I don't think the world applauds that at all. The US used to be the good guys. Very flawed but still "good" as things go. Now they're just dangerous and thrashing wildly...

In Soviet America, a wrong turn takes your life.

Huh. Apparently bees do eat pollen, for the proteins and fats it contains. I thought it was only nectar, but no.

Disagree. Just because luck saved your ass doesn't mean what you did wasn't stupid.

Winning a round of Russian Roulette doesn't make you a genius.

Feeding money to Russia was madness and had to be stopped as a priority. Nothing ridiculous about it.

Please sir, can we have some Moore?

I wasn't aware of that site. There's almost too much great stuff there!...

Thank you again.

a chewing gum made from lablab beans, Lablab purpureus—that naturally contain an antiviral trap protein (FRIL)—to neutralize two herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and two influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2). The chewing gum formulation allowed for effective and consistent release of FRIL at sites of viral infection.

They demonstrated that 40 milligrams of a two-gram bean gum tablet was adequate to reduce viral loads by more than 95%, a reduction similar to what they saw in their SARS-CoV-2 study.

This plus good other images are amazing, thank you!

For me, in this one, the receding reeds capture the show... The way Japanese prints use negative space is unequalled, even in contemporary art!

Photography was available during his time, and he seems to be mixing traditional with a much more modern look. It's fantastic:

Vaccines turned me into a newt!

gestures at butterfly

Is this Neon Genesis Evangelion?

Ok, so Two-Tone-Beard-Man is Marx, Slightly-Darker-Beard-Man is Engels, but who are Long-Beard-Man and Auntie-Glasses-Lady? I ask because Long-Beard-Man appears to be the winner of the heated exchange at the end...

You are being liberated. Please do not resist.

Thanks, and sorry about that! I removed the colon from near my URL now, just in case.

"could help solve" was the quote.

Physics is like that joke about halving the distance to a woman at a bar*. I don't expect it will ever be entirely solved, but whatever stands as the "for all practical purposes" of the era might. I'm taking "help solve" as just another halving of the distance in this analogy.

A mathematician and an engineer are sitting at a table drinking when a very beautiful woman walks in and sits down at the bar.

The mathematician sighs. "I'd like to talk to her, but first I have to cover half the distance between where we are and where she is, then half of the distance that remains, then half of that distance, and so on. The series is infinite. There'll always be some finite distance between us."

The engineer gets up and starts walking. "Ah, well, I figure I can get close enough for all practical purposes."

The real meat of the story is in the referenced blog post: https://blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-spell-ran-in-64kb-ram

TL;DR

If you're short on time, here's the key engineering story:

• McIlroy's first innovation was a clever linguistics-based stemming algorithm that reduced the dictionary to just 25,000 words while improving accuracy.
• For fast lookups, he initially used a Bloom filter—perhaps one of its first production uses. Interestingly, Dennis Ritchie provided the implementation. They tuned it to have such a low false positive rate that they could skip actual dictionary lookups.
• When the dictionary grew to 30,000 words, the Bloom filter approach became impractical, leading to innovative hash compression techniques.
• They computed that 27-bit hash codes would keep collision probability acceptably low, but needed compression.
• McIlroy's solution was to store differences between sorted hash codes, after discovering these differences followed a geometric distribution.
• Using Golomb's code, a compression scheme designed for geometric distributions, he achieved 13.60 bits per word—remarkably close to the theoretical minimum of 13.57 bits.
• Finally, he partitioned the compressed data to speed up lookups, trading a small memory increase (final size ~14 bits per word) for significantly faster performance.

There was something wrong here, but the... right kind of wrong.

Looking back, those times were an incredible desert of of titillation compared to the desserts of today.

No, never did find it... But I'm pretty sure now that pen really was his. It was just a mildly unlikely coincidence that he had one just like mine.

I felt at the time that I'd been conned out of some things in the past, and that had me set a bit too hard on "not being fooled again", so I overdid it.

One particular case I remember is exchanging toy cars with someone, and them claiming later that day that they lost the car i just gave them. So I spent a good few minutes looking for it with them. I even insisted "no, let's look again" when they suggested we give up. I felt bad that they'd lost out on our exchange, so I gave them back the car they'd given me, just to ease their misfortune. Only to hear the next day how they'd been bragging about fooling me. Gah.

I had a similar thing with a pen, the very same year I think... I had a mildly special pen which one day I lost. Went looking for it and found it sitting on a (slightly older) classmate's desk, so i grabbed it and said "hey, that's mine". He tried to pretend that no, it was his, and he sounded very convincing about it, and even got the teacher involved. They both looked at me with infuriatingly condescending expressions as I explained how it was mine.

The teacher suggested "just let him have it" to the classmate, who conceded.

I went back to my desk fuming and scratched my initials into it before returning to show them, "look, see, it was mine! The classmate immediately pointed out "you scratched those in just now" and I think I mumbled something incoherent before going back to my desk, to the teacher's mortification with the whole situation.

It had already begun dawning on me at this point that the classmate was right... That wasn't my pen. It was his and just looked like mine. But it was too late at this point and I didn't know how to handle it other than to keep quiet and try to forget about it.

offended beeping