Viewing profile — puzzledobserver

Disclaimer: I'm not a physicist. For a particle to "oscillate", it must "experience" time. All massless particles travel at the speed of light. As a consequence of special relativi…

Wikipedia tells me that the package index PyPI (launched in 2003) is about 4 years older than the interpreter PyPy (first released in 2007). Still, at its core, PyPy is a Python in…

That claim appears to contradict the second-system effect [0]. The observation is that second implementation of a successful system is often much less successful, overengineered, a…

A natural follow-up to your question might be: "If everything is expanding, then wouldn't the ruler itself be expanding, so the expansion becomes unobservable?" I'm not a physicist…

The Indian Supreme Court introduced the Basic Structure Doctrine in 1970, allowing the judiciary to overrule constitutional amendments if they are found to contradict the "basic st…

Could this lead to better semiconductor manufacturing? Increased yields, fewer defects, larger chips, etc.?

It's also because making some of these decisions (choosing health insurance, deciding how much to save, etc.) involve two considerations---the first being purely analytic (mundane …

It looks like the website is based in India. Instead of the ones(10^0)-thousands(10^3)-millions(10^6)-billions(10^9)-... system followed in most other parts of the world, the India…

If you ignore syntax and pretend that the following is a snippet of Java code, you can declare that a variable x always holds an int, like so: var x: int = y + 5 Here x is the vari…

Not really. Or at least not completely extinct in South India. Some of my favorite childhood memories are from these messes (short for mess hall, I assume). You go there, pay what …

I agree that over-reliance on pictograms frequently causes confusion. I remember reading an article some time ago about European vs North American traffic signs. The article was pr…

I had never thought about point 1, and never knew about points 2 and 3. Growing up in India, iodized salt was the norm. Given that I'm vegetarian, now that I have moved the US, I h…

Are you sure about this? I just wrote a script without a .py extension, and it seemed to work fine.

I am a computer scientist working in programming languages (so with no particular expertise in combinatorics). In my experience, treewidth is one of those ideas at the outer limits…

I am not a mathematician, but here is a motivation I read somewhere some years ago. There are basically two ways to produce big numbers: add two small numbers, or multiply two smal…

I share this experience. Perhaps another way of asking the question is: Are there any results, either about individual programs or in PL theory as a whole, that were made simpler /…

If I understand correctly: The idea is to scan every ballot, and upload all scans to a public website. The system preserves anonymity because voters are not required to write their…

As someone who is intimately familiar with Datalog, but have not read much about Logica: The way I read these rules is not from left-to-right but from right-to-left. In this case, …

There's an interesting article by David Graeber on how we characterize play and fun among animals: https://davidgraeber.org/articles/whats-the-point-if-we-cant... . I can't say tha…

I think this is the real question to ask. Does the complicated flowchart point to deficiencies in the Slack user interface? If the user cannot intuit the flowchart, then how can th…

I mean, it is similar in spirit to a LOTO (lockout / tagout) lock, no? Except without the who to contact bits, perhaps. "Don't turn this knob. But if you really need to, talk to th…

I'm right-handed, and usually use scissors with my right hand. When I try using them with my left hand, two things happen: First, they doesn't sit right in my palm, because of the …

I see a number of comments here about giving awards to organizations rather than individuals, and counter-comments pointing out that Nobel's will disallowed it. How is the Nobel Pr…

One thing that I've always wondered about: Is the CAP theorem really making a non-trivial claim? If a distributed system is consistent and available, it must return the last writte…