Viewing profile — taserian

Who gets to define "good"?

One of my favorite stand-up routines talks about the infamous bumper sticker philosophy, and what happened when the person moved from a left-leaning location to a right-leaning one…

&& precedence mans that the && arguments are bound first, so: .where(p -> p.getCategory == 2 || p.getCategory == 5 && isProductUnderDiscount(p)) is equivalent to: if (product.getCa…

Hiya, Scott! I recently heard the first episode of Rationally Speaking podcast episode where you were the guest (yes, I'm catching up with the RS Archives during my long commute). …

I can speak from my own experience; even though English is my first language, I entered as a grad student and TA in a public US university as a foreigner, since my undergrad degree…

Thank you for this! I've always wondered if there was anything similar being done. I will say that this is quite a large collection of papers. Do you have any pointers as to which …

I've always wanted a page where it would have the translation of "I'm sorry, but I don't speak a word of X" in perfectly enunciated X for all X in [Languages]. I guess this is the …

That's a totally different issue. There are multiple products on Amazon that develop a "following" (either because the product is ridiculous on its face, or because it's so ordinar…

A lot of the "rarity" with baseball cards was that they weren't inherently rare on release, but that the player on the card became a standout for the team afterwards, and therefore…

I have a small velvet bag that I use to keep my cell phone safe from scratches in my pocket. You can keep the fingerprint sensor on, but drop it in a similar bag with the sensor at…

My experience with coding was using the old BASIC books (like the ones at https://www.atariarchives.org/ ), and stubbornly typing my way to make these games work. When they didn't,…

I lived in New York until the early '80s (I was 11 at the time), and I recall the commercial "Take the Train to the Plane". I always thought that they were part of the MTA. https:/…

It's a funny after-dinner speech (where some of the attendees aren't experts in coding theory), providing a somewhat tongue-in-cheek biography of Alice and Bob.

Also a concept used in the game Endgame: Singularity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity

I recognize that premise about 3 being an optimal radix from https://web.williams.edu/Mathematics/sjmiller/public_html/10...

What I feel is most important is reducing the amount of "friction". if the OS is a GUI Linux with Python, it's just a matter of: - opening a terminal - `python` - `print "mikestew"…

One of my favorite quotes from James Nicoll: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just bor…

http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2017/01/time-mozart-...

A dear favorite of mine was Baldor's Algebra. Everyone else in high school was scared of it, but I found it to be very methodical and easy to follow from one topic to another. Pict…

Slightly off-topic, but is there a resource that collects the music cited in Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach"? I've never been good at reading music notation, so those sections o…

A local speed-dating event. 15 years together this upcoming February, and we have a middle-school age daughter who is a joy (I thought they were supposed to be challenging at this …

You might want to check out lesswrong.com I'd recommend https://www.readthesequences.com/ as something to test the waters; if this is your style, then you'll enjoy lesswrong.com .

Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the outcome of the election? For example, if the outcome of the election has Candidate X ahead of Y by D v…

Some 10-12 years ago, I used to teach a simple CompSci 102 course on a military base while in grad school. A drill sergeant taking this class was a veritable fountain of stories of…