Viewing profile — gdavisson

Classical brute force is embarrassingly parallel, but Grover's algorithm (the quantum version) isn't. To the extent you parallelize it, you lose the quantum advantage, which means …

"Grue" has a surprising variety of meanings: Obsolete/dialiectical English: to shudder with fear, or a shudder (related to "gruesome") Computer games: in Zork, a monster that eats …

Except that sometimes chasing these unicorn entitles leads to... finding the unicorn entities. That's basically what happened with the neutrino. Neutrinos were originally proposed …

You're refuting a strawman. The junk DNA claim is not, and as far as I can see never had been, that all non-coding DNA is junk. It's that most of our genome -- around 90% -- is jun…

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2024.108404

That's not correct; you cannot use a double-slit test to check for entanglement. Running a photon through a double-slit setup always just produces a single dot, not a any sort of p…

Brackets are used in shell wildcard ("glob") expressions. For example, if you try to use "[bar]" as a command, the shell will first look for files named "b", "a", and "r" in the cu…

True, but since everyone in the study -- both those with and without diagnosed COVID-19 infections -- had been subject to this, it shouldn't affect the results. Essentially, they'r…

Photons are their own antiparticle, so this is not an issue.

echo -n is not safe, because some versions of echo will just print "-n" as part of their output (and add a newline at the end, as usual). In fact, XSI-compliant implementations are…

I (vaguely) remember playing games with terminal echoback on physical terminals back in the early-mid 1980s when I was in college. This was on a VAX/VMS system. Someone (I don't re…

That's what I do. I have one account ("Apple ID") for iCloud, and a separate one for music and App Store purchases. A couple of caveats, though: Apple encourages using the same acc…

I find that the `pbpaste | something | pbcopy` idiom is common enough that it's worth having a shell function for it: pbfilter() { if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then pbpaste | "$@" | pbcopy els…

It usually doesn't matter much, but there are some situations where it can matter a lot. For one thing, you can't use seek() on a pipe, so e.g. `cat bigfile | tail` has to read thr…

Actually, the article ends with "The ampersand isn’t the only former member of the alphabet. Learn what led to the extinction of the thorn and the wynn." (which links to https://ww…

I don't know about that particular analysis, but there've been a number of such claims that don't stand up (mostly because, as you ask, the districts themselves don't follow Benfor…

I recently watched a YouTube video from someone who'd tracked a nasty intermittent parasitic draw [0]. The problem only happened after turning the ignition on & back off (so the st…

"They filter AT LEAST 95% of the particles above a certain size." That's a common misunderstanding; they filter at least 95% of particles of all sizes . It's actually intermediate-…

That study didn't compare suicide rates with and without surgery, it compared post-op trans people with the general population (i.e. mostly cisgender people). It explicitly says "T…

That's just plain wrong. Mental properties in general (e.g. personality) are not easily measurable, but that doesn't mean they don't exist (or can't exist without a non-material so…

First, why do you consider it to be a problem in the mind, rather than the body? It seems to me that, fundamentally, gender dysphoria is a mismatch between the mind and the body. D…

They weren't in the medical literature. The 10k prediction was in STAT news ( https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a... ) (note: it wasn't a hard prediction, …

I have an example of the opposite: When I was quite young, I got into model rocketry as a hobby. Buying engines required a pyrotechnician's license, and I was too young to get one,…

bash is the default interactive shell for users, but dash is the default shell for scripts with a #!/bin/sh shebang (or no shebang, unless they're run from bash), system() calls, e…

The Democrats' Senate Majority PAC is planning to return $1M contributed by SBF and $2M from Nishad Singh; the House Majority PAC got $6M from SBF and "will send funds in question …