giggly_gopher

Not sure what you're going to do to convince your boss.

Though the machines might not be suited for the course, slapping a lightweight Linux distro on the old computers and giving them to parting gift to students without hardware would be a serious act of kindness. Not having your own hardware sucks.

If your boss is motivated by the desire to give charity and to not waste donations, this suggestion might be comforting to them. Then you need to convince them to buy some loaners so the students can complete the course.

I got the baby Klein bottle from Cliff years ago. Nice little nerd tchotchke for the mantelpiece. He also wrote an awesome account of a KGB internet hacking from in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_(book)

Context is important. Imagine someone randomly starts talking to the one black man sitting in an Omaha airport about violent crime

I used to use dark mode, but now I just turn down the total brightness of my screen and I like it much more. I think people are confusing eye strain for staring at a bright light all day.

I heard a story that someone giving a talk at IAS only used M's on the chalkboard (lowercase, uppercase, doublestroke, script, etx) before he was told to cut it out. I can't remember who it was if anyone else heard the story.

New Kind of Science

This seems like they just polished some rough edges off of the existing command line version of Mathematica. I wish they would not call it Wolfram Language. His ego/talent ratio is already so high it's NKS level buffoonery.

This is not entirely true. Seehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disfranchisement

I cringed when I read

> The ordinary algorithm to do integer factorization takes sub-exponential time according to the Wikipedia. This is the fundamental reason which makes the RSA cryptosystem so reliable.

On all other nights we drink Folgers, tonight Maxwell House.