madcaptenor

Indeed he seems to be excited about it now, after Claude Opus 4.6 solved a problem he'd been working on: https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/papers/claude-cyc...

note "now" is April 2026

Don't feed my ego like that.

I came up with it before that but I'm not going to claim I'm the only one, or even that I didn't hear it somewhere and have it get into my weights and stochastically parrot it later.

I was not expecting to see that the book would culminate in a chapter on general relativity!

My guess is that Miami and Washington are there for essentially rhetorical reasons. Miami is often talked about as a city that's vulnerable to climate change, and Washington is the capital.

Well, they wouldn't call it a "projection", but whatever drawing of the map they use.

I didn't know that. Makes more sense than a rectangular projection at least.

Over water, probably something like the entire 60th parallel south.

Over land, I think you want to start near the westernmost point of the African continent and thread the needle of the Isthmus of Suez, and stay south of the Caspian Sea. At least in the projection gcmap.com uses (plate carree - essentially the x-coordinate and y-coordinate are just raw longitude and latitude), this keeps you south of Lake Baikal and allows you to get very far east in far eastern Russia. Something like 17.5 N, 16 W to 69 N, 178.5 E seems to work:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=17.5n16w-21.79n0.21e-26.08n16.4...

Of course this depends on the projection you use!

This is different from the Portugal-to-China path that is the longest over land in reality, which a flat-earther would have crossing the Mediterranean.

I would think the person committing piratage would be called a pirate.

Franklin couldn't predict the future. It was Twain, saying you'd never go wrong attributing a quote to Franklin.

(2016) but still worth the read

He didn't carry the stone tablets around all the time.

I tried to read it at the height of the pandemic, inspired by the plague framing, and couldn't get into it. Might be time to give it another shot.

Except there is no such place. Perhaps you're thinking of Intercourse, PA?

I get what you're saying, but if the government repealed the Gregorian calendar (and went back to Julian) that wouldn't change the day of the week. The day of the week is historically independent of the day of the month. Catholics and Protestants agreed on this in the calendar change. The original papal bull that set up the Gregorian calendar has Thursday 1582-10-04 followed by Friday 1582-10-15; Great Britain and colonies (if we're taking the US perspective) followed Wednesday 1752-09-02 with Thursday 1752-09-14.

and brown is just dark orange.

I assume there is a way to handle this in modern contract law. Surely people have forgotten how long the various months are and written contracts referring to April 31.

I think the rays are straight but you're comparing them to the US-Canada border, which is curved. (No, it really is! A parallel of latitude is not a great circle.)

You're right, but:

- he works in Germany (https://vedran.miletic.net/files/cv-vedran-miletic.pdf)

- the original author is Till Tantau (https://www.beamer.plus/Introduction.html) who is German (https://www.tcs.uni-luebeck.de/en/mitarbeiter/tantau/cv/)

I believe the software was written by a German.

I'm guessing this is a coincidence, though; the Capitol is also, famously, on a Hill.

Wait, so it was actually believed that the Washington meridian just happened to fall exactly on an integer number of degrees (120-43 =77) west of Greenwich?

I need to remember that this is okay. I didn't do it because of concerns about resale value... but recently I sold books for the first time in a while and got so little money that I realize this is not worth worrying about.

ai;dr

Every now and then HN falls apart

IIRC her best-known song saw a spike in popularity around the 2024 solar eclipse. (I know I played it a few times.)

"Strong Songs" podcast breaking down Total Eclipse of The Heart: https://strongsongspodcast.com/blogs/episodes/s07e06-total-e...

I am an Italian-American and would presume to speak for Italian-American foodways but not the foodways of Italians living in Italy.

Bluey would never do this.

I had wondered if getting wordle in 1 based on social media data was possible! Now I know.