Viewing profile — dwcnnnghm

The dialogue you refer to is Meno and the idea is a solution to “Meno’s Paradox”.

If you’re in America and want to help your native butterflies (and moths), the National Wildlife Federation has a tool for finding local plants and their respective pollinators. ht…

Japan’s national bird (green pheasant) is, IIRC, the only national bird that’s also a game bird. There’s not many stories or symbolism with green pheasants (as opposed to, say, cra…

Corner Café in New Providence, New Jersey. From Rob Pike’s blog: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/utf-8-turned-20-y...

By “two held out hands”, do you mean a person’s wingspan? Is there something similar for centimeters? I’m asking out of genuine curiosity and not antagonizing. I would love to have…

Having lived in the UK, I found the balance between systems to be quite nice. I think that the Imperial System is actually underrated for daily use: most of the measurements are in…

Miles and kilometers can be estimated by the Fibonacci Sequence. The conversion (mi -> km) is very nearly the golden ratio (1.61 and approximately 1.62, respectively, IIRC). For an…

There’s an app for this [0,1]. It follows the calendar and shows you the current season, it’s haiku, seasonal foods, etc. It’s free to view the current season, but you can pay (one…

I appreciate you having a look! I totally understand if it's not enough to make a switch, but I'm glad you were able to see that it's not so bad on this side of things. There's def…

My apologies. I think I misunderstand what you mean by "ecosystem". All of your requirements are fulfilled by the tools I suggested. The guides I provided show complex typesetting …

Plan 9 troff might work! It works with utf8 out of the box[0], and while I haven't used it for complex math typesetting, there is a command (eqn [1]) that was developed for it. I'd…

In the early days of computing (that is, when computer companies and universities were finding the first people to learn programming) music experience was a strong signal for progr…

> Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembl…

The discussion on Ghoti[0] around language standardisation reminded me of this essay. It's a review of an American Usage Dictionary[1] that centers primarily around the question of…

This is definitely true, but I think it's also valuable to ask "how much and how fast?"

I do think this is a great point but I do think the idea is fun to consider anyways. My first thought would be some (silent) {super,sub}script symbol/letter to indicate distinction…

Do you have any recommendations for next steps beyond Spock? I learned Haskell at uni and am interested in going back to it for web work (instead of Erlang). Any insights you might…

I'm not sure if you mean that the murder was mentioned without reason or if Chris was the victim of a murder without reason. I think it's a bit unclear in the writing style (at lea…

I had believed something similar. They are definitely remnants of a 10 month calendar, but July and August were existing months (Quintilis and Sextilis, respectively) renamed for t…

The French [0] tried to implement this twice! They failed both times, and I think it's due to more than having everyone in the world (or country) relearn to hold time in their head…

>That ship has sailed long long ago...like, 1890 long ago. In California, at least, that is still the only way become a lawyer without a law degree (called the "Law Office Study Pr…

This is great. Another wonderful piece of advice I had read somewhere for similar situations is: "remember that an argument between you and your partner is you two against the issu…

This is also the basis of the Steel Man Argument [0] [1], as opposed to Straw-manning. Instead of attacking (basically nitpicking) the easy missteps in your opponent's reasoning, f…