Viewing profile — te_platt

Yes, very much. Growing up I used to scramble to get whatever computer equipment I could. My parents didn't have much money but many of my friends parents did. I hated asking to bo…

From March 13, 2020: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/13/trump-asks-energy-department... Also: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/china-to-...

Not so bad. Assuming a spherical Earth in a vacuum and a bunch of other slightly less reasonable assumptions we have: 1E+45 photons from sun per second 1.49598E+11 distance to sun …

Yesterday I suddenly lost cell service while running errands. Within a half hour I was home. Upon checking my email I found notifications of financial transactions pending (thankfu…

In most ways, yes. For me the first 5 seconds or so were fantastic. It felt like seeing a behind the scenes "How it was made" documentary where I was seeing the actors out of chara…

It's something like an economist finding a $20 dollar bill on the ground and it's actually a real $20 bill that no one has picked up yet.

The one I would add is: Names are a reasonable indicator of the person's sex. Go ahead and prefix a Mr. / Ms.

My (Chileanized) Castilian is pretty rusty but I thought your translation was in line with how I read it. Instead of "withhold" I would say "hold onto for myself" ; as in "Retener …

I agree with the main argument but would like to note "crank" in not an all or nothing description. Sometimes the problem as publicized doesn't exactly match the precise problem. F…

I wonder how they take into account the kind of people who take a test like this are likely to have a good vocabulary. I suppose that might not be true but I don't think I'd do som…

A few years ago the guy I was sharing an office with at work was cleaning off his desk and found a stack of resumes. He said they were all from the batch that I was hired from and …

Nice touch: 4.15 FERMAT’S LAST THEOREM: ... General case when n>2 was proved by Andrew Wiles (1994). The proof is too long to be written here. See: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~anin…

My last two projects have been for the military and a medical device. The example here seems so wonderfully simple (even as an example of how much has to happen on a simple change)…

I was both impressed and horrified. Well done.

Having never worked on a search engine myself I will avoid guessing as to why Google's results are the way they are. As a search engine user I noticed Google's results seem to be l…

Neither of whom is white nationalist.

As well as sarcasm, emphasis, irony, puns.... I really like this sentence from Douglas Hofstadter: "Every word in this sentence is a gross misspelling of the word 'tomato'." There …

I've always been fascinated by the difficulties of translation. There is the issue of expressing the original thought. Already I've edited this post several times. Then there is th…

I think you are right on both points. There were more details and his answer was just a quick way to say: He didn't care about the status of having a PhD He didn't need a PhD to ad…

My oldest brother had a real love of mathematics and got a masters degree but never even applied to a PhD program. When I asked him about it he just said he was tired of working on…

It's nice to read an article like this that doesn't try to invent some controversy. It looks like a supernova could cause a disruption large enough to cause an extinction. No, ther…

The hoax I wish would get around is that it is really good to smoke is dandelion roots. I love to imagine groups of teenagers running around at night digging out dandelions from ra…

That especially hurt me too read as just this morning I helped a friend move a couch. We had had to turn it pretty much every way possible and the only reason we kept trying was be…