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• Post #3745410

  Profound words from the manual

• Post #3385876

  Australian spiders not scary enough for you? Well now it seems they build catapults. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-23/ballista-spider-new-discovered-web-traps-green-ants-queensland/106831796

• Post #3027187

  The British Library is always worth a visit. Here's a typewritten document by Alan Turing: "I propose to investigate the question as to whether it is possible for machinery to show intelligent behaviour. It is usually assumed without argument that it is not possible..."

• Post #3027186

  Outside of my immediate social circle it seems like a high proportion of people are conspiracy theorists. We have entire TV channels that seem to be nothing but alien conspiracy documentaries. Has "conspiracy theory" taken over as the main religion of the US?

• Post #3027185

  I'll be listening many times more but nothing on Inferno has really grabbed me so far. Tomorrow's Harvest is still the greatest album ever made.

• Post #3027184

  There are a lot of District line stations that are place-names in the US: Monument, Richmond, South Kensington, Temple, Tower Hill, Victoria, Westminster and Wimbledon.

• Post #3027183

  I enjoyed the metaness of the moment as I sat down in Pret à Manger, King's Cross station, surrounded by Pottermania, to sip my cappuccino and start my new book which coincidentally started at King's Cross station with the protagonist surrounded by Pottermania. (Slow Horses, if you were wondering.)

• Post #3027182

  TIL the now defunct silverware company Oneida (who manufactured our own silverware) started as a sex cult whose membership included one (actually successful) assassin of a US president https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community

• Post #2866368

  I've never heard of this book by Fred Hoyle before (Ossian's Ride) but I was sold when I read the blurb and first paragraph.

• Post #2866367

  Bank holiday, hottest day of the year, and yet this beach on the south coast of England is almost empty...

• Post #2866366

  The most perfectly post-apocalyptic beach I've ever visited. The looming nuclear reactor complex gives it all a bit of a Stålenhag feel.

• Post #2866365

  I enjoyed watching The Mandalorian and Grogu even if the target audience is about 8 years old. I guess I was mildly annoyed by the whole gladiator has to win just one more fight story that's as old as the hills and always plays out the same way. But Grogu and the Anzellans made up for that and it was cool to see some instantly recognizable Phil Tippett stop motion. I watched it in Borehamwood where the original Star Wars was made, one day shy of its 49th anniversary.

• Post #2866364

  I'm sure Google can't actually be using generative AI to create plausible train times around London but after a week I'm yet to see any real train that corresponds to anything listed by Google Maps.

• Post #2577695

  Vanity purchase on eBay due to having a mention in it. But check out these ads. I tried doing something with Shortcuts on my iPhone this morning but I think that Sharp might do it many times better. Only problem is I now have to figure out how to restore failed glue in a "perfect bound" magazine from the 80s.

• Post #2481105

  At 11.82 bits per English word, a 40x40 jpg is worth a thousand words.

• Post #2202424

  All day long. Copying numbers from emails and texts to web sites. From little plastic cards to apps. Digging them out from old emails to copy to web sites. 6 digits. 4 digits. 12 digits alphanumeric. All day long. Make it stop! I'm not a number copying machine.

• Post #2153516

  40999180004300000 / 999970000299999 = 41. 00041 # prime 00043 # prime 00047 # prime 00053 # prime 00061 00071 00083 # all three prime 00097 00113 00131 00151 00173 # yes, still prime 00197 00223 00251 00281 00313 00347 00383 # even more prime 00421 00461 00503 00547 00593 00641 00691 00743 # still all prime 00797 00853 00911 00971 01033 01097 01163 01231 # more same 01301 01373 01447 01523 01601 ... # you get the picture

• Post #2061581

  Often a machine can do a task better than a human. But economics being what it is, what may actually happen is that machines can do a worse job for a lot less money and for that reason the machines take over that task. People warned us about superintelligent machines taking over. What will actually happen is that almost every aspect of our lives will be dominated by machines less intelligent than humans.

• Post #1927675

  A paper titled "A proof of the Collatz conjecture". https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20642

• Post #1909146

  Movie idea: elaborate plot to hijack an aircraft involving hijackers making a movie with the sole purpose of winning a large hunk of metal that they could use as a weapon on an aircraft. Clearly there is an audience for whom this is a plausible story. An Emmy might be better than an Oscar. A friend of mine had a bit of hassle trying to bring his back one year...

• Post #1854403

  The US has basically abandoned democracy and replaced it with some kind of weird game involving fractals.

• Post #1815119

  Something it took me many years to appreciate is this: a lot of constructions in algebra can be interpreted as figuring out what you can precompute when you're not sure what's coming next. The first example I was taught may have been the free group on some generators. You're basically saying "well I don't know how to multiply these things so I'll just record whatever I need now so when I do learn how to multiply elements I've already done...

• Post #1810551

  Are you a robot

• Post #1772792

  "Edger Dijkstra, one of the greatest computer scientists of our age and a spiritual descendant of Plato, has claimed that the development of the microprocessor has put computing back twenty-five years. His assertion is based on the view that the easy availability of computing power to people with no systematic training in good programming will lead to the wholesale abandonment of the standards and techniques painstakingly developed over the years by him and his colleagues; all the old m...

• Post #1705113

  Astounding story in the news today: the first ever sub 2:00:00 marathon. Even more astounding: two sub 2:00:00 marathons in one race. Sebastian Sawe followed by Yomif Kejelcha. https://apnews.com/article/marathon-record-sawe-london-under-two-hours-8481a99809f19e0dd2cafca36bd3676a

• Post #1690751

  A curious formula from a curious paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19324

• Post #1604054

  I've been revisiting my hairy ball theorem argument over here: https://blog.sigfpe.com/2012/11/a-pictorial-proof-of-hairy-ball-theorem.html I may try to make a video of the whole argument but here is the key step. If you make the sphere a union of two extended hemispherical caps so they overlap along the band containing the equator, then this band can be looked at in two ways depending on whether you view it as part of the northern hemispherical cap flattened out or the southern cap....

• Post #1604053

  Spotted this at the local used book store. It looks like typical quantum woo woo. And Herbert may seem worse than most - he's somewhat notorious for his quantum metaphase typewriter for communicating with the spirit realm. And yet - one of his superluminal communication inventions turned out to reveal a genuine problem in the physics of the day. The conventional explanation of lasers at the time implied the ability to clone quantum states, something we now know to be impossible. Peres t...

• Post #1604052

  When working on my game probability computation project https://github.com/dpiponi/dice-nine I wanted to do high precision computations with exact rationals. It seems pretty straightforward seeing as the host language, Python, natively supports arbitrary precision integers and has a rationals library. But I was using numpy (and previously pytorch and tensorflow) for my computation and using Python integers in a numpy array loses you performance advantages. But I noticed that when doing proba...

• Post #1604049

  “It is difficult to get someone to see a break in the road as something to bridge rather than as an uncrossable chasm when their salary depends upon it being an uncrossable chasm.”