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Slow

michaelnotebook.com

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101–110 of 238 posts

Re: Slow

#101

Post by thom »

mateo411 wrote: post #67
alnwlsn wrote: post #18

A friend of mine once wrote a dictionary[1]. It has all the (normal) one syllable words in English, defined using only other one syllable words. He decided to work on it by focusing on one letter per year, so A was in 1991, B was 1992, and the book was finished in 2017, 26 years later. It's not even a very long book - only a few hundred pages - but I'm sure if I tried to do the same thing all at once, I'd probably ha…

I bet your friend is good at Scrabble.

Hopefully their interest expands beyond single syllable words, otherwise the highest scores according to a cursory search are 'zizzed' (34) and 'jazzed' (32) which are probably slightly below the average for an elite player.

Re: Slow

#102

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I think that pretty much everything we work on (as tecchies) is the endpoint of a very long timeline.

Every advancement stands on the shoulders of those that came before. Maybe we can run an LLM, because some Roman architect figured out how to make an aqueduct stay up in a seismically-active area.

If you watch James Burke's Connections[0], you get a feel for it (I think some of them are a bit of a stretch, but I really enjoyed it).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series...

Re: Slow

#104

Post by Davidzheng »

cubefox wrote: post #36
tombert wrote: post #4

In my free time, I have taken to trying to prove the Collatz conjecture. People much smarter and more educated than me have failed at this quest, so I will nearly certainly fail at it, but that's not really the point in my mind. Even if I'm not the one to actually prove it, I can at least try and contribute to the body of work towards proving it. Mathematics is, more than nearly anything else, the result of generatio…

A related thing occurs in academia for very niche topics on which only very few people are working. Perhaps nobody for most of the time. A paper might "reply" to another paper from years or decades ago, and receive itself a reply only years later, but from a different author. The cool thing is that you can easily become the current world leading expert on such a niche topic, because there aren't that many papers. So…

I do want to say often math papers have gaps, purely explained parts and sometimes mistakes which can make it quite hard to understand a topic of literally no one else still remembers it though. However the overall advancement of math sometimes helps in this regard

Re: Slow

#105

Post by stavros »

veqq wrote: post #63
lubujackson wrote: post #26

I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…

This is an urban legend. The college archivist covered it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020816065622/http://www.new.ox.... > In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true. > In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Ho…

But this urban legend must be over 150 years old! When was it created?

Re: Slow

#107

Post by travisgriggs »

Avicebron wrote: post #52
lubujackson wrote: post #26

I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…

"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton Trueblood

Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late. Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer population looking at their last hoorah and declining relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a state of denial about soon not being here.

Re: Slow

#109

Post by saltcured »

stavros wrote: post #105
veqq wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an urban legend. The college archivist covered it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020816065622/http://www.new.ox.... > In 1859, the JCR told the SCR that the roof in Hall needed repairing, which was true. > In 1862, the senior fellow was visiting College estates on `progress', i.e., an annual review of College property, which goes on to this day (performed by the Warden). Visiting forests in Akeley and Great Ho…

But this urban legend must be over 150 years old! When was it created?

Right after they consumed the previous rural legend.

Re: Slow

#110

Post by pklausler »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #83

> I suspect many key open source systems (Linux, Wikipedia) will still be around in 100 years. Bet FORTRAN will still be around. Maybe PHP, as well. Def C.

Fortran has multiple incompatible implementations and a standard that's supported completely by none of them, and that hasn't maintained 100% forward compatibility across revisions. It'll still be around in the sense that English will be -- there will be a thing by that name -- but it's impossible to say now exactly what it will be, or to write Fortran now that will still work identically without change for the next century. I think C'89 uniprocessor code would stand a better chance.
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