Viewing profile — ntoronto

It's like he's contemplating his entire acting career and questioning how he got to this point in his life. That's my favorite Rickman scene as well. It takes a fine actor to pack …

I've posed exactly these problems to children about 15 times now. Most children 10 and up I've talked to can figure out the first (one more guest) easily enough, the second (an inf…

"I'm sure there's way more complexity I'm overlooking, but that's how one might get started." That's how I'd start. There's probably a way to make the search a lot smarter. Here's …

Meta-comment: Not sure what's up with the downvotes on the parent comment. During lifeguard training years ago, like everyone else in my class, I was very surprised to learn what d…

Sorry, forgot about the able swimmers. But first: another water poloist! Awesome! Water polo was pretty small in my area, so we didn't have a lot of talent in the pool. (Pun intend…

Facts: http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Water-Safety/wa... When an adult or adolescent drowns, it looks exactly the same, they're much more dangerous to would-be helper…

> What do people usually expect drowning to look like? Head erect, more splashing, perhaps a cry for help, and above all, someone who thinks and acts like a human being. You can't …

> Also, how do you differentiate the drowning response from someone that's just bad at treading water and floats low in the water? Watch the face, arms and legs, and water surface.…

I'll bet it was both. I was a lifeguard, so I can speak with some authority. Both skills are necessary. Not only do you have to count and track swimmers, but you have to keep menta…

> Also, 95% of life-guarding is preventive. I remember this well: sitting in a chair, scanning the pool, and every 20 seconds yelling, "Walk, please!" I was a living reminder to sl…

> Rescuing active drowning victims (this kind of drowning) is very dangerous, for that reason. The victim won't just hold you, they'll climb you. My only save as a lifeguard was a …

This is one of the sweetest things I've ever seen on the Internet.

I've monkeyed with a lot of numeric representations, and every one of them involves tough theoretical and practical trade-offs. Returning an exact rational as the result of divisio…

We had this discussion on the Racket user's mailing list a couple of years ago. One user with an AMD processor experienced significant stalls; others with Intel processors didn't. …

Ugh. It's shameful when people use wrong arguments about mathematics to oppress. I really wish you the best. This article first appeared in "Computing in Science and Engineering" m…

All correct, for exact rationals. Racket's exact rational arithmetic tends to take about 1000x the amount of time floating-point arithmetic takes to compute similar functions, and …

It's not necessarily just you. I thought it was wrong when I first opened it. There may be something funny going on with the font - I think the "1" and "l" are switched. Edit: Neve…

That is indeed a typo. Thanks for catching it. It's amazing how much you miss when you think you already know what's written.

This article (like all other IEEE Computing Now articles) is free to download for a limited time.

...and which exercised the weird feature of some x86 processors that had something like 80-bit internal registers but did 64 bit double precision computations, and which allowed th…

Right. I don't remember whether I said it in the talk, but that demo saturates the AGP bus, meaning that the engine can extract and write scene data at about 1.5 to 2 GB/Sec. It's …

More precisely, the problem comes from how certain Linux libraries and OS X have responded to OpenGL's new profile system. An OpenGL context is roughly a 3D drawing area and its as…