Viewing profile — norrius

> But if I asked you, "Why is this stove burner on?" it would be entirely normal for you to answer, "I'm making tea." This is a confusion specific to the English language, not cons…

> I can rotate a die in my minds eye without actually seeing it. It's hard to explain. I think I'm the same. It's as if I can imagine a geometry, but it doesn't have any texture or…

What is the "smallest positive number" in the set {x | x in reals and 0 < x < 1}?

Sure, if you want to allow non-flat, curved faces, this body is possible. I'd argue this is not in the spirit of the question, similar to the triangle statue mentioned in the artic…

I come from a country with rather _interesting_ views on what should be allowed online. 451 is used often enough that I've seen it in the wild more than once (and consider yourself…

I suspect this is more about giving that almost-boiling water more points where it can break tension and start forming bubbles. So it doesn't make the water reach 100° faster but m…

> Whenever an input accepts YAML you can actually pass in JSON there and it’ll be valid ...unless your parser strictly implements YAML 1.1, in which case you should be careful to a…

Does size/shape[1] mean anything? Or is it my punishment for not using Chrome? [1]: https://i.imgur.com/g8J28D8.jpg

Can someone explain what prevents birds of the same subtype from mating? The article mentions that the chromosome 2 cannot cross over in meiosis, but I just fail to understand the …

> Getting a bank in most other countries is not hard at all and certainly not a "nightmare." I don't know about "most" countries, but my American colleagues in Germany and Switzerl…

I love how a (metaphorically) air-gapped system can be attacked (literally) through the air. Maybe the truly critical things should also be vacuum-gapped (and put into Faraday cage…

> So it broke the experience for all first time users. To be fair, Python 3 provides a very clear error message if you try to use print as a statement, although I don't know when e…

I think the choice of an object in this comparison is interesting, altough it doesn't affect the result that much, of course. The 5-franc coin is ridiculously big: measuring 31.45 …

That reminds me of a story where a student couldn't figure out the properties of some physical system, so he ran a massive simulation of a universe with laws of physics similar to …

Yes, that's it, thank you! And here's the English version of the article I linked above: https://yuzhikov.com/articles/BlurredImagesRestoration1.htm

If you do something really simple like a Gaussian blur (which is a type of convolution), it might be possible to find the inverse convolution (de-convolution) and restore the origi…

I recall being taught a (fairly rudimentary?) explanation of the memory model that the available space is used from one side as the stack, and from the other side as the heap. Read…

I am disappointed that the references at the end are made up and are not the prior art in the obviously important field of non-textual languages. I'd really love to learn about tha…

These are bast shoes [0], known in Russian as lápti, which were the typical footwear in villages until the 20th century. They are strapped to the leg so that they don't fall off. …

Given what appears to be exponential growth, the calculation seems to ignore potential future deaths in the currently known cases. Pardon the morbidity and cynicism, but maybe some…

Given the next sentence (...if it isn't true, it seems like a polynomial algorithm would be unwieldy indeed), I think the GP actually meant P!=NP to be true.

I wonder if the French parts of the book were altered in the translation or kept as is. Or do you get excerpts of untranslated Russian instead, huh?

It could work... If you want to set minimal system requirements to visit your website. It will also annoy users of password managers with auto-filling capabilities. "password" is n…

> When I first heard about the quantum search algorithm I thought it [O(sqrt(N)) run time] sounded impossible. I just couldn’t imagine any way it could be true. It's curious to hea…

Was that meant as a joke or am I completely missing the point here? Mathematics provides plenty of tools to work with infinities. In plural, because there are quite literally infin…