xkcd

Apeiron

PROTIP: There is no “external world”. What your brain observes (the signals coming from your highly distorting, filtering and biasing senses), is reality to it. Yeah, this is why i mostly gave up on Solipsism (it's not useful or testable). Reality is what does not go away when you stop believing it...

Apeiron

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, or the hostage gets it! Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time with more firepower. Henry Ford A good conscience is a continual pain in the ass. Benjamin Franklin A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows who let the dogs ...

Apeiron

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/world_according_to_americans.png Alt text: It's not our fault we caught a group on their way home from a geography bee. And they taught us that Uzbekistan is one of the world's two doubly-landlocked countries! Maybe it's just me, but am I missing something here? I see a ...

Apeiron

The plural of dwarf is dwarves. The plural of forum is fora.

Apeiron

Fractal you say? Maybe because that is what it is called. http://www.stonybrook.edu/philosophy/fractal/2Tic.html Hah, brilliant, only that that version is a lot worse, because it doesn't have squiggly, poorly drawn lines (who needs rulers?) and is far less prone to mistakes! After all, THAT is what...

Apeiron

I never quite understood why someone would have a preference in gender of the singer. It might not be preference, so must as tendency. i don't seek female vox, but they tend to appeal to me more often and more than male voices. Then there are people who think that the music they like says something...

Apeiron

Male, prefer female. i prefer their voices and i'd rather Madonna tell me i make her feel like a virgin than David Gahan saying he feels me. But it's mostly the voices. Would i rather wear a shirt made of fine cotton or burlap? Would i rather drink fine wine or mud with rocks in it? That's generally...

Apeiron

Fucking magnates. How do they work?

Apeiron

I hate that stupid elitism; and that's considering that I belong to that area . I am a computer programmer, I know "a minimum of two programming languages", and I feel sorry for the computer "illiterate". They need someone to tell them "have you tried turning off Caps Lock?...

Apeiron

Did anyone else catch the MC Hawking reference in last week's Simpsons? i squeeled with geekish delight... confusing my poor wife. Stephen's contribution to to gangsta rap is almost as great as to physics.

Apeiron

Throw in some car alarms or sirens for added infuriation.

Apeiron

echoechoecho wrote:I signed up to this forum to make this very important observation.

Is that pizza guy holding the pizza SIDEWAYS?!

This.

If my pizza guy did that he'd get no tip and nasty call to his boss.

Apeiron

Those of you making a distinction between "atheist" and "agnostic" do realize that they are not mutually exclusive, right? Theism/Atheism simply refer to theistic BELIEF, while Gnosticism/Agnosticism refer to whether or not you feel you have KNOWLEDGE of something. Theist simply...

Apeiron

A quick bit of algebra shows that this will work for any two numbers where: \begin{eqnarray*}a \times b & = & a \times \sqrt{b^2} \\ & = & a \sqrt{b^2}\\ & = & \frac{b^2}{a} \\ \therefore a^2 & = & b \end{eqnarray*} It's not all that exciting; try it with 2 and 4, or...

Apeiron

Slightly simpler -- I'd like to build an Omegle variant where you can only communicate using colored geometric shapes. Would communication conventions arise? As long as it can't become chat roulette! *shudder* Hmm. That could work if the players some reason to cooperate (or compete). My idea of a 3...

Apeiron

Imagine a game where the only way to communicate with other players is through some highly abstract system that is not provided to the users; they must invent it. Perhaps the avatars have speech bubbles over their heads that show basic geometric shapes in various colors (or shades of gray or fill pa...

Apeiron

I apologize for being boring, but: There also will be bills or coins- it will be useful for some transactions to occur without access to the internet or for people to buy cocaine, child porn, or AK-47s. Trustworthy institutions will be able to sell notes that say "on presentation of this note ...

Apeiron

Apeiron, clear something up for me. Why do we need unique pieces of information to serve as a currency? As long as we've got a solution to the authentication problems, and all the information is stored (only!) on a central computer, anyway, why not just have, instead, a table of all the parties who...

Apeiron

interesting idea. as Vaniver poins out, inflation could be an issue but it seems to me that this currency is specially designed to allow government intervention in a local economy, presumably during a downturn. if the credits could be removed from circulation when things started to swing up, it cou...

Apeiron

* What is the likelihood of any timestamps producing the same CRC32? Quite high; about 1 in 77000. (that is, after about 77000 timestamps, there is about a 50% chance that two of them have the same CRC32 (assuming CRC32 uniformly distributes its results)). Crap. Any ideas on a fix? The example time...

Apeiron

Caveats: 1) iANa Economist, just someone fascinated by currency/money and computers 2) i reply only to helpful posts 3) It's a sketch, not a bill before Congress or the UN. Don't take it seriously and please forgive me if i ramble. Here goes: The idea is a global virtual currency that could be used ...

Apeiron

i like the idea of the sticker price being the actual price. When i mentioned that in a Slashdot thread some guy went off the handle talking about how various levels of gov't could use that to hide tax increases. When i lived around the US military community in Germany the AAFES stores rounded price...

Apeiron

i got married on this year's Pi Day at 1:59pm. If this is true, you are the coolest guy that has ever cooled. I repeat. Coolest. guy. i'll see if i can scan and post the wedding invites. We used my aunt's cell phone to determine when i would walk up to the platform and when my sister would start si...

Apeiron

Wow! What a lively discussion. Thanks for the input. i'll look in to the ternary thing in a bit. i found that 1, 2 and 5 work very well, as does 1, 3, and 5. But 3 is prolly less useful because doing math with 2 is much easier. In the US, i'd like to see the abolishment of the penny, then round all ...

Apeiron · Re: Happy Pi Day! i got married on this year's Pi Day at 1:59pm.

i got married on this year's Pi Day at 1:59pm.

Apeiron

Is there any sort of ideal set of currency denominations?

If you were making currency denominations, how would you do it and why?

This is in relation to my general interest in money/currency and to setting details for D&D.

Thanks!

Apeiron

i like this as a thought experiment. i'd like to see how far you can push it. Do you have a site for this? You'll hit a wall, i think, when you run out of one syllable permutations. It might also have the same issues as Ro . i suggest placing the letters that change closer to the front. Where they w...

Apeiron

Got is one of the worst words in English. It's a catch all verb that's eroding our vocabulary.

Apeiron

I am almost 100% certain that all characters used in SAMPA represent distinct sounds. No, not all of them . There are several sounds represented by pairs of characters, though I don't think any of them are used in English. So if you are just focusing on English, I'm not sure why you'd prefer someth...

Apeiron

Ones - My girlfriend does this several times a day. Ones? Plural one? WtF? If there's more than one, it wouldn't be ONE. If it is one, it can't be plural. The case where one can be plural is if one is the name of the items in question. A dollar bill is a one, if you have five of them, you have 5 one...

Apeiron

In the language i'm building, punctuation is at the beginning. In English, punctuation goes at the end. If you're using emoticons in English, they go at the end and after the real punctuation.

Apeiron

Get off of the horse. Get off the horse. The "of" is redundant and carries no meaning. It's a tick... a bad habit that people keep doing without thinking. The prevalence and duration of the mistake are irrelevant. Wrong is still wrong 1000 years later and if it achieves 100% saturation. If...

Apeiron

Bad guys captured you and are going to make you play Russian Roulette. They spin the 6 round cylinder, and pull. *Click*. They give you a choice... to spin again, or pull without spinning again. If you live, they'll let you go. If you lose, well....

1) Spin, then pull
2) Pull now

Apeiron

You already posted that same link in this same thread. Either participate in actual discussion, or don't spam your website here.

Apeiron

Since IPA can be hard to type and display for a lot of people, I would recommend X-SAMPA , an ASCII adaptation of IPA. i've made my own system i call 'I Can't Believe It's Not SAMPA' . IPA is untypeable, SAMPA uses multiple characters for single sounds, so i use this creation of mine. It's usefulne...

Apeiron

Gramma Nazi is french for "You pointed out my mistake and that hurts my feewings, so I'm going to call you names and be dismissive.".

Apeiron

Apeiron's Commandments of Child Naming

Enjoy.

Apeiron

Token wrote:What about the case for not using such notation at all?

It's not on topic of using consistent notation, but i'll bite, what about it? What is the case for not using such notation? How should we compress all those zeros and have it still be user friendly? Exponents?

Apeiron

Here goes: K as in kilo should be capitalized because it's a multiple of the unit in the same way that M is mega and m is milli. Hecto could go to H, deca goes to D, disambiguating it with deci. Multiples will all be caps, fractions will all be lower case. Simple and consistent, no arbitrary "i...

Apeiron

Changeante (sounds like shonjzwa)

It's in the lyrics Stereolab's Lo Boob Oscillator (that's the song title [not kidding]). The way Laetitia says it... it sounds like the most beautiful thing in the world.

/my first post here

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