bars have to be cut no matter which strategy one uses, so this criticism of not being able to cut the bars into exactly equal pieces applies equally to the o…

I think it was C+@ (pronounced CAT, as I recall). Edit: pasting a comment of mine from here in 2019 [1]: The language is C+@ [2]. I dug up an article about it in Dr. Dobbs Journal,…

I use one much like this four or five times a day, and have none of the problems described. I fill it through the spout though, so never have to remove the lid.

This makes me think of Bane's rule, described in this comment here [1]: Bane's rule, you don't understand a distributed computing problem until you can get it to fit on a single ma…

Though I was confident this was just a metaphor, I did try cracking a walnut using this method. I submerged three walnuts in a jar with some tap water, and let them sit for three y…

In the same vein is the talk Pathological Physics: Tales from 'The Box' [1] which talks about various physics papers written by amateurs and sent in to the physics department at th…

Even if that's the intended meaning of literally , it is still a reckless exaggeration. I'm pretty sure that Stephenson's endings are no more abrupt than some of Shakespeare's (che…

>> ‘It was the development environment’ > No, it wasn’t. I kind of think it was . The best argument I think is embodied in Kent Pitman's comments in this usenet thread [1] where he…

In the same vein was an incident where an improperly localized phone in Turkey caused a sent message to arrive with different characters, with very different meaning, and the fallo…

In a similar vein is this 2003 post in an MIT discussion forum by Scott McKay [1]. I'd also highly recommend that anyone interested in this kind of thing listen to all three of the…

I know that Guy Steele joined Thinking Machines, but after they'd at least designed the CM-1. He talked a little about it in A Conversation with Guy Steele Jr. in the April 2005 is…

You're probably referring to A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE by Iain M Banks [1] [1] http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm

This is not the first time I've read articles attempting to paint the Culture as a dystopia. I think the best counter is to quote the author's own words, describing how he felt abo…

If caches have a place in a file storage format, they should at least be optional and separate from mandatory content, and I got the impression from the critique that they were nei…

I think the point of the criticism I read was that the edit should have worked. There is no reason why the opaque mess following what was obviously a definition of the contents of …

I remember reading an early criticism of the spreadsheet side of OOXML, where a simple spreadsheet with three cells was created: A1 containing '1', B1 containing '2', and C1 contai…

If there were another writer of non-fiction as deeply researched I'd compare McPhee to, it would be Robert Caro. I already knew from Caro's memoir Working that Caro did not use a t…

The Oxide and Friends podcast [1] did a whole episode on this: Coder's Block (25 Oct 2021) [2]. It had some good stuff in it, the best of which (for me) was: when stuck, write debu…

It's unmentioned in the article, but Trevor Blackwell's PhD thesis, Applications of Randomness in System Performance Measurement [1] was advocating this in 1998: This thesis presen…

This reminded me of Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011) [1] which has been most recently discussed here, here [2]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20111228105122/http…

Thanks, I'd not seen that particular article before, and it has some things in there I'd not read in any of his other interviews. I think the article I got his take on Blade Runner…

Well to be fair I already had that aversion, though I will use that on occasion. Ironically enough I am an aficionado of the Waters series facility [1], which requires one to write…

To the best of my knowledge Gibson has never talked about Tron being an influence. He'd already described cyberspace in his short story Burning Chrome before Tron came out. He has …