insidecolinshead

Since when did ð look like an o with a rangiferine diacritic rather than a curly d with a cross through it?

When I play a racquet sport, I’m no longer in the Cartesian theatre, I’m peering into some telescope affording views over the Forth, or a What the Butler Saw machine. It is very odd, and not at all what I’m used to.

There’s something very unidiomatic about “subtle atheist”, but I can’t tell you what it is.

I always thought it was a disgrace that aviation fuel was untaxed. But, whereas the UK administration can always at least in principle cut forecourt taxes to try to stave off the inevitable shift of people out of their mobile death aquaria, they have no such leeway with aircraft.

I don’t expect predictive text algorithms to use context, there’s not enough room in the typical mobile phone for that, but they could use counts, and if so, what corpus did they get their numbers from?

German T9 doesn’t have Spargel in its lexicon. At this time of year, why would you send a text message about anything else?

Would you eat anything that had been prepared by Edward Teller?

What seems a bit more likely than the story I relayed in the last post, given what I’ve heard recently about the historical conditions when computers were replaced with computing machinery, is that A. Rosenbluth and M. Teller did indeed cook the dinner and then went on to contribute in the normal authorial way to writing the algorithm.

I distinctly remember being told, as an undergraduate, that the female authors on the Metropolis algorithm paper¹ were credited purely on the basis of their having cooked the dinner that led to the algorithm. The Wikipedia entry perhaps surprisingly at no stage in its editing history mentions this story. In fact it doesn’t mention the female authors at all, though this isn’t surprising, given that it’s Wikipedia.

1 N. Metropolis, A. W. Rosenbluth, M. N. Rosenbluth, A. H. Teller and E. Teller, J. Chem. Phys., 1953, 21, 1087, doi:10.1063/1.1699114.

Wirbeltier sein is not intrinsically as much fun as it sounds.

One of the browsers I use has a menu option that says Exit Opera. This sounds lot more final and melodramatic than it really is.

Sows, having large litters, have tiny teats.
Is this why we don’t milk them?