tor825gl

7 ms·

1.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
The locus of points where magnetic north aligns with true north is a (one dimensional) curve. On one side of the curve magnetic north is too far to the east, on the other side too far to the west. Same for the locus of points where grid nor
2.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
Paper money was well established at this point. When the pound replaced the Spanish silver dollar as the default global currency, it did so with a nascent international banking system where banknotes issued by a certain bank in a certain lo
3.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
One of the major uses for the telegraph was the first funds transfers that could happen quicker than moving paper (or bullion) from one location to another. London banks would telegraph correspondent banks in India, Australia, etc. This ess
4.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
My understanding was that the latency was much higher due to manual repeating at stations along the way. Eg. when the London-Mumbai telegraph was new it took around 45 minutes in one direction.
5.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
This is a fiction.
6.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
Yes. Arguably the new Netflix mini series and extended episode formats are better for decent shows. To be fair, they are much worse for garbage shows. But 20x25 minute episodes is still an option, so what's the problem.
7.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
Arguably there are lots of films which could have done with being 4-5 hours long, and were compressed to match conventions and hardware limits for 'movies'. Lots of novelizations fall into this category. Most decently dense and se
8.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
Have you got older recently?
9.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
> he fell short of advocating that modeling them as having intention is a useful contrivance Sorry, I remember differently. That "modelling them as having intention is a useful contrivance" is exactly the central argument of th
10.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
A counterpart to TFA which somewhat chimes with your position: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/semicolon-shaped-peo... It's an article about how some of the best people do work that engages with public view
11.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
> Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point? Yes, the second word of the title.
12.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
The Periodic Table is also very special, and like the books you mentioned, the surprising part is that it says something additional about his experiences to each of the other books.
13.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
I also thought it was very good. Did a very good job of answering the question: why do (did) bright, ethical, motivated people want to work for a company like this?
14.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
I would say, there are exactly two reasons to read a book: because you enjoy it, and because you want to know what it says.
15.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model. He makes it very clear that the geno
16.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
Why doesn't anaconda disprove this?
17.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
It's not correct that there is a legal duty to redact names of people who might be accused of wrongdoing, but where the allegations haven't been proved. The only two reasons that redactions are allowed are a) to protect the privac
18.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
This wasn't a fuck-up though was it? Knowing they would die in the attack, the terrorists just didn't care if their identities were known.
19.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
It's actually quite easy to open the pdf and see that there are several different elements per page to the document, eg the main text, an image, the footer, the title. Randomly removing these by trial and error will usually quite easil
20.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
There are two types of jobs, the ones which require you to know that a day is about 8.5x10^5 seconds, and those which don't.
21.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
The problem with this is that destinations are a fixed distance away, whereas their time distance is not fixed. In most journeys people want to reach a specific place rather than drive for a given amount of time.
22.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
If you car was fueled by a fixed pipe which it travelled along, consuming all the fuel in the sections of the pipe that it moved past but no more, what would the cross section of the pipe be?
23.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
If they sold 500 million microcontrollers and your workplaces never bought any, then your experience doesn't tell us anything about why the people that did buy them, bought them.
24.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
Thanks for this! Another pattern might be that, whereas oral culture matched the 'sufficient unto the day' ethos of hunter gatherers, writing reflected the new agricultural process of carefully building up and storing for the futu
25.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
I don't think the Beatles song really tells us much about 'cottagecore' or rural life in the 1800s. Retirees in the 1960s were not aspiring to a rural way of life, or giving up plumbing or electricity. They were just buying a
26.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
You are making the same two errors again. You are focusing on the 0.01% of humanity which isn't part of mainstream modernity rather than the 99.99% which is. And you're discussing cases of extreme differential in technological kno
27.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
But you've selected one particular group. The thousands of groups and individuals who merged their way of life with that of farming/toolmaking/industrialised/modern human society do not have a name, they are just part of
28.
by tor825gl 9mo ago
This wisdom is preserved for us in the story of Esau and Jacob. Esau was a hunter and Jacob was a farmer. When hunting went badly, Esau's desperation for protein, which Jacob could guarantee a supply of by cultivating lentils, was such