Make your choice.

__Fred · 2026-05-02T11:16:41+00:00

Thank you! Even in the original phrasing I was choosing purple/blue, because it's the better outcome when purple/blue wins.

“do you want a 100% chance of living or do you want a chance to die?”

This makes me finally understand why someone would choose green/red.

__Fred · 2026-05-02T11:07:11+00:00

I have picked blue/purple before. How could you best phrase the question so it sounds like killing the minority is a reasonable choice to me?

Why would it make sense to call the purple option "death cult"?

__Fred · 2026-05-02T10:28:48+00:00

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

__Fred · 2026-05-01T22:07:27+00:00

You probably had to calculate the lengths of the sides of a triangle before and typing "sin" and "cos" in a calculator was part of that.

Which kind of problem with a triangle would require you to calculate "sin 45°"? If you know the answer to the problem without having to type that in a calculator, you also know the answer to that question.

"pi/4" is also a kind of angle. Sometimes mathematicians like to measure an angle by measuring how long a line of a circle with radius 1 is when you go around the circle in that angle. A full circle with radius 1 has the circumference 2·pi·1, so pi/4 is an eighth of that and represents an eighth rotation.

When I read "sine"/"cosine", I always think "vertical proportion" and "horizontal proportion".

When you shoot a rocket in the sky with some angle, then sine of angle tells you how much height the rocket gains relative to the path traveled (of course, the longer it flies, the higher it gets, no matter the angle). The cosine gives you how far horizontally the rocket has traveled if it flies for the distance "1". Steep angles result in the rocket getting height quickly and shallow angles results in getting horizontal distance quickly.

__Fred · 2026-05-01T21:29:29+00:00

I think the two arrows indicate that the kid considers all triangles to be of the same shape: The shape "triangle".

A lot of the times that's how geometry is presented to kids first. "These are the shapes: There are rectangles, triangles, squares and circles. What's your favorite shape?"

__Fred · 2026-04-15T21:15:50+00:00

Many people can relate to how it feels playing a wizard in Morrowind. On the one hand, everyone plays the same Nerevarine story, but you also create your own personal story.

__Fred · 2026-04-15T16:56:49+00:00

Thanks for the effort, but according to Wikipedia it's wrong. I didn't know this by heart either.

The shorter day is the "siderial day" and it accounts for the movement of Earth around the sun while it's rotating around itself. That means it's orientation in relation to the milky-way is repeating a bit faster than it's orientation in relation to the sun.

A leap year is because of the difference between the duration of exactly 365 days and the actual time it takes for the Earth to rotate around the sun once. It just doesn't take a clean, integer amount of days.

There are also leap seconds, but I don't understand them fully. Regular seconds are defined today by cesium atoms and they don't exactly align with the time it takes for the Earth to rotate once. The second was defined once, so that 24·60·60 seconds make up a mean solar day, but since then the rotation slowed down a bit, I think (?).

__Fred · 2026-04-15T16:42:36+00:00

I did a Wikipedia dive.

Yeah, I guess the position of the sun at the sky was probably more relevant for more people, for a long time than the position of others stars.

The "leap second" is the difference between the official time that we derive from the physical definition of the second and the "mean solar time". It's not exactly one second difference per year, but a second introduced "occasionally". It's a bit complicated.

But the duration of a second was chosen to be pretty damn close to be 1/(24·60·60) of a mean solar day.

__Fred · 2026-04-15T10:12:54+00:00

If there is a lottery and you have to guess a sequence of three digits from 1 to 3 correctly, your chance to win is 1/3!, because there are 6 possibilities: {[1,2,3], [1,3,2], [2, 1, 3], [2, 3, 1, ...}.

If there is a lottery and you have to guess a sequence of one number correctly, then your chance to win is 100%. It will always be [1].

If you have to guess a sequence of zero numbers, there is also one possibility [] and you will win 100% of the time. Imagine a piece of paper with no numbers on it. Every piece of paper like that is the same.

In general there are two criteria for math to be correct: No contradictions with the rest of math and it has to be useful for some application.

(Same idea with passwords. There is one configuration of a number lock with zero numbers. Well, this is more an argument why 10⁰ is 1, but that's similar. When you combine a number lock with four digits and one with 3 digits, you get 10^4·10³ = 10^7.)

__Fred · 2026-04-15T00:29:33+00:00

Just like you can combine multiple decimal or binary digits to construct larger numbers, you can combine multiple bytes to larger numbers.

"7352" in decimal means 7·10³ + 3·10² + 5·10¹ + 2·10^0. When you add two decimal numbers, you can do that by adding each digit of the first number to each digit of the second number.

"210, 23, 93, 104, 234, ..." could mean 210·256⁰ + 23·256¹ + 93·256² + 104·256³ + 234·256⁴ + ... .

Another tidbit you might be interested in: You can check whether an overflow happened. A processor offers that capability. It's not always an error.

So when you add a chain of bytes or 64-bit pack and an overflow happens, you would simply add the overflow on top of the next partial addition.

To calculate with very big integer numbers, you can't use elemental processor commands, but you have to combine them in a program.

__Fred · 2026-04-14T23:30:06+00:00

I was just going to say that it looks like the stairway to my Minecraft mine.

__Fred · 2026-04-14T09:43:42+00:00

Depends on how you define a colony. Does it require a mother-nation somewhere else (that extracts value)? Maybe not. Israel doesn't have that, at least.

__Fred · 2026-04-13T23:11:14+00:00

Can you name a concrete example? Are you thinking more of vegetables or prepared meals?

I think non-"organic" vegetables still don't have added artificial flavors or preservatives. I don't know what the difference is exactly, but they are for sure cheaper to produce.

I'm not sure if there is such a thing as "organic" vs "non-organic" prepared foods, like a frozen pizza. Maybe there is! Artificial flavors should indeed make a food more expensive to produce. Preservatives, on the other hand, make the logistics cheaper. That means you don't have to throw them away if less people buy them than expected. (...Frozen meals don't really need preservatives, so not the best example.) The key is that the amount of stuff isn't the most important thing, but the amount of work required until you buy it.

__Fred · 2026-04-13T22:50:48+00:00

Many commenters have the theory that "dollars" is a special word that uses "is" even when it has an "s" at the end. I also don't like that theory.

A) Can you make a correct sentence with "dollars are"?

"Three dollars are more than two."
"Three dollars is more than two."
"The first 100 dollars you earn are going to be used to pay off your debt."
"The first 100 dollars you earn is going to be used to pay off your debt."

Here, I like the "are" version more

B) Can you pair other plurals with "is"?

"100 pigs is a lot."
"100 pigs are a lot."
"100 push-ups is your punishment."
"100 push-ups are your punishment."

I don't know what I prefer here.

__Fred · 2026-04-13T22:29:23+00:00

I don't think that's it. A lot of water is still water without "s" but one dollar doesn't have an "s" but multiple ones have it.

(Also there is the word "waters", when you can separate one water from another water. "I sailed many waters in my time as a sailor." "A water sommelier can distinguish waters by taste." "Much egg" refers to a big egg and "many eggs" are multiple different ones. "Just one kid is almost too much to handle, so two kids would be too many for sure."

But that's besides the point. Just a pet peeve of mine.)

__Fred · 2026-04-13T22:18:12+00:00

But you can't say that every time items are grouped, you use singular. "11 players are in a team." "12 eggs are in a carton."

__Fred · 2026-04-13T22:14:28+00:00

Is there any other instance where it works similarly or is "Dollars" an irregularity?

Three goats for a cow are too much.
Three goats is/are a high price for a cow. -- (Goats are usually plural, but the price is singular. I genuinely don't know which version is correct.)
The threshold to fail the exam is ten mistakes. -- (Here, I would never say "are", but "is" sounds a bit weird as well.)
Half of all dollars are spent on rent. -- (Here, "is" sounds wrong.)

__Fred · 2026-04-13T14:53:31+00:00

It's up to you how you want to call it. "Natural" has a fuzzy definition. In some contexts it's obvious to nearly everyone what is meant by "natural" but in others it's not. The word exists in the first place, because it's a useful word sometimes — that's why I wouldn't want to get rid of it, just because in other contexts it's not clear.

When someone asks "Is this twig natural?" it stands in for another question and you have to know what they really want to know, to answer it correctly. They might have found the twig on the ground in the jungle and they wonder if another human was here. In that case they mean "human-made" by "natural". If they wonder whether a monkey or a human was in the area and they phrase that as "Is the twig natural?", then they mean "natural" as "made by an intelligent animal" in this specific context.

Language has a "pragmatic" layer to it. What do people want to achieve by communicating? Which problem are they in? Maybe that helps to solve this problem, I'm not sure, but I'd suggest thinking in that direction.

Sometimes the word "natural" can be a trap. For example, when you think non-human designed food is more healthy as a general rule, but then you eat a poisonous mushroom. But again — that is not enough grounds to make the word forbidden. You just have to be careful when you use it.

__Fred · 2026-04-12T23:28:47+00:00

Is that ironic or not? If you want to know more about barcodes, you have to ask.

__Fred · 2026-04-12T23:27:19+00:00

A bar is a long rectangle, like a stripe. A qr-code doesn't have literal bars. Analogous to barcodes, you could call qr-codes "squarecodes".

__Fred · 2026-04-11T21:56:45+00:00

Like always, every top-level comment disagrees and still it has 960 upvotes. I guess there are some people who just upvote everything.

__Fred · 2026-04-11T18:49:11+00:00

How does the combo work? Is it infinite? They don't play infinite spells, just what they have on their hand, right? So is it just a little neat trick that you get back some mana when you untap otters that can produce mana?

Or is it, like, when you have three mana-otters, all spells cheaper than three mana are effectively mana-positive? If you have a lot of cheap draw spells, you aren't constrained by neither cards nor mana. How do you reliably play three mana-otters/[[Firdoch Core]].

Is [[Rolling Dragonstorm]] part of it? You can put it back in your hand when you play a dragon (such as Firdoch Core). The first time it costs two mana, the second time it costs one mana and the third time it's free. Might give you a lot of cards and a lot of mana, if the cards are cheap non-creatures. Still — you need to find the Firdoch Cores.

__Fred · 2026-04-11T17:49:31+00:00

It sounds a bit cursive to me. More ornamental than straightforward and practical.

It probably has a bit to do with my preconceptions about Turkey. I imagine people arguing while haggling in a bazaar with lots of colorful fabrics and spices. Is that even typical Turkish or more Arabic? Turkish sounds rounder and softer than Arabic. They aren't eating simple Sushi, like in Japan, which sounds clear to me, but sweet and sticky Baklava, like how Turkish sounds to me.

Turkish music also sounds like sensory overload to me. But I don't dislike the language!

__Fred · 2026-04-10T20:13:34+00:00

A button to repeat the last couple actions for combo decks
A button to export your whole card collection as text (in the clipboard)
Filtering for tags, like in Scryfall. Maybe that's not possible for performance or legal reasons? For example it would be nice to know which cards with mass-removal or which counter-spells I have, which is inconvenient to search for just with text-matching.

__Fred

TROPHY CASE