The system used for small numbers is probably a broad extension of an earlier dual number for nouns, i.e. something like a plural but just for two things. For (some) male nouns, the nominative dual ending was the same as the genitive singular, which was then extended to all other nouns even when this correspondence didn't hold, and from just 2 things to 3 and 4 as well. Nowadays the dual has been completely forgotten for nouns, and the only interpretation of the rule is that it's a genitive singular.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingvaeonic_nasal_spirant_law

I understand the argument for having an early sunset, clearly having sunlight when you're awake has an effect. But who cares about having an early high noon, when there's still two thirds of the day left at best?

To recover the fact that 365 % 7 == 1 from the given formula, one can notice that the sum of the coefficients 5+4+6=15, which modulo 7 is 1.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46951794

Points: 15

# Comments: 0

* Yeah, I read the article. Regardless of the IEC's noble attempt, in all my years of working with people and computers I've never heard anyone actually pronounce MiB (or write it out in full) as "mebibyte".

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46854386

Points: 91

# Comments: 16

Imagine you're standing on a randomly chosen vertex on the ring which is not right next to the starting position. At some point, the ladybug will be guaranteed to appear either to the left of you or to the right of you for the first time, and this cannot happen as the second-to-last step, because then the ladybug would have had to have visited both of your neighbors. At this point, for your vertex to be the one last visited, the ladybug would have to turn around and loop all the way around the circle to your other neighbor. But this means the previous trajectory of the ladybug and which vertices were visited before is irrelevant, as the ladybug will have to pass by them anyway. By symmetry, this situation is completely equivalent to being at the very start of the process on one of the vertices neighboring the starting position. Hence any randomly chosen vertex not next to the starting position has to have the same probability of being visited last as those two vertices. Hence all vertices have to have to same probability of being visited last.

In the general case of n intermediate occasional liars, the odds of the final result being accurate goes to 50% as n grows large, which makes sense, as it will have no correlation anymore to the initial input.

The kernel has a different error message: "No working init found. Try passing init= option to kernel."[2]

1: https://github.com/archlinux/mkinitcpio/blob/2dc9e12814aafcc... 2: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d358e5254674b70f34c84...

A flyby of both Jupiter and Saturn can be done every two decades or so (the synodic period is 19.6 years)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program

Perhaps the route being so busy is the cause of the connectivity issues, but it's still baffling to me how bad it is, given that the amount of mobile devices trying to connect must be very predictable.

Plugging 12 years and 18e9 solar masses gives about 2e12 kilometers, or roughly a fifth of a lightyear. This also means the smaller black hole is zipping around the bigger one at around 6% of the speed of light, which is low enough that the Newtonian approximation is probably reasonable accurate (at least to give a rough idea of how large the distances must be).

Though I have to admit, when I was still in academia, whenever I saw a beautiful figure or formatting in a preprint, I'd often try to take some inspiration from the source for my own work, occasionally learning a new neat trick or package.

1: https://info.arxiv.org/help/faq/whytex.html