Viewing profile — kmm

That's pretty funny, I had in some sense the opposite experience. Learning Russian, at the point where I got beyond the beginner stage, I was really put off by the intense prescrip…

I like the temperate graph halfway down the page. It looks like two decaying exponentials alternating every ~40 minutes, with the downward one steeper than the upward one. It's a n…

Russian used to have dual pronouns too, but they all were lost somewhere in the 13th century, as in all other Slavic languages other than Slovenian. The system used for small numbe…

Curiously, Old English unc is actually not related to German uns, at least, not after the Germanic language family had already formed. Old English at some point underwent a sound c…

Everytime people extoll the virtues of high noon, I ask the same question: why does it matter if the sun reaches it highest point near 12 o' clock? You're awake for 4-6 hours befor…

That's correct, but it's pretty well-hidden because at first sight there is no term that's just the year modulo 7. That's because a Gregorian calendar cycle of 400 years is coincid…

That's only if you delay renewal until the last day of the lifetime of the certificate. If you renew at day 30 you'd only get in trouble if there's more than two weeks of downtime.…

Hah, the capitalization of the title of this post only just now made me realize why the GPU farm at my job is called "barracuda". That's pretty funny.

And a megabyte is depending on the context precisely 1000x1000=1,000,000 or 1024x1024=1,048,576 bytes*, except when you're talking about the classic 3.5 inch floppy disks, where "1…

I think I have some sort of intuition why all the probabilities are the same. Imagine you're standing on a randomly chosen vertex on the ring which is not right next to the startin…

In that case following Alice's input is still the best strategy, but you'll be worse off: you'd only be right if both tell the truth, at 80% 80%=64%, or both lie, at 20% 20%=4%, fo…

That's actually a message from the (Arch) initramfs[1], in case it can't mount the root filesystem or find an init to hand off to. The kernel has a different error message: "No wor…

That alignment is only necessary to do the Grand Tour, to visit all four outer planets in one mission. Voyager 1 actually didn't do the Grand Tour, it only visited Jupiter and Satu…

There are many more kinds of masters than just owners of slaves. The word "master bedroom" only appeared in 1920, it has absolutely nothing to do with slavery.

Interesting to see you have a different experience. I'm not sure I would call it stellar. On the train route between Den Haag and Amsterdam, one of the busiest routes in the countr…

In Newtonian gravity, the relation between the orbital period T and the semimajor axis a of the orbital ellipse is a^3 / T^2 = GM / 4π^2, where M is the reduced mass of the system …

I sort of understand the reasoning on why Arxiv prefers tex to pdf[1], even though I feel it's a bit much to make it mandatory to submit the original tex file if they detect a subm…

I understand there are API limitations, but isn't 15 minutes a lot for an object that orbits around the entire Earth in 90 minutes? On average you're going to be off by about a twe…

I don't see how the size of Wikipedia has any bearing on the 50MB figure given for pre-20th century literature by the parent.

Perhaps that's meant to be 50GB (and that still seems like a serious underestimation)? Just the Bible is already 5MB.

Without taking into account dark energy or a cosmological constant (so on scales smaller than a few hundreds of millions of lightyears), in the usual cosmological model you can see…