Viewing profile — alex_stoddard

It's an auto-immune disease with complex causality. It doesn't necessarily manifest at birth, the time to develop the auto-immune response and for it to become severe varies. For s…

Another very entertaining series, with a much more SF bent, by Eric Flint, with Ryk E. Spoor is kicked of by the freely available 'Boundary'. https://www.baen.com/boundary.html (Li…

I haven't fully grokked it myself. But it relates to the concept and implementation of a Lisp reader. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_reader "Unlike most programming languages, …

They do specifically say single use plastics where I suppose a lot of applications are in food packaging. It just has to last significantly longer than the food spoilage time to be…

Uninformed speculation: I would hypothesize the mRNA process could react faster to flu mutations, the current vaccines are kind of trying to guess which strains are going to be imp…

To me footnotes/endnotes exist as the least bad way of working with supplemental information within the constraints of the _printed_ page (i.e. it can't be dynamically re-rendered)…

Thank you kindly for providing the way to actually do the documented: "You can determine if make contains support for Guile by examining the .FEATURES variable; it will contain the…

This seems like two examples of errors converting decimal fractions to percentages in hacker news in one day. Very roughly it looks like they should have said 0.1 or 10%. 10% of co…

"Under-promotion" - deliberately not changing a pawn into a queen is very rare and the unique properties of the knight do matter tactically. Under-promotion not to a knight can mat…

https://www.xkcd.com/125/

Maybe I'm contrarian but I was deeply disappointed by The Matrix, mostly because I feel it wasted a fantastic premise and opportunity to explore such issues. I found its approach t…

It is on my to-read-someday list but Snow Crash was published in 1992!

Any recommendations for books written post 2000 that might bear comparison to Orwell's "1984" come 2070?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solitaire_(cipher) "The Solitaire cryptographic algorithm was designed by Bruce Schneier at the request of Neal Stephenson for use by field agents in …

Looks like it is implemented in python(2) with use of the stdlib sqlite3 module. https://github.com/harelba/q/blob/master/bin/q

What are the decent options as of today and from what supplier/retailer? I've been struggling to find exact that - a decent dumb cellular phone.

Am I correct to assume all the designs are for US Letter paper? (And not the A4 size common in the UK and elsewhere. http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/ ) I rem…

https://www.cdc.gov/acute-flaccid-myelitis/afm-surveillance.... > All of the AFM cases have tested negative for poliovirus.

Does the rocket equation still bite to hard if fuel production is outside Earth's gravity well?

It's nice to see an editor for the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) has a sense of humor. I wasn't expecting to see Pratchett T. as the first citation in a (somewhat) serious…

I'm inferring from the article the problem is spatial/temporal resolution of the _radar_ currently being used for speed sensing for adaptive cruise control. There are lots of objec…

I believe they made their own "good enough" clock out of a loop in a webworker.

That is not my understanding. The current use of the word "patent" has become rather ironic compared to its historical meaning. "Patent" just means "open", in this case openly decl…