Viewing profile — jagthebeetle

Looking at https://text.marvinborner.de/2023-04-06-01.html helped me understand the syntax a bit (though I'm just a non-theoretical programmer). I was confused about what = \lambda…

I quite like _The Secret History_ too. I think in _Babel_ (and _Katabasis_ as well), Kuang is a bit more prone than Tartt to showing off legit academic tidbits, which gives a nice …

A bit of a nit, but the 17kb PNG actually looks slightly blurry, or "artifact-ed" on my MacBook screen. Happily though, the author included a section on SVG at the bottom, which wa…

This construction is similar to a hendiadys (which comes from the Greek for "one through two"); e.g. "nice and warm." (So says Fowler anyway.)

I thought this wasn't actually mathematically established - the related property would be whether or not pi is normal.

Agreed, not least because: - area-based visualizations make the effect hard to distinguish; bar charts or data clouds with numbers and confidence intervals would have been way more…

While I agree the LSD is somewhat meaningless, I personally find it fun to test my color matching/mixing. Binary search circumvents that (at least for the most significant digit); …

Tangentially, "valetudo" is just "health" (which may contextually connote _good_ or _bad_ health): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1... We get "valetudin…

That intuition makes a lot of sense to me, especially if I picture the person's frame of reference. Kind of reminds me (a layman) of winding numbers. I suppose there are topologica…

"Travois" seemed the most interesting one. Based purely on the first page of Google images, it struck me as somewhere between a horse and a carriage, but ever more on the vehicle s…

What a great example! As a recent astronomy enthusiast, I found myself doubting this comment initially ("well, eclipses ARE related"), and this despite the fact that I have a toy t…

I never did math past linear algebra/real analysis, so the only concept of sizes I have are countable/uncountable infinities. Apparently the crux of this proof was showing that "th…

Of particular note are some reinforcements from Old Norse (circa 850s onward): - are (displacing bēoþ, sind, and sindon) - their (displacing heora) - they (displacing hīe) As a lin…

I noticed some locale-formatting tests breaking in Chrome 110 and traced this back to a change in Unicode CLDR 42. You can find this by searching for "y-MM-dd" in the linked change…

I'm from NYC and call it "plain" or "cheese." "Regular" makes me think too hard as to whether the "New York thing" is to say "regular" or "plain." It's also a lot of syllables. A s…

I see this concept often cited when mathematicians talk about how they had a breakthrough on a proof, but I have to say, I don't think I've ever noticed it in myself, sadly. I have…

Financial Times reported on Silvergate's disclosure of $8.1B in withdrawals [1], but curiously, don't mention a $100M seizure. Is this new / verified? [1]: https://www.ft.com/conte…

Isn't the earth's eccentricity incredibly low? (To the point that human-noticeability or non-precision-machinability are out of the question?) That's not to say I have any comment …

I wish it weren't song-based, though it's an understandable implementation. As others have noted, there are often many cues 'n' clues even before a single word is uttered. But also…

Actually, Americans wouldn't say "fourth July" – that would likely connote "the fourth iteration of July" in some longer timespan (e.g. "In the fourth July of my adolescence"). "Fo…

I don't really view GPT-3 as a chatbot. It provides reasonably cogent completions to snippets of text, so this doesn't seem like an exploit – though perhaps it is one depending on …

To be fair, we wouldn't have "literally" without a metaphoric interpretation of "literalis," "of or relating to letters." I always find this particular example to be somewhat self-…

While I think this is definitely a useful foundation, things get a lot more complicated quickly once you jump into a large site's stylesheet(s). Why isn't this element the size I s…

I'm having a lot of fun with this, having just completed addition. I suppose it's natural [pun not intended] to feel like you don't really know what you're doing except symbolic ex…