Every child should have a dog. It gives them valuable life lessons about responsibility, fidelity, unconditional love and to always turn around three times before you lie down.
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litoE commented on The emergence and diversification of dog morphology science.org/doi/10.1126/s... · Posted by u/Marshferm
The whole thing does not make sense to me because the grammars are so different. In English you say "Mary's house". In French it's "La maison de Marie."
Did the wine have anything to do with him falling into the ravine in the first place?
litoE commented on Iran's president calls for new capital to replace Tehran ft.com/content/74854fde-9... · Posted by u/arthurofbabylon
I’m curious if any of these centrally planned capital city relocations have succeeded. Brasilia, for example, is widely considered a terrible city. Are there successful examples?
Washington D.C.
litoE commented on Avoid 2:00 and 3:00 am cron jobs (2013) endpointdev.com/blog/2013... · Posted by u/pera
I run a cronjob at 2:30AM every day that uses dirvish (a perl wrapper around rsync) to perform backups of several computers. In the fall, at 2AM the clock is rolled back to 1AM. The cronjob runs at 2:30AM, which is 25 hours after the previous day's run. That's not a problem.
However, in the spring, at 2AM the clock jumps to 3AM. Vixie cron seems to be smart enough to run all the cron jobs that were scheduled between 2M and 3AM at that point. However, dirvish is started but exits without running the backups! After some troubleshooting I concluded that dirvish does not make the backups because the previous day's run happened less that 24 hours ago (because that day was shortened by the change to DST) so it sees no need to run a backup yet. This problem would persist even if I moved the cronjob to a different time because it has to do with the day having only 23 hours. I solved this by adding a second entry to the crontab that runs at 3:45AM only on the 2nd Sunday in March.
litoE commented on The Rise and Fall of the Powdered Wig (2020) battlefields.org/learn/he... · Posted by u/andsoitis
> In 1700, 800 shillings was approximately £40.
Since there were 20 shillings to a pound, 800 shillings were exactly £40. </nitpicking>
litoE commented on Chile's plunging birth rate may foreshadow future in U.S. text.npr.org/nx-s1-547603... · Posted by u/mooreds
Someone once said that the best contraceptive seems to be a dollar bill: the more of those people have, the fewer babies they have.
I can so relate to this. I just had cataract surgery (both eyes) back in August. Amazing. The procedure took about 20 minutes, was totally pain free (thanks to anesthesia), and my vision is markedly improved. And even more important than the point that I can see better now, is that I just plain feel better and to a degree that's hard to put into words.
It turns out, apparently, that when you are dealing with constant severe levels of eye strain and eye fatigue as a result of cataracts, that feeling somehow permeates throughout your whole body and leaves you feeling like dogshit. At least that's the way it was for me. Within, say, 10 hours of my surgery, I felt better than I'd felt in probably a year.
Now, are things perfect? No... I do have some (expected) side effects based on the lens replacement I chose (panoptix). Specifically I see rings around bright lights, especially at night. And reading text on a computer screen is a bit annoying since I sometimes see a bit of a halo or glow effect around fonts, especially with my preferred "green on black" terminal configuration. But I can live with that, and the only other side effects so far are the occasional day when one or both eyes seem a bit more light sensitive than normal. I understand that will fade over time. On balance though, for how much better I feel now, and for being able to read without glasses, it's totally worth it.
I had cataract surgery about one year ago. Prior to surgery I needed glasses for longer distances (e.g. driving) but not for near objects like the computer screen or newspapers. I was not a candidate for the panoptix lenses for reasons not related to cataracts. Post surgery I have 20/20 vision for distance so no glasses. But for the computer screen I now need 1 diopter glasses and for newspapers or books I need 2.5 diopters, so two pairs of cheap drugstore glasses. This is livable, except when I have to work with a piece of paper and the computer at the same time. Switching glasses back and forth is a PITA. I got a set of bifocals but can't seem to get used to them. Sometimes I'll even scan the sheets of paper so I can also display them up on the screen.
One problem with a slide rule is that it only performs operations on normalized mantissas. You have to keep a parallel exponent calculation in your head, and that slows you down. Also, maintaining best precision slows you down.
For multiplication, the DLDP in the result is:
- the sum of the DLDPs of the multiplicands MINUS 1 if the multiplication is done with the slide sticking out to the right of the ruler's body (for example 2.0 x 3.0 = 6.0).
- the sum of the DLDPs of the multiplicands if the multiplication is done with the slide sticking out to the left of the ruler's body (for example 5.0 x 4.0 = 20.0).
There's a similar rule for division, but that's left as an exercise for the student.