I hadn’t read there were so many angles on the word. I had heard it came from Joyce and never dug deeper. I’m surprised that you quoted a passage from Oxford but didn’t check the OED. Joyce being Irish, the OED would better document the English he’d have been using. Merriam-Webster and derivatives are American English dictionaries.

From the OED:

Honestly, I’m just surprised physicists don’t have a gif/jif thing going on with quork/quark pronunciation.

Oh oh iyo

He lives in me!

Awww, JEJ 😭 Well, as long as there’s baseball, he’ll live on in the cornfields of our cells.

Centrioles is my favorite pasta shape, the little ridges hold sauce so well.

Sometimes you need a stranger to really get that Rough Endoplasmic treatment.

What is this, a barn for aphids!?

Got’em! Saddam!

I believe the Fahrenheit scale was originally set up for 100° to be human body temperature. We’re just built colder now I guess? I had to look up what zero was and apparently he originally set it at the coldest the air had ever been around his village, but later had to standardize it and so cooked up some brine that froze at 0°.

I would propose that 100 should be calibrated around the wet bulb temperature, which I think is around 105°F but varies with humidity. That’s the temperature where sweating doesn’t cool you off any more, so any temperature 100 or more is deadly to most people. I like 0 being freezing for water, seems sensible and is also a good “prolonged exposure to this or lower will kill you” cutoff point.

Start with a list of numbers, like [1 2 3]. That’s it, a list of numbers. If you treat those numbers like they represent something though, and apply some rules to them, you can do math.

One way to consider them is as coordinates. If we had a 3-D coordinate grid, then [1 2 3] could be the point at x = 1, y = 2, and z = 3. You could also consider the list of numbers to be a line with an arrow at one end, starting from the point at [0 0 0] and stopping at the other point. This is a geometric vector: a thing with a direction and a magnitude. Still just a list of numbers though.

Now, what if you wanted to take that list and add another one, say [4 5 6], how might you do it? You could concatenate the lists, like [1 2 3 4 5 6] and that has meaning and utility in some cases. But most of the time, you’d like “adding vectors” to give you a result that maps to something geometric such as putting the lines with arrows end-to-end and seeing what new vector that is. You can do that by adding each element of the 2 vectors. And, almost magically, the point at [5 7 9] is where you’d end up if you first went to [1 2 3] and then traveled [4 5 6] further. We made no drawings, but the math modeled the situation well enough to give us an answer anyway.

Going further, maybe you want to multiply vectors, raise them to exponents, and more? There are several ways to do these, and each has different meanings when you think about them with shapes and geometry.

But vectors are just lists of numbers, they don’t have to be geometric things. [1 2 3] could also represent the coefficients of a function, say 0 = 1x^2 + 2x + 3(x^0). You can still do the same math to the vector, but now it means something else. It models a function, and combining it with other vectors let’s you combine and transform functions just like if they were lines and shapes.

When you get into vectors beyond 3 elements, there’s no longer a clean geometric metaphor to help you visualize. A vector with 100 elements can be used just as well as one with 2, but we can’t visualize a space with 100-dimensions. These are “vector spaces” and a vector is a single point (or rather, points to a point) within them.

Matrices are similar but allow for deeper models of more complex objects.

A vector is a variable-length collection of homogeneous elements. For fixed-length, use an array if homogeneous or a tuple if not. For heterogeneous, untyped collections, please consider one of the many “list” variants.

Seeing this actually sent a small wave of dread through my body

I’m reminded of a very passionate post I once saw about how tiktok dances have made some people afraid to dance because they aren’t as good as people who literally live in dance training camps to factory -produce dance videos. Anyway, the plea was to just ignore that and dance! People largely have an innate desire to move when they hear music, and its OK to just vibe with it.

The internet has got people thinking that everything they make must be step 1 of their plan to monetize that thing and release it for global consumption. Write stories for yourself, letter for friends, and poems for no one! Dance no matter who is looking. Make art everywhere. And for goodness’ sake, play table top games with friends, make up stories, and let yourself get wildly obcessed about it! It’s yours! It’s ok to just love the story your friends are telling and to talk about with people, and you don’t even have to lament that your friend group isn’t charming enough to carry the podcast of your game.

bee-mail*

I’m a big fan of the "wisdom " check before players do something that seems, to me, completely stupid. Like, hey, before you set out to storm the castle, roll your highest knowledge skill.

Tactics, architecture, history, etc, all good. But any success on any skill (or even, literally, Wisdom if nothing else) gets you a little hint that this is a terrible idea.

“OK well, as a Baker, you understand that the huge wagon pulling 500 loaves of bread into the castle means there must be an enormous amount of guards. Since you got a natural 20 on your Cooking check, you can estimate the number precisely to around 150. Even if they weild the baguettes as weapons, you are certain they will defeat you.”

And then, most parties I’ve played with will then begin formulating their plan to sneak in on the bread wagon, which is a much funnier story. Or they’ll complain that they meant the druid should cause a storm to distract the guards or something like that. It’s kind of amazing how often these bad plans arise from a miscommunication.

I have doubts about this “Cane” guy’s citizenship , have we seen a birth certificate?

It’s sad but i stopped writing answers or comments on SO years ago. I used to have all these optimistic ideas about people working together to collectively grow our shared knowledge. I guess Wikipedia and the Internet Archive keep barely hanging in there, but if anything those cases prove my point: without one extremely strong personality to hold the corruption in check, all these collaborative “digital commons” projects are a leadership change away from completely selling out all the work put into them. That can be feeding everything into AI but it’s also monetization schemes and EULA changes to claim ownership of user submitted content and locking the public out of your site without accounts and subscriptions.

And usually the public’s only recourse is to tear it all down and start again, waiting for the next con artist to come along and steal the village’s prosperity.

Phobos and Deimos, Mars’ moons, are captured asteroids and look like lumpy potatoes.

Don’t worry, once you get the job you’ll discover that they lied about what the work is anyway. You thought the job was sitting quietly at a desk and solving little dev tasks. Actually that’s 25% of the job, the rest is: 25% meetings where they make doing the little tasks harder, confusing, and miserable, 25% other tasks you aren’t good at and that aren’t part of your job, and the last 25% is more meetings about those other things. The ratios will adjust over time until only about 10% of your job is doing your job, and the other 90% is email and meetings.

Models. Humans hold models of the world in their minds, math helps you understand and create more complex and consistent models. You always exist in a simulation of your own construction to make sense of the universe.

My feeling is that no model can ever fully capture a complete description of reality, the information isn’t compressible to such a degree that approximations or abstractions can be lossless.

Most of what we consider to be invention is merely combinatoric novelty.

“Yeah man, we’re totally down to bring justice to those monsters accused of doing war crimes! Woah wait, I mean, except when we do a war crime, that’s alright, we have good reasons.”

Ah, they grow up so fast! Just like big brother USA! 🥲🇺🇲🦅

Similar to programming.

stares at monitor

scrolls mouse wheel

fuck, cocking shit, unbelievable

scrolls mouse

what moron wrote this?

ctrl+f, typing

oh. fucking imbecile, dunce, fuckballs, ass

types 3 letters, hits “run”

ah fixed! another shining golden piece of God’s own perfect code completed!