Viewing profile — nealabq

My 50-year-old HP-21 with red LED display still works. I'm very fond of it. RPN forever!

Were this fiction, I would expect a denouement where images of the two memorial stones, black and white, when placed side by side (as Swift intended), reveal a subtle joke.

I find myself wondering if this essay is meant as a gentle satire. Bemused not savage, not Swiftian. I am reminded of Lord Peter Wimsey.

I think he meant it can fall onto his toddler, causing injury.

You're right of course. I was thinking specifically of printing log/debug statements in the assert(..), but that usually only happens if the assert(..) fails and exits, and in that…

I don't mean to be that guy, but for "functional" programmers a print statement has "side effects". But your meaning is clear. In an assert expression, don't call functions that mi…

In C++ you should probably #include instead of unless you have a good reason. And especially avoid #including both. provides the function std::getc(..) while usually provides getc(…

Chompsky, in his early days, wrote of deep grammar or deep structure as opposed to surface structure. He theorized that there was a universal set of semantic concepts represented i…

Third-derivative pun. Riposte: I knew you'd say that! Snap!

Since Iceland is so isolated, it may be a good place to see if a gene drive can actually eradicate.

The Blackfly song has it right then? Thank you National Film Board of Canada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f389hIxZAOc

Is being a monster a good or a bad thing?

Could you do this with dry corn starch? Shake it up in the bottle and light it before the dust settles.

No recursion means no Erlang. Which means no RabbitMQ?

This is a bit of a stretch, but it's a little like distillation, where you are extracting from the vast knowledge of the LLM and inserting those patterns into your brain. Where you…

I'll be interested to see how circumspect the FAA is, given the political situation.

Personally, I'd include the Relational Calculus, or even the Paxos algorithm. But I'd also include Neural Nets knowing what I know now. But I wouldn't include Quantum Computing yet…

Is there a line between research/discovery and engineering? Binary numbers and Boolean algebra is discovery, while IEEE floating-point numbers are engineering. Choosing digital ove…

When the grippers close they probably close the loops of a coil that wraps around the wire. So it's harvesting the ever changing magnetic field that arises from AC current, indepen…

You hear of people occasionally eating frog-legs, alligator, rattlesnake. But maybe these also taste "bad". And since frogs are insect eaters, maybe bioaccumulation isn't as much a…

In the mid 80s I had a sofa and wing-back chair made by a little factory called Bader and Fox(?) in Portland OR. I went to the factory (the two owners were the only ones there) and…

A typical fission nuclear power plant produces about a gigawatt of power. About 8.76 terawatt hours (TWh) every year. According to https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=6…

ASML recently delivered their first high-NA lithography system to Intel. While TSMC is being more cautious, hesitating to commit to this very expensive machine. Intel's making a bi…

Note that reaction wheels do not make use of gyroscopic torque (which balances these monorails). They are different control mechanisms. Altho both use spinning wheels. More info: h…

Turner syndrome happens when one of the X chromosomes is missing. The result in humans is a short female who may have some heart issues and may be sterile. At least according to th…