Viewing profile — tor825gl

The locus of points where magnetic north aligns with true north is a (one dimensional) curve. On one side of the curve magnetic north is too far to the east, on the other side too …

Paper money was well established at this point. When the pound replaced the Spanish silver dollar as the default global currency, it did so with a nascent international banking sys…

One of the major uses for the telegraph was the first funds transfers that could happen quicker than moving paper (or bullion) from one location to another. London banks would tele…

My understanding was that the latency was much higher due to manual repeating at stations along the way. Eg. when the London-Mumbai telegraph was new it took around 45 minutes in o…

This is a fiction.

Yes. Arguably the new Netflix mini series and extended episode formats are better for decent shows. To be fair, they are much worse for garbage shows. But 20x25 minute episodes is …

Arguably there are lots of films which could have done with being 4-5 hours long, and were compressed to match conventions and hardware limits for 'movies'. Lots of novelizations f…

Have you got older recently?

> he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance Sorry, I remember differently. That "modelling them as having intention is a useful con…

A counterpart to TFA which somewhat chimes with your position: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo... It's an article about how some of the best people do …

> Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point? Yes, the second word of the title.

The Periodic Table is also very special, and like the books you mentioned, the surprising part is that it says something additional about his experiences to each of the other books…

I also thought it was very good. Did a very good job of answering the question: why do (did) bright, ethical, motivated people want to work for a company like this?

I would say, there are exactly two reasons to read a book: because you enjoy it, and because you want to know what it says.

If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a u…

Why doesn't anaconda disprove this?

It's not correct that there is a legal duty to redact names of people who might be accused of wrongdoing, but where the allegations haven't been proved. The only two reasons that r…

This wasn't a fuck-up though was it? Knowing they would die in the attack, the terrorists just didn't care if their identities were known.

It's actually quite easy to open the pdf and see that there are several different elements per page to the document, eg the main text, an image, the footer, the title. Randomly rem…

There are two types of jobs, the ones which require you to know that a day is about 8.5x10^5 seconds, and those which don't.

The problem with this is that destinations are a fixed distance away, whereas their time distance is not fixed. In most journeys people want to reach a specific place rather than d…

If you car was fueled by a fixed pipe which it travelled along, consuming all the fuel in the sections of the pipe that it moved past but no more, what would the cross section of t…

If they sold 500 million microcontrollers and your workplaces never bought any, then your experience doesn't tell us anything about why the people that did buy them, bought them.

Thanks for this! Another pattern might be that, whereas oral culture matched the 'sufficient unto the day' ethos of hunter gatherers, writing reflected the new agricultural process…