Viewing profile — zerb

The people at the top of Google are rich and have the freedom and resources to work on things that interest them. Also, this is an old issue, Google in China. I'm sure they won't s…

I was actually just toying with a similar thing myself. I'm experimenting with a system that generates abilities for a game within certain design parameters, then tests the games' …

I guess I stand corrected. But the practicality, as others note, still seems limited.

That would only be useful if everyone were outside, and you wanted a split second of many different people's conversations. Satellites move rather quickly relative to the Earth's s…

It's also daaaamn slow. And when you paste formatted content into it (at least from vim on a mac), lol, have fun cleaning up your newly-unformatted content.

Privacy, other people putting things in your can, previous tenants and perhaps other flaws exist. That's why I think it best it be automated and take more than one offense.

I'm wondering how possible it would be to have garbage trucks identify valuable materials in trash as they enter the truck, so the city can fine someone who doesn't separate.

I rinse foil and reuse it, or rinse it before recycling if it's torn. But what I wonder is how dirty is too dirty to recycle in the case of aluminum? I'm not leaving large chunks o…

Some of the worst offenders are logging webservices. We've replaced a simple text file with a bloated site that requires mousing around, does not support grepping, etc.

What do you think of Wiktionary? That's been my go-to for a long time.

Ah, thanks.

It's not just orthography. English has been influenced by Romance languages and gained a tendency to write "of"s instead of compounds. This reverses the word order (order of words)…

The language isn't using lossy compression, but rather it's robust to loss. Sort of the opposite of compression.

I believe it's just that the etymologies in English are more obscure. They're still fascinating, but they come from foreign roots a lot of the time, so they're not as immediately o…

But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In pract…

The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey me…

It seems there's a general trend in the development of English to remove tenses and moods in favor of instead more-strictly prescribing word order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An…

They were saying each is tolerant of loss.

"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding. As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired Ger…

The more I think of it, while it's disappointing from a pure-science point of view, doesn't the lack of our ability to determine whether it's QM or GR that is flawed imply that eac…

We saw birds flying around when we were cavemen. It's always been clear that heavier-than-air flight is possible. We don't currently know of any space-birds flying around black hol…

I can think of more than one religion that's pro-life _and_ advocates for refugees, the poor, strong marriages. Individual people always have their own flaws. My problem with voter…

Oh, that's another great point. There are different kinds of racism. There's a great video from the 80s called "The Color of Fear" which has a bunch of randomly-chosen people of va…

There's an Italian proverb that "one can never have a friend if one must have one without faults". Obviously, the degree of the faults matters, but your implication that friendship…