Viewing profile — rmidthun

All this eulogy for an abusive bully. Among the many "innovations", there was a feature where he would link to a website that he thought was worthy of ridicule. Often mentioning di…

No mention of Tom Lehrer? I still remember the -LY song he wrote. One recurring joke was based on 2001. A giant monolith would crumble to reveal the sound of the day while Also Spr…

Slack decided that my phone is no longer good enough. So I have lost access to the main method of communication when I am away from the computer. I really don't want to get a new p…

There is a distinct drop in quality as time passes, anything written in the 50s is golden (Untouched by Human Hands, Store of Infinity) , in the 60s is mixed but still some good st…

By using expected value, you are assuming that the distribution of the even numbers is uniform. You will need to prove that first, and I suspect that will be difficult.

Since we're looking at Scott Aaronson, you might want to check out "Quantum Computing Since Democritus". It gives a good explanation of the math behind qubits and how they can be u…

It also gets pretty macabre in parts. Specifically The Tin-Woodsman of Oz where the title character wonders whatever happened to the girl that was the reason he was cursed. You see…

Strongly disagree. I Am a Strange Loop spends an entire chapter of Hofstadter informing us how he is better than everyone else because he hears Bach better than everyone else. And …

I once registered a password using a special character, but I could not get in. It turned out that they url encoded it, if I used %21 instead of "!" I could get into the site.

By this logic, would Guitar Magazine, which published very complete sheet music for many of these songs have a copyright claim? I know I have a magazine at home with Stairway to He…

FATE. Designed to be about the simplest thing that could be called a system, but endless flexibility in what you use it for. The Accelerated version is about 40 pages, the Core ver…

I think you need to read that linked article a bit more closely. "You can go to jail for not filing your taxes. You can go to jail for lying on your return. But you can’t go to jai…

That's a crash trap. But if you were to have a glitch trap, that would be funny. A glitch trap teleports the person carrying you, probably into space to die, leaving you behind. Th…

Greg Egan wrote a story ("Border Guards")in which post-human players play a game of Quantum Soccer. Being Greg Egan, he actually created the game in Java. http://www.gregegan.net/B…

Warning: That link was replaced with a "your machine might be infected, call us now!" type scam.

The web site https://betterexplained.com/ has physical books that you can purchase "Math, Better Explained: Learn to Unlock Your Math Intuition". The explanations on that website a…

Like this one? https://blog.highfidelity.com/avatar-island-our-first-steps-...

It doesn't even need to be hostile to be trouble. The Strugatsky brothers book "Roadside Picnic" (inspiration for game and movie "Stalker") is based on the idea that aliens came an…

The source code to Simon Tatham's Puzzles is open-source, so you could see how at least one person does it. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/devel/ https://git.…

CYOA still lives, but in different forms. Japanese Visual Novels are basically CYOA with pictures. The number of decision points varies depending on the book in question, but the b…

I would add pictorial programming languages, such as ProGraph if you want a really unusual way to program. Object oriented, but inherently dataflow. Loops were very weird though. h…

Remembered another one: gravitational orbits can't occur in 4D space or higher. In 3d space, we have inverse-square laws. Think of a light source, the area that is covers at a give…

Rotations can be composed in up to 3 dimensions only. That means that for any sequence of rotations, you can come up with a single rotation that is equal to that rotation. In 2d, t…

Pigeonhole Principle. The number of messages of bit length N is 2^N. You are trying to map these into 2^M compressed strings, M < N. By the Pigeonhole (or Dirichlet's Box) Principl…

If you want a good look at the other side, read the Showa series of manga by Shigeru Mizuki. It mixes historical background (based on photos) with his own personal story (a more ca…