81–90 of 112 posts
The *nix world is full of dark-but-fun terminology. Daemons run the system. New files get 666 (before the umask takes away unnecessary permissions). Parents kill their children before killing themselves. And sometimes you have to kill zombies.
From: https://devrant.com/rants/1101391/my-daily-unix-command-list... unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep.
It’s almost like these commands were all made by nerd teenage boys.
The *nix world is full of dark-but-fun terminology. Daemons run the system. New files get 666 (before the umask takes away unnecessary permissions). Parents kill their children before killing themselves. And sometimes you have to kill zombies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I told my eight year old the “we taught sand how to think” joke, and he loved it, and also indulged me in a brief explanation. It really is absolutely wild that it all works when you go to the absolute fundamentals and start working forward.
The funny thing is that before that we taught light bulbs how to think(thermionic logic), and before that we taught magnets how to think(relay logic) and before that we taught levers how to think(gear logic)
I wasn’t familiar with both of these expressions but I looked it up and “a la mode” is an American culinary expression, meaning “served with ice cream”. And “au jus” is also an American culinary expression, meaning “gravy” or “broth”. Now, even though they are both derived from a French expression that is a prepositional phrase with à (meaning with), it does not matter any more when they were borrowed to English.
“A la mode” became a new adverbial expression meaning just that: “served with ice cream”. You can have pie a la mode = pie served with ice cream, but obviously not *pie with a la mode = pie with served with ice cream.
And “au jus” became a noun expression meaning “broth” or “gravy”. And you must say sandwich with au jus = sandwich with gravy and can’t say *sandwich au jus = sandwich gravy.
What is extremely interesting here is that it bothers the prescriptivist who wants language to be a certain way he feels it is supposed to be, also the author on that webpage.
Do you pronounce it as demon or like Matt Damon?
It should more properly be written as dæmon. The æ ("ash") character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in encyclopædia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It should more properly be written as dæmon. The æ ("ash") character is usually pronounced more like "ee", as in encyclopædia. I've never heard anyone say "encycloPAYdia" :-)
Fascinating! This is why I stick with nice, clean structural linguistics, this applied stuff gets sticky. I just confirmed on Youtube that the (some?) British people do indeed pronounce "Aesthetic" as "ah-stet-ic" not "ee-stet-ic", and upon diving a bit, it seems that the rule is "don't ask for a rule, you fool! It's 'e' now except for when it isn't." Thanks for the interesting tidbit! The letter æ was used in Old En…
Tried to find the post again, but no dice :(
Unrelated to the word "daemon", but related to the article, I was a bit surprised by this assertion: > Eventually, though, the theory of quantum mechanics showed why it wouldn't work. I was familiar with the information theory arguments (the same presented in Wikipedia[1]). Is that why they mean here by "quantum mechanics" or is there another counterargument to Maxwell's daemon? 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max…
I'm guessing that the daemon's ability to allow only fast molecules through the gate depends on knowing their position and velocity simultaneously?
http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy-more.html#sec-pha...
With 'entropy' being an obsolete term for (lack of) information, and
> “classical thermodynamics” is a contradiction in terms.
I find the “a la mode” vs “au jus” discussion right under the daemon one very interesting! I wasn’t familiar with both of these expressions but I looked it up and “a la mode” is an American culinary expression, meaning “served with ice cream”. And “au jus” is also an American culinary expression, meaning “gravy” or “broth”. Now, even though they are both derived from a French expression that is a prepositional phrase…