mjcohen

The ternary operator is easy to nest if you put each clause on a separate line. Then it looks just like nested if-then-else.

Years ago, I used Acrobat to extract tables from a PDF. Had to do it manually, but it pasted nicely into Excel.

As usual, anything Trump and his minions touch turns to garbage.

I believe that I got the first external cassette drive for the PET on the west coast. Only used it a very few times. The big boost was when I got the floppy disk drive. I could do anything!

For a nice introduction to relativity, look at The Einstein Theory of Relativity: A Trip to the Fourth Dimension by Lillian R. Lieber. $15 on Amazon. Written in 1945 and still quite good.

I enjoyed this article. I always find it interesting how things came to be and how individual contributions made things happen.

If you believe them.

As Victor said, his parents were very upset when they came home and found him in front of a roaring fire, because they did not have a fireplace.

Looks interesting. Should start with a definition of the Hyperbolic Tangent. It is only about 2/3 of the way that the definition occurs in a discussion of computing exp(x).

Damn. Never knew that. TIL

In the mid 70's, I was a graduate CS student at USC's Information Sciences Institute. I remember my feeling of awe when I used Arpanet (or was it Darpanet) to log into London and do stuff there. Wow!

Trump is clearly winning his war on America.

Not if the ratio between the largest and smallest floats is very large (2^(2^n)) where n is the number of bits in the exponent.

Like the old saying:

Military justice is to justice as military music is to music

(I saw this on a math department bulletin board about 1960)

A theorem both deep and profound States that every circle is round But in a paper by Erdos Written in Kurdish A counterexample is found

Did you use the regular version or the one with multiple-precision values?

Clif bars recently went from 6 bars per box to 5. They write the 5 on the box as if it is something improved, not reduced.

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As Disney almost wrote:

Everybody wants to be a bat Cause noone but a bat really knows where it's at

They will never own their mistakes. That's the point of lack of democracy.

Make sure that is legal where you are and, if needed, you have their permission.

There are enough evil people that the present is as bad as it is.

TIL

I find that improv classes are good sources of laughter.

I voted against prop 13, but now I like it living in a house in Westchester for 44 years.

(This has nothing to do with the post, but the title is so similar that I had to include it. Written a few days after seeing "Inception".

Inception Rejection

(Why the dreams-within-dreams in the movie "Inception" could never happen as shown even if the technology worked as described.)

((Though this would have been a lot easier to do as an essay, the poeming was challenging and fun.))

The basis of "Inception", although it may leave you confused, is that in the brain while waking only five percent is used.

To process things in daily life this certainly has been plenty. That mental surplus means our dreams go faster by a factor of twenty.

The magic device that drives the film (the idea's at least sixty years old) allows dreams not only to be observed but changed as they they unfold.

When this device is dreamt of, unlikely as it seems, if used like in the real world, the result is dreams within dreams.

Inception's filled with dreams in dreams, each twenty times faster than before. Unfortunately, here's the problem this movie does ignore:

Level one's dream factor is twenty; four hundred at level two. Level three's factor's eight thousand - two hours there is less than a second for you.

In the first dream at twenty times the brain goes at full speed; there's no excess capacity that the next dream down would need.

A dream in a dream can only be dreamt by the real brain at the top. The faster brain that's in the dream is no more than a prop.

To go faster by four hundred, the dream at level two would need a brain twenty times as fast as the one you carry with you.

So the speed of the dreams that are further down could be no faster than the dream that's first. A quite ingenious plot device here has its bubble burst.

I have used Audio Hijack for recording a meeting (M1 13" MBP). How does this compare?

For very philosophical writings about this, read "Last and First Men" and "Star Maker" by Olaf Stapledon. Written in the 1930's, these describe on a very expansive scale the history of, respectively, humanity and the universe. Very mind bending.

Deepseek seems to be one of the few LLMs that run on a iPod Touch because of the older version of ios.

Clifton Fadiman edited two collections of mathematical fiction "Fantasia Mathematica" and "The Mathematical Magpie". I have them and enjoyed both.