Viewing profile — bombastry

The recent book Mathematica by David Bessis attempts to describe this exact topic. One core theme of the book is that math is done by building mental models and using our intuition…

Adult Swim's 404 page always has a dark, sometimes surreal, shaggy-dog story that ends with a reference to the page being 404.[1] The page seems to return the same story each time …

To provide a bit of context, this article is about Timothy Burke. His most famous work is the compilation video of news anchors on Sinclair-owned local news stations reading the sa…

The amazing thing is even the writers didn’t know that episode was going to end that way until the night before they shot the ending. Here’s Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld talking …

The prefix notation may be throwing you off or perhaps you have mistaken the function `bottles` for the string "bottles". The code `(bottles i)` in the loop is calling the function…

This image is even more worthless than it seems. The post on Wikimedia is an original work. Its description states: "As the percentage of graduates increases the minimum IQ to incl…

I agree; this story is apocryphal. I was annoyed enough that I did some research into the story. Via this Atlantic article[1], I found the original Valleywag post[2] containing the…

I really enjoyed the second example of paying Netflix by the second. The blockchain has invented movie rentals.

This discussion should link to the Reuters article[1] it quotes from rather than a site whose Google search meta description reads “Trump News, and Breaking News Updated 24/7.” [1]…

Unfortunately the newsletter is on break until Monday, although he did end up writing a column about Musk on one of his days off a week ago[1]. We may be limited for now to his bri…

These books are surprisingly satisfying and fun to work through. The instant feedback from the proof checker makes them feel like a game of logic puzzles.

If you get the word right on your 6th guess, the game still counts it as if you lost in the stats.

I wasn't thinking about that when I commented, but you're absolutely right. I definitely missed the point. I don't think there is any way to generalize the algorithm in the article…

If you check every node that the hare enters, you don't need the relative speed to be coprime to the cycle-length. This eliminates the need for the hare and tortoise to finish a ro…

In addition to its annoying layout, this site bizarrely decides to mix public domain works from the various different major copyright systems together (life + 50 years, life + 70 y…

That's a really good method. I think one of the reasons why this works so well is that it makes the student think about the "why". Most people are more likely to follow rules they …

I also thought this was odd. This site alleges malfeasance based purely on analysis of data but then alludes to a person's thoughts on specific dates without citation. I also found…

It's tough to come to any conclusion from looking at eBay listings. Especially when many of the listings are from possible scammers. Sort by "most bids" and set the minimum value t…

It's worth noting that Matt Levine has a lot of other good writing on SPACs. (And economics in general. To anyone reading this comment, I highly recommend his daily newsletter "Mon…

European newspapers can be even worse. Le Monde, one the biggest French newspapers, requires its customers to unsubscribe via registered mail. This is even the case for digital-onl…

I found a link to a video with a large portion of the debate[1], though I can't vouch for whether watching it is worthwhile. From quickly comparing bits of it to a transcript[2], i…

The two blues are identical: the CSS has them both colored as "dodgerblue." Facebook appears to be the only one in the "Proprietary" category. The rest of the blue ones are all "Ch…

For anyone who enjoyed this article: there is another excellent CIA report about Czechoslovkian counterintelligence intercepting Hungarian mail in the 1930s[1]. That article was po…

Org-Capture creates a temporary buffer, inserts its template string, processes the special escape sequences (called "%-escapes")[1], and then lets the user edit the buffer before a…

In Emacs, an org-capture template[1] can be used to quickly and easily append new items to logs. It can prompt the user to enter text in multiple locations, eliminating the need to…