The_suffocated

It took me fifteen minutes to figure out that the screen reads "PRO". At first I thought it was PBN and couldn't make head or tail of it.

Have the three videos been modified by AI? They (esp. the second one) look like having voice-overs with lip-sync. Feel very unnatural.

> The only thing Google had going for it was no ads and a committment to not be evil.

No, those are not the only reasons. There is a more important one: in its early days, search results from Google were noticeably better than those from other search engines. Google’s PageRank algorithm was ground breaking. It allowed the search engine to rank webpages fully automatically without human moderation and without using some obscure heuristics with unstable performances.

While I understand that the ‘America’ in ‘Lake America’ means the USA, I can’t help but think of ‘America’ as the America continent. In this sense the whole farce feels less political.

By the way, Carney may consider calling the USA ‘Nocanoram’ (Non-Canadian North America). This at least is more precise than hijacked term ‘America’.

Why? Aren’t people saying that Chromebooks are easier to deploy and manage in schools?

Yes. The next step is to send a very human-like robot to impersonate you on a date, in wedding ceremony, during intimate times in the bedroom, etc., but we are not sure if your date will do the same.

In terms of temperature rather than length of daylight, the peak of summer depends on geography (and latitude in particular). In where I live (Hong Kong), July and August are the hottest months and so it makes sense to me that Summer begins in June.

Not all men, but all men over 17 and under the age of 45. This still seems draconian, though.

I like this more than most modern designs.

I have longed for this feature. For me, it is useful in many scenarios, such as:

  * reading two distantly separated sections of a long article on two split tabs;
  * reading a research paper on one tab and typing a question to StackExchange on the other;
  * reading a scanned book written in French on one tab and using a dictionary on the other.

The article is well written but its title is a click bait. Although the film portrays mathematicians in a negative way and the allegedly hard problem on the blackboard is actually an easy homework exercise that every decent first-year student is able to solve, I don’t think the film has ever gathered any hatred among mathematicians.

  > The muster roll for the garrison of Calais in 1357 shows not only the names of men-at-arms and archers but also the support roles needed: mason, locksmith, fletcher (a maker of arrows), bowyer (a maker of bows), plumber, blacksmith, wheelwright, cooper (maker of barrels), ditch digger, boatman, carter and carter’s boy. One record belongs to a tiler – Walter Tyler. Was this the future rebel leader of 1381, Wat Tyler?

I didn’t know that the surnames Cooper, Carter and Tyler were originated from different kinds of artisans. I didn’t know that there are names for makers of arrows, bows and wheels either. What is carter’s boy? A bellboy for a cart?

Do people these days call robbers ‘thieves’? When I read the title, I thought the article was about pickpockets.

A wild guess: perhaps it was the Russian authority, not the site owners, who blocked the traffic. Collective action is usually inefficient. If something suddenly happens in a large scale, more often than not it is caused by a few influential entities.

> Evidently, the missing feature of all e-readers is the addition of bellows.

Nah. I'd say the missing feature of all e-readers is multiple screens bound as a pamphlet that allows users to compare the contents on different pages easily.

> Math in its core has always been abstract. It’s the whole point.

I don't think so. E.g. there may be some abstractions in numerical linear algebra, but the subject matter has always been quite concrete.

Discussions of this sort can easily get chaotic, because people tend to conflate intuitiveness and concreteness. Sometimes the whole point of abstraction is to make a concept clearer and more intuitive. The distinction between polynomial function and polynomial is an example.

Somewhat tangential to the discussion: I have once read that Richard Feynman was opposed to the idea (originally due to Karl Popper) that falsifiability is central to physics, but I haven't read any explanation.

Did the scientists deliberately break the bones of the rabbits to perform the tests? I understand that there has to be a necessary evil, and the rabbits here can at least recover from bone fractures, while lab animals in other research projects may get infected with some diseases and die painfully. Yet, I still find the scene of breaking the legs of the rabbits one by one quite troubling.

Anyway, I hope this glue gun project can finally succeed. My grandmother had a broken femur a year before she passed away. Although she could still walk with a walking frame after surgery, the irreversible loss of mobility was undoubtedly frustrating for her.

  > a centuries-old tax loophole, abolished in April, that catered to the global rich. The nondomiciled—or non-dom status, as it is known—allowed foreigners living in the U.K. to pay tax only on what they earned domestically. Profits made abroad were ignored unless brought into the U.K.

I don't understand. Why is this a loophole? Why is money earned abroad and kept abroad taxable not by a foreign government but by the UK government?

No idea why this happened. Perhaps Math.Pow(x,y) was implemented as 2**(y*log2(x)) without writing special code to deal with the case where x is negative real and y is integer?

Many comments here point out the difficulties in replacing the digital infrastructure of a large organisation, but according to the ministry’s website, the ministry is only ten months old: “As a result of the formation of a new government 29th of August 2024 the Ministry of Digital Affairs has been established”.

There probably isn’t any huge or complex infrastructure to replace.

Thank you. I mistakenly thought the typewriter was used to type shorthands.

Very interesting article. I don’t understand, however, how shorthanders used typewriters for short-writing. The figure on p.168 (above fig. 9) is not explanative.

   > I showed the exam to one of our math Ph.D. students (a former International Mathematical Olympiad Gold Medalist from Belarus), and he said "Hmm. Non-Trivial. Good." Our undergraduate students are also very good. This exam was not easy for them, as the score distribution shows.

The questions themselves (except probably the fifth) seem pretty standard. I wonder how the math olympiad medalist mentioned in the tweet would think that they are non-trivial. I am no expert in recurrence relation and haven’t done any exercise for decades, but even someone as lame and as out of touch as I was able to solve the first four problems in less than an hour.

I actually think that the students performed quite well. It was an exam. They were under stress. The median score appears to be around 35 (out of 50). If the questions were really non-trivial, I would even say that the students’ performance was excellent.

What surprised me was neither the performance of GPT-o1 nor that of the students, but the content of the exam. Why would anyone put FIVE questions on recurrence relations in one exam? This is unthinkable.

Then shouldn't $280 became $280\times 10^15 = $280000\times 10^12 = $280000tn dollars? Why $81tn ? Even if the currency is Brazil real, it should evaluate to about 48,000 trillion USD.

I don’t understand why one should define a month by partitioning the orbit into twelve equiangular sectors (relative to the centre of the orbit). Shouldn’t the orbit be partitioned into twelve parts with (roughly) equal travel times?

The book is sometimes confusing. See https://math.stackexchange.com/q/5027820 for example.