boygobbo

I think that was meant to be CBPV (Call-By-Push-Value)

Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jerome Carcopino

Nice reading!

You can get RTF or Word versions from the project home page: http://freestuff.grok.co.uk/rom-dis/ and a complete ROM disassembly in assembler format (with most of the same info as the book) here: https://github.com/ZXSpectrumVault/rom-disassemblies/blob/ma...

A vacuum cleaner described in 'words that are four letters long or shorter':

a tool to suck dirt and dust into a bag

;)

"London’s thriving economy generates a £26.5bn surplus that is recycled by the government to provide financial help to Britain’s less well-off regions, according to an official breakdown of the public finances."

and

"Every Londoner provided £3,070 more in tax revenues than they received in public spending, while people living in the south-east ran a surplus of £1,670 per head."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...

confabulate: to replace the gaps left by a disorder of the memory with imaginary remembered experiences consistently believed to be true (Collins)

Even older. Maurice Wilkes first proposed the concept in 1951 & the EDSAC-2, the first computer to use microprogramming, was operational by 1958.

It wasn't banned in the UK & the BBFC passed it uncut. Stanley Kubrick himself requested it be withdrawn from distribution after some copycat incidents.

The speed limit is a bit of a red herring. The average speed of traffic in central London is about 9 miles/hour & inner London about 12. The average speed in the suburbs (outer London) is about 20 mph, even though the speed limit is 30 mph.

Average traffic speed in London: https://www.london.gov.uk/questions/sites/default/files/0832...

London speed limits: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/london-digital-speed-limit-map.pd...

Ruby developers didn't change the behaviour of these characters

because Ruby has \A and \Z to match the boundaries of a string

The Psion 7 (& Netbook) have IMHO the absolute best keyboards for their form factor. I still use my Netbook for distraction-free writing. It doesn't run on AA batteries but will easily last a couple of days on one charge. At just over 1kg it's effortless to carry about & the shape makes it easy to clutch in one hand. For me it's the ideal note-taking machine.

And Emacs

And most people couldn't tell the difference between a genuine paper on quantum mechanics and one generated by a machine. Would that mean machines could write genuine papers on quantum mechanics? This article says more about most people's ignorance of poetry than anything else.

Don't envy them - they are deluding themselves.

Glacier is for storing records that by law you have to keep for a certain period of time (e.g. 6 years for expenses, tax & accounting, etc.) but that you have no intention of ever retrieving yourself. It's not a cheap backup solution.

As someone who did use an Archimedes A440 when it came out (late 1987 I think), it was plenty zippy enough. It's original desktop shell Arthur was written in BBC Basic, so I think it could have handled Smalltalk. There is a port of Squeak for recent versions of RiscOS (http://www.rowledge.org/tim/squeak/).

"This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

Emacs has a mode for this: https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/En...

To be fair, the paper is by a mathematician, not a philosopher. The question is valid - what /do/ mathematicians mean when they use the term 'morally'? It doesn't seem to have much to do with what most people (including philosophers) think it means. Rather, it appears from the examples given that it is equivalent to 'by my gut feeling' which we might call 'intuition' if that didn't have a more specific meaning wrt mathematics (though, ironically, intuitionism would seem to fit the author's position quite well, e.g. "The truth of a mathematical statement can only be conceived via a mental construction that proves it to be true, and the communication between mathematicians only serves as a means to create the same mental process in different minds." https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism/). Nothing wrong with intuition as a starting point, but as you point out, it surely can't be a justification in and of itself - what happens when people's intuitions about what is right don't agree? I wonder what discipline tackles that kind of problem..?

I also wonder how the author would react if a philosopher had said they'd heard of this thing called 'Category Theory' and thought it would be interesting to apply a topological transformation to find the homomorphism between Kant and Nietzsche and then started talking about the influence of German beer on their thought? It would make about as much sense as this paper.

My personal wish for gauging this work (once it's complete) would be more quantitative: a "classical music earworm neural net" plus a "composer uniqueness rating".

This sounds a little like marking your own homework...

There's a Wikipedia page[1] which covers the general background and a copy of the SCRIPT/VS Text Programmer's Guide[2] (which was my bible back in the day) on archive.org, which should give you a pretty good overview.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT_(markup) [2] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibm370DCFSpositionFaci...

This looks very similar to me to the mainframe manuals I am familiar with from this time which were written using SCRIPT/VS as the printer control language & GML (which begat SGML) as the document markup language (implemented as SCRIPT/VS macros). There was also SCRIPT/PC for DOS but that was very limited by comparison and a pain to use so I doubt they used that. (SCRIPT/VS is quite like Troff - they share a common ancestor in RUNOFF.)

I'm wondering what they would do to your lungs if you inhaled them...

It's called 'market segmentation'. It's why there are different brands of soap powder from the same manufacturer even though they are all essentially the same.

Did you mean the Acorn Archimedes? (The Acorn Electron was a cut-down version of the 8-bit BBC Model B. The Archimedes was the first ARM computer (32-bit RISC CPU, full colour WIMP interface, anti-aliased fonts, etc.).

I've just read it myself and was very impressed by Richard Hipp's calm, courteous and honest demeanour. I would recommend this to anyone as a paragon of how to respond to a difficult situation.

ndjson appears to be a fork of jsonlines with the addition of a spec (see https://github.com/ndjson/ndjson.github.io/issues/1)

I find the 'expensive tissue hypothesis' (based on brain/gut ratio) quite persuasive.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expensive_tissue_hypothesis

Also In Our Time (another great BBC radio discussion programme) on Songs of Innocence and Experience: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07gh4pg