161–170 of 238 posts
Here's another good example of a series of slow experiments: the cosmic distance ladder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdOXS_9_P4U https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder You can compute the distance to the moon if you know the radius of the earth by looking at how long lunar eclipses take, data gathered over years of observations. Eratosthenes computed the radius of the earth by clever trigonometry in…
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((Old growth) tree), not (old (growth tree)). Old growth trees are trees or forests that are centuries old and not recently cultures.
That should have been hyphenated then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
Pick any point in the past few centuries, and there's going to be something, possibly nowadays always a single word, but not necessarily so even now, that was in a state of flux at the time. The same goes for today.
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Interesting new contender for simplest to state unsolved problem: The Antihydra Does this program halt? a = 8 b = 0 while b != -1: if a % 2 == 0: b += 2 else: b -= 1 a += a//2 (// being integer division, equivalently a binary shift one to the right: >> 1) https://www.sligocki.com/2024/07/06/bb-6-2-is-hard.html https://bbchallenge.org/antihydra
Fwiw, ChatGPT is able to say that it doesn't. I wonder what other classes of programs it's able to state if it halts?
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That should have been hyphenated then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
It does not have to be. The English language has a process where phrases become hyphenated compounds which then become single words. It's permissible to be partway along that path, and for people to disagree where something is on that path. Pick any point in the past few centuries, and there's going to be something, possibly nowadays always a single word, but not necessarily so even now, that was in a state of flux a…
From perceptron to transformers (few hidden layers to 480B parameters), from multicore CPUs to distributed GPUs and WWW/social media has all contributed to the growth of Artificial Intelligence.
This has took almost 50+ years and so many iterations along the way.
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…
Interesting new contender for simplest to state unsolved problem: The Antihydra Does this program halt? a = 8 b = 0 while b != -1: if a % 2 == 0: b += 2 else: b -= 1 a += a//2 (// being integer division, equivalently a binary shift one to the right: >> 1) https://www.sligocki.com/2024/07/06/bb-6-2-is-hard.html https://bbchallenge.org/antihydra
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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.
Zoom out: 200 years ago they were killing each other over slavery, 400 years ago, there was no american society. The trend is up, but they're in a local minimum :D
Well, there were people living in that part of the world..
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"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.
I think of The Art of Computer Programming... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Computer_Programmin...