Viewing profile — russell

I have often wondered what happens when large scale technological unemployment occurs, or even the threat of it. I think we have seen the result in the 2016 Presidential election w…

Ah, Cryptonomicon by Neal Stepehson updated for the internet age. Worth reading if you havent.

I say the girl should be congratulated for her ingenuity. The amount of effort she put into tweaking the teacher's tail is commendable. The real "solution" here is for her to find …

It's a history of presidential nomination conventions ffrom their appearance in the early 1800s. The takeaway is they can never get it right.

I'm not sure where you got your numbers. The 10 largest cities in the US have a population of 26M (2015 estimates, Wikipedia). Generally population estimates are given for the metr…

According to the review, DeLong and Cohen have written a historical analysis of what has worked as economic engines in America's economic history. Their observation is that it is b…

The Eternal September all over again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

All well and good if your kids are from a school known to the admissions department at the colleges they are applying to, otherwise the AP courses, with all their flaws, are a reas…

From your second link: >>>The junction provides access to and from the A38 (Tyburn Road), A38(M) (Aston Expressway), the A5127 (Lichfield Road/Gravelly Hill), and several unclassif…

California is quite peculiar. California has 482 municipalities. Whether they call themselves cities or towns is local preference, although fewer than two dozen call themselves tow…

Hah! The army is the only service not getting one, unless there is a helicopter variant in there somewhere.

Indeed. There was a paper done in the 70s or 80s that found that operating system size doubled with each new feature. Picture going from single tasking to multitasking or to virtua…

The lack of interlocks really surprised me, although the name said so. The CDC 6600 had them two decades earlier. We always carefully scheduled our instructions flows, but it was n…

Historical nit: I always considered the CDC 6600 to be the first commercial RISC machine, although given its strange architecture, I can see that others might disagree. It had mult…

The Koutnik links to this article, which inspired his essay. http://thecodist.com/article/my-biggest-regret-as-a-programm... . It was very painful to read, because I made exactly t…

Nah, the aliens are bound to have tons of post-doc archaeologists looking for faculty positions.

From the RFS entry on Surinam, position 22: "“public expression of hatred” towards the government is punishable by up to seven years in prison under a draconian defamation law. The…

Wow! FDR at the bottom, below Buchanan, Harding, Fillmore, Pierce, and GW Bush. I shudder to think what your political views are.

This article seemed rather inane to me, complaining about Cook's standing up for privacy and Zuckerberg's anti-Trump speech or his new foundation, while ignoring the $900 million t…

The tyrant in question was Cylon of Athens who staged a failed coup in 632 BCE leaving him only a would be tyrant.

Simple kits for testing both water and painted surfaces go for $10 and up at Home Depot. The less expensive ones have two tests. You should test at least a couple of fixtures becau…

When it comes to mind boggling longevity, nothing can compare to the B-52. The first prototype flew in 1952 and the last one was built in 1962 and the final plane is still in activ…