Dave

185 thoughts; 25 streams
last posted Dec. 4, 2018, 10:23 p.m.
1
Joined on Oct. 22, 2013, 9:21 p.m.
get recent cards as: atom

Kinsey Millhone, from Sue Grafton's Alphabet books, is an obvious candidate.

How about Dorothy Sayers' Harriet Vane? She's listed as a protagonist in the wikipedia pages for the later Wimsey books...

1 thought
updated Dec. 4, 2018, 10:23 p.m.

Vorobiev keeps on cranking them out. Not only is this another frame-story clip, but Chekhov's rifle is lampshaded.

3 thoughts
updated June 17, 2018, 9:10 p.m.

Something I miss from some mid-90's HTTP servers is autolink functionality: when selecting text as an anchor for a hyperlink, a query would be run on what would now be called a CMS, suggesting possible targets. Not only was this convenient for the author, but also for the reader, as it encouraged more informative anchor text than the frequent-at-the-time "this" or "here".

(yes, link rel= navigation was also automatically supported, as were Imagemaps.)

16 thoughts
updated June 13, 2018, 9:32 a.m.

Lambek's "From word to sentence" notes (pp.79-80) the difficulty of shoehorning languages which use parallel constructions (resp. the mathematician's respectively) to place objects and modifiers, not in a nested order, but in parallel sequence (resp. not order-inverting). Maybe linguists need an equivalent of the zip function?

2 thoughts
updated June 1, 2018, 10:44 a.m.

Correction: Darius Bacon points out that Boole was before Peano in pointing out the connection to Taylor:

("An Investigation of the Laws of Thought", Ch.5 p.52 ... and I failed to find any mention of Taylor's 1715 result in De Morgan)

21 thoughts
updated May 21, 2018, 4:52 p.m.

The 80's cartoon "Mother for a little mammoth" (~8 min) is deeper than it first appears: not only were the ancestors of Mammuthus primigenius to be found in eastern Africa (Mammuthus subplanifrons), but there's a very similar relation (both geographic and familial) between Australopithecus afarensis and Homo sapiens.

... also, despite being equally unsure of what Cheburashka may be, I'd still offer a paw were we to cross in the street!

12 thoughts
updated Feb. 20, 2018, 1:22 p.m.

TIL

One of the most surprising things about electronic mail is the ease with which misinterpretations arise

was a 1985 sentiment from RAND report R3283, "Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail". Now I'm imagining ca. 2005 Odeo looking at email and exclaiming "hold my beer!"

37 thoughts
updated Jan. 23, 2018, 10:28 a.m.

Not one to let Shnur have all the disaster fun, Vorobiev's "I love You" manages to close off the "Crazy" troika with a bang.

For memory, the excellent start:

and somewhat weaker bridge:

5 thoughts
updated Oct. 13, 2017, 11:54 a.m.

What a long strange trip it's been...

A 1980's Latvian song contest finalist:

had its tune taken, with the lyrics changed out for a different story, becoming not only a soviet hit when sung by Пугачева, but an evergreeen, even in translation*...

...among which, a persian translation performed (indoors, judging by the liberal amounts of greenscreen) by the Iranian singer Farzaneh ...

... then recently reprised in Tadjikistan by Фарангис: (NSFW if you're in a country where you shouldn't be watching grown women without hats in the office...)

5 thoughts
updated Aug. 11, 2017, 12:25 p.m.

The Moskva may not have a delta at the Oka, but the russian alphabet does have a «дэ» ... I wonder what was the inspiration for this rather slidey, bluesy tune?

5 thoughts
updated June 5, 2017, 11:31 a.m.

In which Nazis (whose black & white world was a tragedy) find themselves inexplicably vividly colorized (this time in a rainbow palette, as farce).

Cf the "All You Need is Love" scene from "Yellow Submarine" (which was available on YT a decade ago, but I guess the blue meanies have bubbled it in the interim)

Yes, let us mix, Max. I've never admitted it before, but my cousin is the blue bird of happiness!

5 thoughts
updated May 2, 2017, 8:12 a.m.

Leningrad again, back in form with some interesting cinematography: we replay a great disaster, in reverse, rewinding to discover its origins...

5 thoughts
updated Feb. 15, 2017, 12:23 p.m.

It's unlikely Sergei Zhukov* reads XKCD, but if he were to have, Munroe's feeling old chart contrasts nicely with lots of old-age makeup and a little confetti...

  • whom we last saw on a stairwell, at 2:20 of "Beauty"
5 thoughts
updated Nov. 14, 2016, 9:39 a.m.

Rivers and Sunsets

The Новые Самоцветы aren't the only ones doing retro themed videos; Кобзон (who we've previously seen demonstrating willingness to play with intergenerational arrangements) has a current-and-retro-video, "dress":

(can anyone comment on the accuracy of the setting? I'm guessing the flashbacks are supposed to be late 60's~early 70's, a time when Kobzon was certainly active, but as far as I can tell, this particular song was a "song of the year" finalist in 1991 [cf "don't cry"], and hence [however touching] would be a bit anachronistic for either period depicted in this video)

(also, looks as if tea may soon deserve the chess and legwarmers treatment)

5 thoughts
updated Sept. 14, 2016, 2:11 p.m.

I'd intended the trichotomy to be:

  • consequential / timelike

  • inconsequential /spacelike

  • tangential / lightlike

but it's been decades since I've dealt with the molluscs of space-time.

1 thought
updated Aug. 24, 2016, 7:02 a.m.

just ran across the party band Volga-Volga; most of their repertoire is a pastiche of russian pop, but some of it shades into western standards as well, eg:

the lyrics may be Maxime's « Знаешь ли ты », the style balkanized, but the music is clearly a western "classic", or

(a well celebrated "Hava Nagila"), or their punked out extended dance version of "Titanic":

OK, that last was pretty weak. They do much better when covering eastern european party tunes such as "American Boy" ... but that's unlikely to mean much unless one is familiar with both the early 90's original (by a group we've seen here before, Комбинатция) and its various extant pastiches...

5 thoughts
updated Aug. 23, 2016, 12:22 p.m.

WRT learning by going from results to definitions (dually to the traditional presentation?), TIL that at least one department of a breakaway technical college somewhere in the fens characterizes their courses by giving samples of the sorts of questions one ought to be capable of answering by the end of the course.

7 thoughts
updated Aug. 16, 2016, 10:09 a.m.

What's particularly neat about this is I can construct a pyramid of interests so the foundation is fairly broad ... and narrows to the specialization I'm interested in as you go up.

James, may we risk saying that cosmology generates one of your principal ideals?

1 thought
updated Aug. 16, 2016, 9:15 a.m.

in the hopes this stream may someday extend beyond this τρίπους...

1 thought
updated Aug. 8, 2016, 2:41 p.m.

PMRC v CCCP

St. Petersburg recently celebrated the opening of the Rock Club and 35 years of official acceptance of their local scene*, and coincidentally I ran across some official soviet censorship lists from the summer of 1984:

https://pp.vk.me/c604417/v604417769/20099/9An0pVA4zuA.jpg

https://pp.vk.me/c604417/v604417769/200a1/NAAEyfTUS3E.jpg

(one notes that кино, despite having being on the list, now merits a symphonic interpretation ... tempora mutantur)

It's apparently a soviet attempt to "reassess the contracts of musicians who performed violently or sexually in concert, and creating a panel to set industry standards.", but I'm not sure any of the censors (similar to how their US counterparts seemed to have forgotten Elvis' pelvis?) actually listened to the censees.

For example, I can understand how the soviets (who seem to have been even more obsessed than the LDS with squeaky-clean?) would have had problems with the Ramones and Acca/dacca.

And maybe the B-52s got the boot for their name, not their songs. But the Talking Heads? Yes? Asia?

Was there something amazingly subversive about new wave or prog that my white suburban teenage friends of the time completely failed to appreciate?

  • not to be confused with the 80th of the traffic police, which ended appropriately enough with a group interpretation of Time Machine's ca. 1979 "Curve Ahead":

@1:36:36

5 thoughts
updated July 12, 2016, 11:44 a.m.

Going the other direction is a bit more difficult. So far the best US cover of an RU song I've run across has been Chet Atkins:

Atkins - Очи чёрные

I'm sure you all are much more color-blind, and it's just my old-fashioned XX upbringing that caused me some cognitive dissonance in the previous card's collection of pale guys singing "go down moses", but judging by the parodies, russian radio also tends to segment by audience ethnicity:

БОНЯ И КУЗЬМИЧ - ЗА МОЛОКОМ

on the other hand, although russians definitely have fewer integrated acts than western europe, in certain cases it seems to be due to lack of opportunity rather than lack of inclination:

Валенки.Марина Девятова и Пьер Нарцисс.

MC Doni feat. Натали - Ты такой

21 thoughts
updated May 28, 2016, 1:26 p.m.

Either vampire Jacques Vaucanson or vampire Pierre Jaquet-Droz, however, would be the perfect age, and both of them already demonstrated

  • an unhealthy fascination with animating the the non-quick

  • the ability to drum up public and private funding to support complex projects

Jaquet-Droz's choice of writing, art, and music were not haphazard; these were the ways in which aristocrats of the XVIII distinguished themselves from the public.

2 thoughts
updated May 4, 2016, 9:29 a.m.
print((lambda d:d+repr(d)+"))")('print((lambda d:d+repr(d)+"))")('))
6 thoughts
updated April 25, 2016, 8:24 a.m.

another question for those of you who actually "made the scene" during the seventies:

Here's ONJ doing a disco cover of Dolly's Jolene.

All that shimmying (during, as well as in between, the verses) reminds me strongly of the 1980's soviet pop I've been watching lately. Is it just that (like Grandpa Simpson's belt onions?) everyone did the song-and-dance thing back then? Or was this limited to Ms Newton-John's interpretation?

2 thoughts
updated April 19, 2016, 11:36 a.m.

On a different topic: back in the early days of compilers —when they were just starting to be practically useful, and it was yet unclear if they were even theoretically possible— there was a fair amount of work done with homomorphic compilation, with the idea that to be a homomorphism was sufficiently constraining that there couldn't be more than one, and hence if one succeeded in constructing such a compiler, it would necessarily be the one sought.

(anyone know how to express the above para in a less esoteric language?)

It just occurred to me that a homomorphic compiler is a reasonable counter to Thompson's "trusting trust" attack, on at least two levels:

  • as per the reasoning above, a properly constructed homomorphic compiler shouldn't be able to insert trojans (to what degree would this extend to a Scott-continuous compiler?), as that involves a bit more latitude of action than simply composing meanings to determining the meaning of a composition.

  • even if one were not convinced that the compiler was fully homomorphic (and that programs were initial, etc.), as long as it was sufficiently homomorphic, one could effectively use "homomorphic encryption": by compiling a conjugated login program, and unconjugating the compiled object, it could be made arbitrarily unlikely that the trojan insertion would be triggered.

(of course, at this point one would still have to trust the loader, the h/w, etc. etc.)

5 thoughts
updated Nov. 10, 2014, 6:59 p.m.
1 thought
updated Dec. 4, 2018, 10:23 p.m.
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updated Nov. 14, 2016, 9:39 a.m.
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updated Aug. 24, 2016, 7:02 a.m.
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updated Aug. 16, 2016, 9:15 a.m.
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updated July 12, 2016, 11:44 a.m.
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updated May 4, 2016, 9:29 a.m.
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updated Feb. 20, 2018, 1:22 p.m.
16 thoughts
updated June 13, 2018, 9:32 a.m.
21 thoughts
updated May 21, 2018, 4:52 p.m.

TIL

37 thoughts
updated Jan. 23, 2018, 10:28 a.m.
6 thoughts
updated April 25, 2016, 8:24 a.m.
5 thoughts
updated Nov. 10, 2014, 6:59 p.m.

Streams by this user that have been favorited by others.

6 thoughts
updated April 25, 2016, 8:24 a.m.

TIL

1
37 thoughts
updated Jan. 23, 2018, 10:28 a.m.
1 thought
updated Aug. 8, 2016, 2:41 p.m.
1

$$ \forall x \in X, x \leq Zeppelin \odot\kappa $$

0

James mentions in the intro to his Poincaré Project that

In mathematics in general, and in the early days of this Poincare Project in particular, we will often be asking questions like: what is the most general object that exhibits this characteristic? What is the distinguishing characteristic of this object compared with others we’re dealing with?

Going meta: when may we define the open balls by saying "when two objects a and b share a most general object c, they are in the same open ball"?

0

Kinsey Millhone, from Sue Grafton's Alphabet books, is an obvious candidate.

How about Dorothy Sayers' Harriet Vane? She's listed as a protagonist in the wikipedia pages for the later Wimsey books...

1

Vorobiev keeps on cranking them out. Not only is this another frame-story clip, but Chekhov's rifle is lampshaded.

0

Something I miss from some mid-90's HTTP servers is autolink functionality: when selecting text as an anchor for a hyperlink, a query would be run on what would now be called a CMS, suggesting possible targets. Not only was this convenient for the author, but also for the reader, as it encouraged more informative anchor text than the frequent-at-the-time "this" or "here".

(yes, link rel= navigation was also automatically supported, as were Imagemaps.)

0

Lambek's "From word to sentence" notes (pp.79-80) the difficulty of shoehorning languages which use parallel constructions (resp. the mathematician's respectively) to place objects and modifiers, not in a nested order, but in parallel sequence (resp. not order-inverting). Maybe linguists need an equivalent of the zip function?

0

Correction: Darius Bacon points out that Boole was before Peano in pointing out the connection to Taylor:

("An Investigation of the Laws of Thought", Ch.5 p.52 ... and I failed to find any mention of Taylor's 1715 result in De Morgan)

1

cognates/когнаты

Some cognates in the super video "Top" are obvious in the printed lyrics; for others you'll have to listen.

Sing it, сестра; Пой, bro.

Geekfish liked Dave's thought #12107 on Russian
6 years, 7 months ago
1

The 80's cartoon "Mother for a little mammoth" (~8 min) is deeper than it first appears: not only were the ancestors of Mammuthus primigenius to be found in eastern Africa (Mammuthus subplanifrons), but there's a very similar relation (both geographic and familial) between Australopithecus afarensis and Homo sapiens.

... also, despite being equally unsure of what Cheburashka may be, I'd still offer a paw were we to cross in the street!

Dave
TIL
0

One of the most surprising things about electronic mail is the ease with which misinterpretations arise

was a 1985 sentiment from RAND report R3283, "Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail". Now I'm imagining ca. 2005 Odeo looking at email and exclaiming "hold my beer!"

1

A late soviet boy band:

On its own not so remarkable, but my band played Misirlou (Μισιρλού) regularly, so it was cool to see Shatunov's friend (first appears at 1:48) wearing a Dick Dale & The Del Tones t-shirt.

0

They're still findin' out what logics will do, but everybody's got 'em. — Murray Leinster

(in a story published in the mid-XX: well after Pandora's; slightly before Kleene)

0

Ved å studere mesterne, og ikke deres elever — Niels Henrik Abel

(who did, in fact, commute ... to Berlin and Paris)

0

Not one to let Shnur have all the disaster fun, Vorobiev's "I love You" manages to close off the "Crazy" troika with a bang.

For memory, the excellent start:

and somewhat weaker bridge:

0

Bearsploitation

... is yet another Revva parody/homage. Thanks to the shoutout changing "Afonya" to "iPhone-ia", I was able to track down the 0riginal scene, ca. 0:23:

In comparison, the parody is a bit more Boogie Nights or Kill Bill than Sweetheart Roller Rink...

Dave
TIL
0

Giuseppe Peano was evidently a bit jealous of Leibniz' XVII ability to publish things like:

(to express commutativity and idempotency), for even in the late XIX he expresses himself anachronistically:

(Peano's versions of his symbols make better ping-pong paddles than our modern variants!)

Evidently Peano went even further than Schröder's Pasigraphy , proposing not only the formal notation for which we remember him, but even a creolized Latin to serve as a scientific conlang for informal argument ... but he wasn't foolish enough to attempt to revive greek!

0

TIL Ernst Schröder would've have to wait nearly 80 years* —with the intervening invention of the computer — for his late XIX logical notation: (here intended as part of a universal formal "pasigraphy", as communicated to an international mathematical conference in Zürich) to find yet another application: as a simpler, if unfortunately far too earlier, alternative to predicate transformer semantics.

  • „Über Pasigraphie, ihren gegenwärtigen Stand und die pasigraphische Bewegung in Italien‟, 1897
0

is from "On the cruelty..." and while unicode fonts now give us the opportunity to easily play the syntactic games of the immediately prior paragraph, replacing {True,False} with the less-interpreted {◉,◎}, I have to admit that, some two decades after having first encountered this passage, I am increasingly convinced of Dijkstra's approach, in this paragraph, to semantics.

(the distinction between functional and imperative is largely [cf Hehner] moot at such a low level; his description of the procedure call as a matter of taste is correct insofar as it "merely" provides a shorthand for formulae; and I'd even be tempted to more austerity: booleans are to integers as characters are to strings, while skip is a derived notion, as the identity for the semicolon.

Then again, I am an unregenerate purist: while I can understand that the modern applications programmer might be happy to call libraries, finding bit-twiddling and finite-state machines to be things of a musty past, I don't see how anyone can claim to be a hacker without a fundamental grounding in bits and machines sufficient to abstract to information and automata.)

0

Yet more twang,

albeit reminiscent of "norteños y rancheras" in this performance. For those who prefer finger picking arrangements, there's this 1980 interpretation by Bichevskaya:

and the prairie sound (low lonesome?) comes through strong (implying this genre, in Russian, would be both kinds of music: "Country and Eastern"?) even in possibly the earliest interpretation I've found:

Reference to ru.wikipedia.org says the song itself goes back to the late XIX.

Dave
TIL
0

Older Siemens ES64U locomotives had sidelobes in the audio range during initial acceleration ... but someone decided this bug could be a feature, and so they played a distinct do-re-mi.

0

Youtube: not only good for pseudorandomly encountering pop music from other cultures, but also serves as an unusually diverse mirroring medium for linux distros:

0

Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Baron von Münchhausen, invents bootstrapping in the XVIII

1

continuing the retro quotation habit, compare this camera work (starting at 1:26) from 2016's "The Very Best Day":

with a sequence (from 2:10) in 1964's "I'm Cuba":

(we've also seen both this, and another, Gaynor cover earlier)

0

In Soviet Russia...

the (fictional) jailhouse concerts seem to have ...differed... from those in The Land of the Free...

but I'm not quite sure what the US song paired to "Magadan" might be (even if the gulls and Pacific are reminiscent of islands in the SF bay):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvoM7cotb1c

Any suggestions?

0

What a long strange trip it's been...

A 1980's Latvian song contest finalist:

had its tune taken, with the lyrics changed out for a different story, becoming not only a soviet hit when sung by Пугачева, but an evergreeen, even in translation*...

...among which, a persian translation performed (indoors, judging by the liberal amounts of greenscreen) by the Iranian singer Farzaneh ...

... then recently reprised in Tadjikistan by Фарангис: (NSFW if you're in a country where you shouldn't be watching grown women without hats in the office...)

0

Women as protagonists are easy to find in the context of this stream.

In the following scene, Alisa Selezneva impresses her new class by having a conversation with their teacher, Alla Sergeevna, about London:

(TV show based on a sci-fi series started in the mid-1960's)

The solist in the following song from "Hussar Ballad", Shura Azarov/Shurochka Azarova, is pretending to be a male cadet in order to fight the XIX french.

(movie based on the memoirs of a historical tomboy who served in the cavalry, published 1836)

Finally, "Miss Pavlichenko" may have a written biography somewhere, but I learned about her from a recent movie:

(and, it being the XX, she didn't have to pretend to be male)

0

It's interesting to see the great variation in political campaign songs in different countries.

Consider "Make America Great Again"

compared to "Takogo Kak Putin"

True, back when the latter's Army Choir was Red, they also sounded like the former, but they upgraded their sound sometime between this century and last:

Also, if having a good beat and being able to dance to it would be too modern a concept for the former's voting base (or too much glitter would be too soulful for them?), I understand the latter may also have helpful advice concerning more classical productions.

0

a little ditty about driving to the next village over (itself, in material culture, reminiscent of life in pre-war alpine villages, except here the village dances were called "balls", not "discos") which has inspired a few pastiches, including the very professional (it turns out to be excerpts from a feature film) Armenian version:

as well as the amusingly amateur:

(good thing for the US OSHA that it need not bear any responsibility for agricultural safety practices among kids in the neighborhood of Borodino)

0

representative words partitioning UK/US english vowel variation:

bath choice cloth cure dress face fleece foot force goat goose kit lot mouth near north nurse palm price square start strut thought trap

0

«Салам Алейкум» или «Шолом Алэйхем»?

Either way, we're covered, whether we want a clip with the jewish interpretation as set in last century's shtetls:

or we want a clip with the muslim interpretation as performed by this century's university students:

... and as the phrase is a greeting in both cultures, we can even compare it to the —very 1980's— atheist commie music video «Алло»:

0

Is this "Ecstasy" or Ex-Stas-y?

In either case (unless I've horribly misunderstood the plot) the moral from 7:40-9:30 would seem to be "not having any culture may be overlooked, but not having a current passport is simply an own goal"?

Previous Leningrad cards: A, B, C.

0

The Moskva may not have a delta at the Oka, but the russian alphabet does have a «дэ» ... I wonder what was the inspiration for this rather slidey, bluesy tune?

0

The potential problem with the PM: Like all inhabitants of 10 Downing Street, he wants to take his place on the world stage. But people on stages are called actors. All they are required to do is look plausible, stay sober and say the lines they are given in the right order. Those that try to make up their own lines generally do not last long. — Sir Humphrey Appleby, GCB, KBE, MVO, MA (Oxon)

It would appear that Sir Humphrey is somewhat more optimistic than de Maistre.

0

Oleg Gazmanov's video adventure ends much more smoothly than did Herr Rust's: historical adventure but I guess that's an advantage daydreams have over IRL.

0

Я думаю, это Дюма. Ура!

A young Mikhail Boyarski played in the 1970's live action interpetation:

and to this day it seems he's never completely given up the costume:

Thoughts by this user that have been liked by others.

1

Norvig's reboot of Strachey's 1966 checkers program (ab)uses default arguments to map CPL's 1960's era use of let-binding. Now, there are other stupid tricks one can play with binding in python, but my current favorite involves misuse[0] of comprehensions.

With a bit of effort, we even have letrec:

print(min( f(6) 
    for Y0  in [lambda y,f:
                lambda *x: f(y(y,f))(*x)]
    for f   in [Y0(Y0,lambda fac:
                lambda n: 1 if n<2 else
                          n*fac(n-1))]))

Exercise 1: add one line to produce the classic Y

Exercise 2*: modify Y0 to support the classic mutual recursion between even and odd

[0] or not exactly misuse? cf Wadler's Comprehending Monads (p19,infra):

[the existence of the map from the identity to the list monad] explains a trick occasionally used...

Dave
TIL
2

"These twice five figures" with which we count are clearly related to our five fingers[0].

But why five? TIL that it's a few hundred-million-year backward compatibility issue:

Because there are only five distinct Hox-encoded domains across the limb bud there is a developmental constraint prohibiting the evolution of more than five different types of digits.

[0] at least when counting moving objects, such as cattle; bakers, whose objects tend to stay where one left them, use nicer rectangles, and hence prefer dozens to tens.

1

If anyone feels like taking another run at Cleese (a python VM as bare-metal OS*), it might be worth taking advantage of NetBSD rump kernels.

  • in this case, the stupid python trick was loading and running a gcc-compiled C "hello world" program underneath a python supervisor.
1

Dave's Stupid Python Tricks (mark II) Fun: a toy for interpreting GFM Tables per McCarthy 1960:

Fun = lambda s: min( globals().update(eval(com(par(s))))
    for par in [lambda txt: [[f.strip() for f in pline(l.split('|'))]
            for pline in [ lambda xs:
                ((xs[0],'') if len(xs)==1 else
                  xs        if len(xs)==2 else
                  xs[1:3]   if len(xs)==4 else None) ]
            for l in txt.strip().split('\n') ]]
    for com in [lambda xs: compile(xs[0],xs[1:])
            if xs and None not in xs else '[]'
            for nonsep  in [lambda s: any(c not in ' -:' for c in s)]
            for compile in [lambda hdr,bdy:
                '[("{}",(lambda {}:{} None))]'.format(
                    hdr[0], hdr[1], ' '.join(clause(b)
                for b in bdy if nonsep(b[0]+b[1])))
        for clause in [lambda b:
                    '({}) if ({}) else'.format(
                      b[0],   b[1] or 'True')]]])

if __name__ == "__main__":
    Fun('''
        | fact        | n   |
        |------------:|:----|
        | 1           | n<2 |
        | n*fact(n-1) |     |
    ''')
    print(fact(5))

    Fun('''
        gcd        | x,y
        ----------:|:---
        gcd(x-y,y) | y<x
        gcd(x,y-x) | x<y
        x          |
    ''')
    print(gcd(10,2014))
1

$$ \forall x \in X, x \leq Zeppelin \odot\kappa $$

Dave
TIL
1

The chance that an arbitrary permutation doesn't have any fixed points tends to 1/e.

(is this any relation to the 1/e that shows up in optimal stopping heuristics?)

1

In the XIX, FMACs were done with springs (and clocked via handcrank):

2

From when "spaghetti code" was meant literally: how adders could multiply (w/out logs):

Boyell, "Programmed Multiplication on the IBM 407" (1957)

1

Cayley not only introduced the term "tree" (in the CS sense) to the english language in 1857, he did so as a computer scientist:

  • his motivation was abstract parses of concrete syntax
  • his investigation distinguishes between commutative and associative operations, and
  • his trees have their roots at the top, and their branches opening downwards!

1

Programming Language Theory papers, insofar as they tend to consist of a Grammar (to produce the terms), a Logic (to produce the typing), and some Rhetoric (to explain the previous two), are highly trivial (in the medieval sense of the trivium)

Dave
TIL
1

The sequence:

0 → algebra scenes → hollywood movies → profit → 0

fails to be exact at small values of "profitable":

It's My Turn (1980) Snake Lemma

1

I agree that isolation is most important but exercise helps when learning new material. My wife suggested the increased oxygen uptake might have something to do with it; I'm guessing it's more (as in recitation or a lecture) that the exercise demands enough attention that one must concentrate somewhat to actively go over the material, but not so much attention that one's mind can't wander and find new connections.

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Believers in Conway's Law would say that spending time at other groups' water coolers may not have tangible immediate payoff; but it may well enlarge the feasible design space.

On a somewhat related point:

Excerpts from How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet

Figure 1: The OGAS Project was developed by scientists in 1960s Kiev that also formed a group that pretended to be an independent country called “Cybertonia”: on the left of this passport is a map of its capital city, Cybergrad. On the right is their mascot and supreme leader: a saxophone-playing robot.

Chapter 5 chronicles the slow undoing of the OGAS between 1970 and 1989. Neither formally approved nor fully rejected, the OGAS Project found itself ... stalemated in a morass of bureaucratic barriers, mutinous ministries, and institutional infighting among a state that imagined itself as centralized but under civilian administration proved to be anything but. ... This chapter frames how hidden social networks unraveled computer networks.

(emphasis added)

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Today anglophones will say "it's greek to me" to indicate something is incomprehensible.

Back in the days when people studied greek, they might have been able to make the same statement, but indicate "this might appear incomprehensible at first glance, but if we concentrate a bit, we can likely puzzle it out..."

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in the hopes this stream may someday extend beyond this τρίπους...

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if speaking in terms of Principal Ideals is inconsistent, we could always press the cosmological background-cone into service.

Consider the interval between, eg cosmology, and any other concept: we can classify these intervals according to the following schema:

  • consequential: one background cone contains the other.

  • inconsequential: the background cones fail to intersect, or do so only partially.

  • tangential: one concept occurs on the boundary of the other's background cone.

I hope a trichotomous classification of intervals is consequential with regard to cosmology? :-)

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skater 9chka

from comrades in leg warmers to comrades on decks? (1986 above, 1984 [including ollying comrades] below)

and, yeah, so far it looks like the early 80's were pretty much sk8er boi's, but (as with anything else soviet?) we also find the skater grrls of this card's title: (that last competition was in Saratov, which, judging by some bibliographies I've read, was known not only for its skaters, but also for its computer geeks)

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Скейтбордисты remix

featuring video of Odessan comrades on decks remixed to the mid-80's sounds of Victor Tsoi's Kino.

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continuing the retro quotation habit, compare this camera work (starting at 1:26) from 2016's "The Very Best Day":

with a sequence (from 2:10) in 1964's "I'm Cuba":

(we've also seen both this, and another, Gaynor cover earlier)

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A late soviet boy band:

On its own not so remarkable, but my band played Misirlou (Μισιρλού) regularly, so it was cool to see Shatunov's friend (first appears at 1:48) wearing a Dick Dale & The Del Tones t-shirt.

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The 80's cartoon "Mother for a little mammoth" (~8 min) is deeper than it first appears: not only were the ancestors of Mammuthus primigenius to be found in eastern Africa (Mammuthus subplanifrons), but there's a very similar relation (both geographic and familial) between Australopithecus afarensis and Homo sapiens.

... also, despite being equally unsure of what Cheburashka may be, I'd still offer a paw were we to cross in the street!

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cognates/когнаты

Some cognates in the super video "Top" are obvious in the printed lyrics; for others you'll have to listen.

Sing it, сестра; Пой, bro.

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Vorobiev keeps on cranking them out. Not only is this another frame-story clip, but Chekhov's rifle is lampshaded.