palordrolap

Or any of the churches that have kept Christmas where the Julian calendar had it, which is generally some time in January.

I about gave myself an aneurysm deliberately and pedantically (and dare I say, facetiously) trying to parse this as written (lack of punctuation) rather than as intended.

Any such pain is well deserved, of course, but still.

Best guess, something owns or has some oversight of an entire group of human (or at least sentient) control tests (or control testers) that are identified by the letter ‘a’.

There is no conclusive evidence that its b control test people are better than its a control test people.

Within reason.

You could try your luck and see how much you can get away with before someone notices, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Nah, they’ll just make life more difficult for any employees who take bathroom breaks, if not find some “clearly unrelated” excuse to outright fire them.

That’ll be a problem for that one system that’s at right angles to the plane of the galaxy, but I suppose it could work otherwise.

I can also envisage situations where systems that are close to being at right angles to the galactic plane have the different star-planet lines cross the galactic polar line at opposite sides of the star due to slight variances in relative orbital plane. None of our planets are exactly aligned that way, for example.

Perhaps that’s not a concern though.

Not all planets pass directly between their star and the centre of the galaxy. The plane of our own solar system isn’t lined up with the plane of the galaxy, for example. If the Sun were attached to Sagittarius A* by a thin cotton thread, I’m pretty sure none of the planets would hit it.

We’d perhaps have to define it as the centre of the planet crossing the unique plane that both passes through the star and the centre of the galaxy and is perpendicular to the planet’s orbit relative to the star. And for some planets in some systems that would still be hard to calculate on account of an extremely oblique crossing angle.

And even then there might be severe problems with that for systems closer to the galactic core that are stable, but otherwise weirdly affected by nearby gravitational effects.

Also, what about planets that are far enough out to orbit two stars? Do we switch to barycentres and which do we use?

And what about moon dwellers or binary planetary systems? Pluto and Charon orbit a point that is outside both. There are further complications there.

WHY IN GODS NAME ARE YOU LEAF-BLOWING AT 8AM ON A SATURDAY

These people are usually the sorts who rise at 5am regardless of day and have become bored after 3 hours awake. If they think about it at all, they believe that everyone who is not yet up by 8am is a fool who ought to be out of bed, thus that is the perfect time to make noise.

As to why they rise at 5am, take your pick from: i) Old and unable to sleep for long periods - Will be asleep again in an armchair by 11am once they’ve gone back inside; ii) Military bearing or wannabe - Probably has reveille.wav for an alarm; iii) Abject a-hole who gets a kick out of it. Honourable mention: iv) someone with no choice under direction from one of the above.

https://www.paralympic.org/athletics/classification for para-athletes on their own.

As for the all-inclusive idea, I forget where I came across it. Maybe it was a Reddit comment back when I still went there. All I know is that it hadn’t occurred to me as an idea and seemed like an idea that better qualified people would be able to flesh out. Or provide reasons it wouldn’t work.

But should $Age return the same value as $age if used in its place by mistake?

Someone sharper than I am came up with the suggestion of categorising people in a similar way to how it’s done by disability in the Paralympics. As to what those categories should be and whether it’s practical, let alone possible is another thing entirely.

Basically turn the “categorisation by disability” on its head and make it “categorisation by ability”.

Thought experiment: Would you expect a programming language variable name to be case insensitive?

That is, if you set foo = 1 and then print FOO, what should happen? Most programming languages throw an error.

Is this even comparable with filenames, which are, after all, basically variable names that hold large quantities of data?

If there is a difference, is it the fact it’s a file, or - for a mad idea - should files with only a few bytes of data retain case insensitivity? And if that idea is followed through, where’s the cutoff? 256 bytes? 7?

(Anyway, Windows filenames are case sensitive, in a sense. If you save “Letter to Grandma.txt” it will retain those two capital letters and all the lower case letters exactly as they are. It won’t suddenly change to “LETTER to Grandma.txt”, despite the fact that if you try to open a file by that name, you’ll get the same file.)

Time for a law to be passed that kills off this bad idea permanently.

With governments (of all alignments) in the pockets of, or otherwise under the influence of, the very large corporations whose advertising would stand to benefit from this, I have only the following to say: Good luck with that.

There’s no proof the universe will end in a Big Crunch. Apparently there’s some measure of the universe where if it’s less than 1, we’ll get a Big Crunch, and if it’s greater than 1, we’ll get a Big Rip where everything just falls apart. I may have those backwards, but the important thing is when it’s exactly 1, it implies a universe that continues forever, getting colder and colder. And as best as science can determine for our universe, the value is precisely that.

But here’s another, well, dimension to that: There’s a popular but unprovable conjecture that our universe is the inside of a black hole that exists in a higher-level universe. In our universe, black holes boil away due to Hawking radiation, a process that can take trillions of years for very large black holes.

Once the black hole we’re inside of stops consuming matter in the level above, that spells a very slow but alternative end to our universe. One day it will simply cease to exist.

“This the way the world ends: Not with a bang, but a whimper.” – T.S.Eliot.

Not completely mysterious, but still largely so. The usual zodiacal constellations are listed, and the names therein have allegedly been decoded as resembling a Turkic language.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t a hoax, only that someone with knowledge of a Turkic language helped create those pages in particular.

As I used to say to customers of the ISPs I worked for, Internet e-mail was not designed to be instant, and it’s largely good fortune that it works fast enough most of the time.

It would be closer to IM if everyone in the conversation was on the same mail server, which is what often happens within a large organisation, but even then there are overheads that expect there to be a sending and receiving server if not a lot of other things along the way. And as soon as someone outside that organisation needs to be included, their mail system could introduce a bottleneck even if there’s no bottleneck at the sender’s side.

Instant messaging tends to be far more streamlined and centralised precisely so it can be quick.

You can try asking a process to round up its dead children, but unlike the quit signals, the number varies by platform. For most Linux users it’s -17, but using the text version -CHLD is probably a better choice (unless you’re on a really old system that absolutely has to have a number, in which case check the local documentation.)

If it’s a well-behaved process, that can do away with the need to kill it. In other cases, there might be some kind of restart mechanism built in that can be called instead - assuming sending it a SIGCHLD doesn’t trigger that behaviour anyway.

Case in point, the Cinnamon DE has at least a couple of ways to restart it, and at least one of those gets rid of its zombie child processes. It’s fairly rare that I need to do that, and I haven’t tried sending it a -17. I might do at some point.

Assuming 1) you want things to be colder, 2) your budget can accommodate a bit of extra electricity usage and 3) the following actually exists on your appliance, many freezers have a dial somewhere that can be used to set the temperature.

Sometimes it’s coupled to the setting for an attached refrigerator section. Sometimes, yes, it’s an unchangeable setting whether there are other settings elsewhere or not. Might still be worth double-checking.

I think I’ve seen a couple of their videos, and have no idea which of them Adam would be (can’t even call any faces to mind right now to be fair), so I’m pretty sure those phrases are in my head from elsewhere.

The “Please stop” is pretty generic, but got a lot of traction that time Hyperbole and a Half told a story involving it. “Hey! Quit it!” is probably Lisa or Bart from some episode of The Simpsons. “Stop it! NOW!” is probably something that was actually said to me at some point as a kid.

Never got shot though, so I must have started behaving at that point.

(For legal reasons, that last part is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. I am also using “for legal reasons” mostly humorously. Mostly.)

Linux has at least four levels of decreasing pleasantry: -1, -2, -15, and -9, aka HangUP, INTerrupt, TERMinate and KILL or “Please stop”, “Hey! Quit it!”, “Stop it! NOW!” and *loud gunshot*.

Sometimes processes will clean up after themselves and leave when asked nicely. Or sternly told off. Of course, if you don’t need or want that, load up your, uh, -9 shooter.

Given that magic eye pictures are basically a certain convolution of a repetitive source image (or random noise) and a depth map, it ought to be possible for an AI, if not a standard procedural algorithm, to at least attempt to “factor out” the source and map from the result image.

Whether that even counts as seeing and whether this guy’s neural network could do this, or maybe “see” in some other way is open to question. But I’m guessing it’s a no.