Making the rounds (I saw it here). Applies to Pittsburgh too:
Chicago actually has 12 seasons:
- Winter
- Fool's Spring
- Second Winter
- Spring of Deception
- Third Winter
- (you are here)
- The Pollening
- Actual Spring
- Summer
- Hell's Front Porch
- False Fall
- Second Summer
- Actual Fall
From a friend: just because something has a name doesn't mean it deserves a name. Exhibit A: consecotaleophobia. Exhibit B: Zymarikaphobia.
Seen on the net; source unknown:
Transcript:
Lost Roomba!!!
(Photo)
His name is "Higgins". 35cm /9cm high / 2.8kg
DOES NOT BITE!!!
Roomba app info:
Battery: 3%
Dust bin: 190%
My husband left our bungalow door open and our Roomba escaped!!! We followed his cleaning track for 4 Km down to the beach where we lost his trail. Higgins can not swim!!! Please help us bring Higgins back! (Tear-off strips with contact information)
Shameless self-promotion:
As we know,[1] the evening meal for Purim starts with Wacky Mac, a dish that features four pasta shapes: wheels, shells, spirals, and tubes. What is less widely known is how we are to eat this ritual item. Like the Pesach seder a month later, the meal has specific requirements and specific meanings! And like at the Pesach seder, your child should ask you to explain why this night is different from all other nights and what the laws and customs are and what they mean. It is only because of the other celebratory aspects of this holiday that in most families the child is too inebriated to ask (and the parents too inebriated to answer). So prepare yourself now, so you can both fulfill the commandment and explain it to your child.
First, we must examine the symbolism. [...]
See the full article at Judaism Codidact.
Pass the wine! :-)
P.S. For the programmers, we have this question on type systems and the use of void -- more answers welcome!
Forwarded to me without attribution:
Rabbi Moshe Karelman, a brilliant Talmudist, and his star pupil Yeshaya are traveling to Vilna when they have to stop for the night, and pitch their tent in an empty field.
After the evening prayers Rabbi Karelman and Yeshaya retire for the evening. Some hours later, Rabbi Karelman wakes up and nudges his student. "Yeshaya, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."
"I see millions and millions of stars, Rabbi Karelman."
"And from this, what do you deduce?"
Yeshaya ponders for a minute. "Well, astronomically, this view conveys the vastness of the heavens. Chronometrically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow. Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful, and that we are a small and insignificant part of His universe. What does it tell you, Rabbi Karelman?"
"It tells me that someone has stolen our tent."
I've seen variations on this before, but this is the most thorough answer from the student I've seen in any of those tellings.
This is surreal. A year ago, somebody entering data on Open Street Map recorded a suburban building as being 212 stories. A backyard shed, apparently. It seems to have been an honest typo, later corrected. It happens. No big deal, right?
The error was later corrected by another
openstreetmap user, BUT, in the interim, Microsoft took an export of the data and used it to build Flight Simulator 2020. The result... this incredible monolith (2/2)
The original thread where people tracked it down is hilarious.
Overheard at last night's choir party:
Director: ...And I told (another choir's director) that we have five tenors now and quite a few basses too, and she was blown away. [Context: for whatever reason, SCA choirs and maybe amateur choirs in general have a lot of trouble getting enough tenors. Our choir has about 25 members and five tenors is considered very good.]
Transgender tenor: Some of our tenors used to be sopranos.1 She could suggest...
Other choir member: In the Debatable Choir we make tenors!
1 Two, in fact. There is also a woman in the bass section (who hasn't undergone physical changes thus far).
Some stuff has been accumulating in browser tabs. Some of it lost relevance because I waited too long (oops). Here's the rest.
This article explains the Intel problem that's going to slow your computer down soon. I don't know much about how kernels work and I understood it. I do have some computer-science background, though, so if somebody who doesn't wants to let me know if this is accessible or incoherent, please do. In terms of effects of the bug, you're going to get an OS update soon and then things will be slower because the real fix is to replace hardware, but you probably want to take the update anyway.
This infographic gives some current advice to avoid being spear-phished. It has one tip that was new to me but makes a lot of sense: if you have any doubt about an attachment but are going to open it anyway, drop it into Google Drive and open it in your browser. If it's malicious it'll attack Google's servers instead of your computer, and they have better defenses.
Sandra and Woo: what the public hears vs. what a software developer hears.
This account of one hospital's triage process for major incidents blew me away. I shared the link with someone I know in the medical profession and he said "oh, Sunrise -- they have their (stuff) together" -- they have a reputation, it appears. Link courtesy of metahacker and hakamadare.
I was one of the subject-matter experts interviewed for this study on Stack Overflow's documentation project. Horyun was an intern and was great to work with.
From siderea, the two worlds, or rubber-duck programming and modes of thinking.
The phatic and the anti-inductive doesn't summarize well, but I found it interesting. Also, I learned some new words. "Phatic" means talking for the sake of talking -- so small-talk, but not just that. Social lubricant fits in here too.
Rands on listening for managers.
From the same source as the "phatic" post, a story about zombies made me laugh a lot.
From Twitter:
Three logicians walk into a bar. The bartender says "Do you all want something to drink?"
The first logician says "I don't know."
The second logician says "I don't know."
The third logician says "Yes."
A friend shared this with me earlier today and I literally laughed out loud:
(Source)
The second-last column is about a famous Zulu leader. The last one is about walled cities under fire.
"Shaka, when the walls fell" is a key phrase in a rather unusual episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, named "Darmok". The famous universal translator doesn't work when the Enterprise encounters these particular aliens, because their language doesn't work at the word level. They speak in what the crew calls metaphor. I've seen discussions of this over the years ("could that really work?" "improbable, because..."). The post about the Jeopardy episode links to this Atlantic article about the episode that argues that we're looking at it all wrong. I found it an interesting read.
Also, Atlantic does in-depth articles about episodes of SF shows? Who knew?
(I don't have a Trek icon. Here, have one from one of my favorite shows instead.)
I have some things collecting in tabs, so here's a hodge-podge:
First, border-crossing. You've probably heard by now that border control in the US has gotten aggressive, including demanding passwords for encrypted devices and then taking them out of view for an extended time. You don't have to give up your password, but if you don't, they can confiscate your device for weeks or months for "review". The rights you have against unreasonable search and seizure in the US are not the same as those you have at the border. While they can't deny entry to US citizens, they can to others.
It's important to know what you don't know. David Director Friedman has an interesting idea about applying economics to teaching -- specifically, grading exams.
A lot of the Rands article The New Manager Death-Spiral sounds very familiar.
We all know one of the Internet rules: don't read the comments. The parts of the net I frequent tend to be better than, say, a random sample of YouTube, which is due to a mix of conscientious participants and comment moderation. A while back I came across a comment-moderation policy described as "Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite": they require a comment to be at least two of true, necessary, and kind.
I'm not sure that philosophy applies to windshield notes, but they sure are funny.
How do we know Humpty Dumpty is an egg? The rhyme doesn't say so. Huh, I never thought about that.
Speaking of things I hadn't thought about, have you ever noticed the similarities between fantasy-adventurer settings and westerns?
Stopping GAN Violence: Generative Unadversarial Networks
Samuel Albanie, Sébastien Ehrhardt, João F. Henriques
While the costs of human violence have attracted a great deal of attention from the research community, the effects of the network-on-network (NoN) violence popularised by Generative Adversarial Networks have yet to be addressed. In this work, we quantify the financial, social, spiritual, cultural, grammatical and dermatological impact of this aggression and address the issue by proposing a more peaceful approach which we term Generative Unadversarial Networks (GUNs). Under this framework, we simultaneously train two models: a generator G that does its best to capture whichever data distribution it feels it can manage, and a motivator M that helps G to achieve its dream. Fighting is strictly verboten and both models evolve by learning to respect their differences. The framework is both theoretically and electrically grounded in game theory, and can be viewed as a winner-shares-all two-player game in which both players work as a team to achieve the best score. Experiments show that by working in harmony, the proposed model is able to claim both the moral and log-likelihood high ground. Our work builds on a rich history of carefully argued position-papers, published as anonymous YouTube comments, which prove that the optimal solution to NoN violence is more GUNs.
It's the season of Purim Torah on Mi Yodeya. Here are some of my favorites:
From this year:
My answer to a question asking what Birkat Amazon is and what giving thanks after a meal has to do with amazon.com
What are we supposed to do about losing an hour of Purim this year? (I answered that one too)
Why do we shake four heretics on Sukkot? (on Sukkot we shake the "four species", different plants; the word for "species" resembles the word for heretics)
And some from past years:
And one I had a lot of fun answering, Why don't Jews accept Our Lord and Savior?
There are a lot more where those came from, and the season continues for about the next two weeks.
Can you help? Somebody asked a question recently on Writers about guidelines and heuristics for when to use screen shots in technical documentation. The question isn't looking for opinions or what you, personally, do but, rather, formal guidelines along the lines of what GNOME does for its documentation. So far it's only attracting opinion answers. I, too, have opinions and practices that I follow, but I can't source them either and I'd like to see the question get a good answer.
Speaking of Writers, I wrote a little something about writing good API reference documentation (like Javadoc), based on advice I've given informally over and over again -- finally wrote some of it down in a public place. Feedback welcome.
I recently saw an article with interesting-seeming observations and analysis of Modern Orthodox Judaism. I'm not all that tuned into the MO community and can't evaluate its credibility from inside, but I found it an interesting read. If any of y'all would care to tell me where on the spectrum from "yup" to "WTF?!" this is from your perspective, I'd be interested.
Finally, a little something for those who use the text editor vim (which I gather is related to vi?):
.
The next day: "What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!" "Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1s and Is." "That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her."I saw this in the parking garage at work today:
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
merle_ and
pedropadrao. I will miss them both. :-(
And there's no good transition from that to, well, miscellany, so this paragraph will have to serve.
I suppose, technically, if you're not sure if a TV show has jumped the shark, then it hasn't. But, that said, I doubt I'll be back for the next season of "Once Upon a Time", a show that got off to a good start in season one, carried it through part of season two, and then started going farther and farther afield of its original context. In addition to links to "the enchanted forest", the land of fairy tales, they mixed in an Arthurian knight (short-lived), Captain Hook, I think a couple other odd ones, and now, in the season finale, it's clear that Never-Never Land is going to be a major factor. If they were doing the work to tell a Gaiman-style story about all these realms being intertwined or some such I'd be on board for that, but it sure feels like they're just making things up as they go along now. Oh well.
Links:
Full moon silhouettes, a really gorgeous video of the full moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, NZ. (Link from Dani.)
Best court sanctions...
ever! from osewalrus. As Ose says, best use of the term
"Red Shirt" in a legal decision. And you thought court decisions had to be
dull...
This is great (given that such idiots exist, which is not great). Bill Walsh was riding his bike and happened to be running a helmet-cam when a cab made an illegal U-turn across the bike lane, after being warned that it was illegal, and promptly got pulled over by an oncoming police officer. The video is short and cuts out before we get to see the expression on the cabbie's face, alas.
Feast of the
ravens, a photo with an interesting story behind it. What do you
expect to find when a large group of ravens congregates? Not this.
From shewhomust.
siderea posted an excerpt from (and link to) an essay about
libraries, mandatory
internet use, and the very poor that is well worth a read. As more
and more stuff moves to "online only", whom are we leaving out in the cold?
The ones who can least cope, it seems.
I hadn't realized that 3D printing was advanced enough to make medical implants... a year and a half ago. Ok, this was an airpipe splint, but are plastic organs in our future?
Sad cat diary, a video in the general style of Henri (but not just one cat), from Talvin over at DW.
siderea posted The Music Theory Song: Intervals (YouTube).
For anyone who's trying to work on ear training to hear intervals, and for
those of you who already grok that, this video's for you. Really.
12 letters that didn't make the (English) alphabet. I forget where this link came from.
thnidu over on Dreamwidth posted
a link to "Earth as Art", which looks to be a nifty photo collection.
The link isn't currently working for me, so I'm linking his entry instead
of there for now.
More beautiful photography, from a locked post. Warning: gravity alert -- it wouldn't be hard to get sucked in.
Some time back I noticed that one of the regulars in the Mi Yodeya weekly parsha chat drew a lot on Abarbanel and that it sounded interesting. I asked him if he knew of an English translation and at the time he didn't, but more recently someone else who remembered my question pointed me at this adaptation (not translation). This sounds like something I should check out. (And it's kind of cool that, months later, somebody remembered my asking and followed up.)
When atheism is good: a chassidic story, linked by thnidu on DW again.
From XKCD: an exploration of wise men, stars, and paths. What would the trip look like, depending on what star you were following when? I can't confirm the math, but I found it an interesting read. (I don't know why he has the journey starting in Jerusalem, though.)
A map of every grocery store ever. Interestingly, my regular "big shopping trip" store (as opposed to the "grab a few things on the way home from work" store) recently remodelled and deviated from the norms. Now I can't find anything without effort.
And a funny cartoon from
gnomi:( Read more... )
siderea.
