On the other hand, I've been angered by dog owners when running who just take up the entire pavement. A couple of weeks ago, I had one guy coming towards me force me to come to a complete stop when I was running flat out, because he couldn't be bothered to control his dogs. He was in the centre of the pavement, and the 2 dogs were at the extreme edges with tight enough leads between him and the dogs, so it'd have tripped me up if I'd tried to jump them. He knew full well I was heading that way, but in the 10 seconds since we had made eye contact, he was clearly determined not to reign his dogs in, and it was only when I was stopped and so he had to reign them in to continuing walking past that I was able to keep using the pavement.

Apparently 13.6GB is in use (out of 64GB), and of that 4.7GB is Chrome. Yeah, I'm glad I'm not running this on an 8GB machine!

That's a good point. Good quality food like meat might be much harder to obtain, you'd need weapons and maybe organised into a group to catch anything large, but the flip side is that subsisting on fruit and berries is much easier when there's literally nothing to stop you gathering and eating what you want.

In a sense, simple existence is easier when you don't have to worry about money, or who owns what land, assuming of course that you're fit enough and able to spend a lot of time gathering food.

Is the argument that the tribe of humans from Africa was good at repelling outside invaders, but themselves expanded outwards and assimilated (and then outnumbered) the other populations, or something else?

It just seems a bit bizarre given that all humans elsewhere have relatively similar amounts (but quite a low amount) of Neanderthal DNA, which seems to suggest a reasonable amount of migration, interaction and interbreeding between populations everywhere except Africa.

I think this graph is a great illustration about how anonymising data is hard. It's very easy to isolate individual authors from this list, because there are clear diagonal lines because the year and age are increasing in lockstep. This also suggests there aren't actually that many authors in this collection, because of these strong diagonals everywhere.

There's probably also some erroneous data here with a bunch of points representing material written by people at age 34 between about 1920 and 1940 (an obvious horizontal line) when most of the rest of the graph doesn't show any strong horizontal bias for a specific age.

One would hope that even the billionaires would feel a little squeamish cutting up a mini-me replica of themselves just to replace body parts.

Presumably they'd also have to be incredibly narcissistic to consider themselves worth more than a younger clone of themselves.

Also, about half of these fonts look utterly unsuitable for coding to me. Nobody really needs serifs and loopy l's in a coding font, surely?

I agree with the assertion that this was a video game because it was using a raster-based CRT for the display, even though the primary purpose of that display was for data storage not display.

I remember back in the 80s writing a CGA text-mode game (they were quite in vogue at the time), and (as I assume most programmers did) I used the video memory directly as the source of truth about the current state of the level.

OP's distinction about video being a raster-based signal that you feed into a regular TV-like device, rather than being vector based or hard wired lights seems sensible. As to how that video signal is generated is kind of irrelevant.

Assuming the article is correct and the hardware can do 7680x4320 @60, which requires 8GB/s memory bandwidth, in theory it should be able to do the same to read the same memory and interleave every other line for the down-sampling. However, it's possible that the new memory controller can't support 2 simultaneous burst streams (because the 2 lines are 30KB apart in memory), or if it's doing a single burst and buffering the first line until the second line is available, then maybe the cache is smaller than 30KB.

Another possibility is that previously the scale averaged pairs of pixel horizontally and cached them until the next line was available to average with that, and for some reason it was changed to average all 4 at the same time and so the cache isn't sufficient (although it'd be weird as 25.25KB is a fairly weird size to limit the cache to)

Alternatively, looking at clock rates needed for the sampler, 3360x1890 @60 is 381MHz, 3840x2160 @60 is 497MHz. It's quite possible that they've lowered the base clock on some hardware and not considered that it'd impact the maximum effect on the scaler.

But whatever IMHO, it's unlikely to be a software bug with an easy fix.

Thinking more about the hours, I like the circle progressing round, but also maybe you could do it as a box with 1-4 sides present enclosing a polygon of 0-5 points. It's easy to mentally convert that to both 12 and 24 hour clock format.

For the minutes, I'd be tempted to do something like the current hours, done as a fraction of the circle arc with an additional polygon of 0-5 points for the minute. It's relatively easy to eyeball the size of the 5 minute segment, and the polygon just refines that a bit. You could locate the polygon so it touches the arc at the 1/12 of the circle corresponding to the base, which would help with estimating the arc length too.

Either way, I wouldn't make the encoding rely on colours, especially colours that look very similar.

I don't think empty for 0 necessarily makes the best sense. You wouldn't easily be able to see where the gaps are at a distance.

Using base 60 and encoding digits doesn't necessarily make the most sense.

For instance hours, it might make sense to use 2x times base 5, probably with no 0 encoded so that there's always something in the hours column.

Or, of course you could do an encoding with a base 4 and a base 6, which is mentally easy to convert back to to a regular 24 hour clock. TBH I'd probably encode that as maybe a square where there's 1-4 sides enclosing a polygon of 0-5 points.

Maybe I'd encode half-minutes with 3 base 5 encodings and some encodings unused, or a base 3, base 4 and a base 5 encoding for minutes.

I would probably also then group them into functional groups that touch each other within the group, so you can easily see the groups, but tell them apart easily.

It surprises me that the compiler doesn't still take the inference from the assert and just disable emitting the code to perform the check. Over the last 15 years I've worked on many codebases that are written with unnecessary asserts, partly as documentation, but maybe because people assumed it helped the compiler.

I've also worked on many codebases (and written code like this on my own projects) where the code looks like: assert(condition); if (condition) { ... } because I still want that safety check in release builds, and want the exception in debug builds but absolutely not ever in release builds.

Other 19th-century experiments were purported to show that frogs did not attempt to escape gradually heated water. An 1872 experiment by Heinzmann was said to show that a normal frog would not attempt to escape if the water was heated slowly enough, which was corroborated in 1875 by German scientist Carl Fratscher.

I don't see the point of the experiment with the brain removed, but given that they did the experiment with intact frogs as well confirms their original hypothesis.

However, later on in the article, it's been disputed in recent years: as the water is heated by about 2 °F (about 1 °C), per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if it can. Earlier it also says that frogs put into already water just die (not mentioned, but presumably from shock) and so don't have a chance to start attempting to jump out. I imagine humans dumped into boiling water would have a similar response.

Mind you, in the UK, defined benefits pension schemes are very rare nowadays, but where they exist they are defined as a percentage of the final year salary with that company, so the highest 2 year thing seems a bit weird to me but for a different reason.

Obviously, if you feel that your whole life you're being bullied, then it's definitely right to be empowered someway to get someone to stop bullying you that way.

But we seem to have gone way beyond stopping body shaming and to promoting body positivity, which I think is dangerous. We shouldn't be teaching kids that it's OK to be fat and that's just a personal choice and not to change.

The simple fact is that being overweight leads to a lot of health issues. I'm fortunate that my body still tolerates being able to run, but at my BMI that's by no means a guarantee long term. I know that realistically, I need to drop 1/3 of my body weight ASAP and keep it off, or the chances of me living another 20 years is actually quite low.

I know exactly the issues with weight loss and how hard it is. At least 3 times in my life, I've lost 25% of my body weight through dieting, but it's always a constant struggle to keep that off if I ease off even a little bit. Most of the times I've regressed, it's been a combination of factors - an injury so I can't go out running for a few months, maybe winter so it's cold and wet and I'm also avoiding my daily lunchtime walk, and maybe my work is really boring so I'm comfort eating a bit more than I need each day, and suddenly before you even realise it, all the weight has suddenly re-appeared, and each time it's harder than the last to get rid of it and keep it off for good.

But definitely, we want a bit of that stigma to remain. Knowing that I'm fat and that most girls don't even look twice at me, or knowing that the health risks are very real and every day I stay fat, it's doing even more damage to my body... it all sucks in the moment, but it's all helping the motivation that something needs to change. It's not OK to just do nothing.

If you run an asterisk server on your own box, you could easily set up a private SIP network just for you and your kids, or your kids and their friends, etc. and either run a SIP client on your mobile for your use and a VOIP SIP gateway if you want your kid to be able to call a friend's mobile.

EDIT: I just looked and the PAP2T has been discontinued, but there seem to be lots of units available new from China that look identical and are sold as Linksys PAP2T, and some unbranded units that look the same but with blank labels. I've no idea if these are fully compatible with the real PAP2T, but they might still be worth trying.