ntoronto

6 ms·

1.
by ntoronto 11y ago
It's like he's contemplating his entire acting career and questioning how he got to this point in his life. That's my favorite Rickman scene as well. It takes a fine actor to pack 30 years of fictional history into a single
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by ntoronto 11y ago
I've posed exactly these problems to children about 15 times now. Most children 10 and up I've talked to can figure out the first (one more guest) easily enough, the second (an infinite bus of new guests) with a little help, and t
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Nintendo is the Bad Guy(escapistmagazine.com)
11 points by ntoronto 11y ago|12 comments
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by ntoronto 11y ago
"I'm sure there's way more complexity I'm overlooking, but that's how one might get started." That's how I'd start. There's probably a way to make the search a lot smarter. Here's the part y
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by ntoronto 11y ago
Meta-comment: Not sure what's up with the downvotes on the parent comment. During lifeguard training years ago, like everyone else in my class, I was very surprised to learn what drowning looks like. But it's not far-fetched to th
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by ntoronto 11y ago
Sorry, forgot about the able swimmers. But first: another water poloist! Awesome! Water polo was pretty small in my area, so we didn't have a lot of talent in the pool. (Pun intended.) I swam distance on the swim team and was a decent
7.
by ntoronto 11y ago
Facts: http://www.cdc.gov/HomeandRecreationalSafety/Water-Safety/wa... When an adult or adolescent drowns, it looks exactly the same, they're much more dangerous to would-be helpers, and half the time they&#x
8.
by ntoronto 11y ago
> What do people usually expect drowning to look like? Head erect, more splashing, perhaps a cry for help, and above all, someone who thinks and acts like a human being. You can't tell from the site, but a drowning swimmer is a wild
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by ntoronto 11y ago
> Also, how do you differentiate the drowning response from someone that's just bad at treading water and floats low in the water? Watch the face, arms and legs, and water surface. A swimmer in distress has his mouth as high as poss
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by ntoronto 11y ago
I'll bet it was both. I was a lifeguard, so I can speak with some authority. Both skills are necessary. Not only do you have to count and track swimmers, but you have to keep mental notes about their abilities, be aware of what they&#x
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by ntoronto 11y ago
> Also, 95% of life-guarding is preventive. I remember this well: sitting in a chair, scanning the pool, and every 20 seconds yelling, "Walk, please!" I was a living reminder to slow the heck down. I'm pretty sure it was o
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by ntoronto 11y ago
> Rescuing active drowning victims (this kind of drowning) is very dangerous, for that reason. The victim won't just hold you, they'll climb you. My only save as a lifeguard was a double for this very reason: the drowning kid&#
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by ntoronto 11y ago
This is one of the sweetest things I've ever seen on the Internet.
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by ntoronto 12y ago
I've monkeyed with a lot of numeric representations, and every one of them involves tough theoretical and practical trade-offs. Returning an exact rational as the result of division sounds reasonable. My favorite representation so far
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by ntoronto 12y ago
We had this discussion on the Racket user's mailing list a couple of years ago. One user with an AMD processor experienced significant stalls; others with Intel processors didn't. I don't know the status of AMD's floatin
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by ntoronto 12y ago
Ugh. It's shameful when people use wrong arguments about mathematics to oppress. I really wish you the best. This article first appeared in "Computing in Science and Engineering" magazine, so its audience is mainly scientis
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by ntoronto 12y ago
All correct, for exact rationals. Racket's exact rational arithmetic tends to take about 1000x the amount of time floating-point arithmetic takes to compute similar functions, and creates a lot of garbage on the heap. It gets worse, th
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by ntoronto 12y ago
It's not necessarily just you. I thought it was wrong when I first opened it. There may be something funny going on with the font - I think the "1" and "l" are switched. Edit: Never mind, it copies/pastes corre
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by ntoronto 12y ago
That is indeed a typo. Thanks for catching it. It's amazing how much you miss when you think you already know what's written.
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by ntoronto 12y ago
This article (like all other IEEE Computing Now articles) is free to download for a limited time.
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Practically Accurate Floating-Point Math(computer.org)
80 points by ntoronto 12y ago|32 comments
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by ntoronto 12y ago
...and which exercised the weird feature of some x86 processors that had something like 80-bit internal registers but did 64 bit double precision computations, and which allowed the garbage in the extra bits to contaminate the LSB, resulti
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by ntoronto 12y ago
Right. I don't remember whether I said it in the talk, but that demo saturates the AGP bus, meaning that the engine can extract and write scene data at about 1.5 to 2 GB/Sec. It's possible to put a lot more static content in
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by ntoronto 12y ago
More precisely, the problem comes from how certain Linux libraries and OS X have responded to OpenGL's new profile system. An OpenGL context is roughly a 3D drawing area and its associated behind-the-scenes data. Via changes to OpenGL