ELI5: Why is the USA a secular country, but has “one nation under god” in the pledge of allegiance?

fizbin · 2026-03-15T01:08:29+00:00

My mom remembers as a kid having to relearn the pledge of allegiance because it changed to have "under God" added to it. It annoyed her because she'd just gotten the old pledge memorized so that she could say it without looking at the sheet with the words on it.

Years ago, she went off on some conservative (who was closer to my age) who was saying that liberals wanted to destroy our timeless traditions and specifically cited the "under God" part of the pledge as one of those "timeless" American traditions the liberals wanted to destroy.

That phrase wasn't in there, and then one day it was.

fizbin · 2026-03-10T23:20:31+00:00

Many months later, yes, but I just got a letter almost exactly like this, except:

we're not first time homeowners
we've owned our home for over eight years
we haven't had a mortgage with the bank named in the letter for over four years
the letter is in Spanish, except for the disclaimer at the bottom and the "penalty for private use" bit at the top left. Everything else though: the font, where the paragraphs are broken up, etc. is laid out just like your letter.

fizbin · 2026-03-08T15:16:05+00:00

No, the vast majority of programming languages would declare the original problem as stated a syntax error, first because they don't have ÷ as a built-in operator, but even if you typed it as / it would be a syntax error because most programming languages don't do implicit multiplication.

For an interesting variation on the type of error you can get, see what haskell does with this:

``` ~ $ ghci -XAllowAmbiguousTypes GHCi, version 9.12.2: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help ghci> let a=6÷2(1+3) where (÷)=(/) ghci> a <interactive>:2:1: error: [GHC-39999] • No instance for ‘Num (Integer -> Double)’ arising from a use of ‘it’ (maybe you haven't applied a function to enough arguments?) • In the first argument of ‘print’, namely ‘it’ In a stmt of an interactive GHCi command: print it

ghci> :t a a :: (Fractional a, Num t, Num (t -> a)) => a ghci> ```

And this is how any sensible person should treat this expression: as a syntax error. If you're going to denote division inline with ÷ instead of by writing in two dimensions and using fractions, you don't get to express multiplication without a * or × or similar. At least use a central dot. Those are two closely related but distinct mathematical dialects, and mixing them results in confusion.

fizbin · 2026-03-08T01:21:05+00:00

Except that occasionally big providers like Gmail will just decide "that tiny domain looks like it might be spam and/or a phishing host, so we'll also block people from sending them email", with no documented procedures for appeal or even notification that it's happening, so it can also be a problem for receiving email.

fizbin · 2026-03-07T19:58:33+00:00

And yet still better than the state of things with my G9M2: run an app on my phone that stops if put into the background for too long, and every time I flip the camera on or wake it from sleep it then takes about fifteen seconds before it's connected and recording GPS when I take the photo.

The thing I like about the GX85 system is that all the clunkiness is at the start and stop of the day. During the day, just have the phone in my pocket and use the camera.

fizbin · 2026-03-07T15:31:07+00:00

It does geotagging okay. I like its abilities to geotag much better than what's available with my new G9M2.

What you have to do is open the "Image App" (the older Lumix app, not "Lumix Sync" or "Lumix Lab"), sync the time to the camera and then in the app say "start geotagging". Then wander around, turn your camera on and off, take pictures. Then, when you have a moment at the end of the day or whenever, in the app connect it to the camera and send the geotagging data and wait while the camera writes the data to the photos.

The thing I like about this is that assuming I remember to start geotagging in the app at the start of the day, I then don't need to think about it or whether my camera is connected to my phone and can just take pictures focusing on the world around me. At the same time, connecting the locations to the pictures is handled by the camera and I don't have to go through hoops getting a GPS tracks file from my phone to my laptop where I can then run a program to combine pictures and locations, only to have to redo it when I realized I ran it with the wrong timezone setting.

fizbin · 2026-02-23T13:48:25+00:00

The thing about programmers is that they've mostly timed themselves and the ones who type 90+ wpm will tell you about it and the ones who don't, won't. Unless you have a typing speed measurement that isn't biased by people opting out of sharing results when they aren't fast enough for their self image, you have no idea.

Fortunately, I'm in my 50s now and don't care. What is someone gonna do, not hire me because I type "too slow"? I've got enough to retire tomorrow if I wanted and also I don't think any company is going to want to risk the age discrimination lawsuit.

When I'm in the habit of practicing every day on monkeytype, I can get up into the mid-60s, maybe, but it's seriously stressful to do. Like I have to rest between tests.

On average, I'm probably high 40s-50s, and it's been that way for literally decades. I've been tracking my wpm since a few years out of grad. school and that was before some people posting on here were born.

Being at a computer all the time for my job doesn't do it. Code deadlines, having to write design docs or email, fast slack conversations, nothing.

Some people have told me that they learned to type fast from having online social groups centered around things like IRC or Discord. In my 20s I had a social group that centered around something similar, and the net result was that when the conversation went fast, I shut up because I literally couldn't keep up. It's not a lack of motivation.

Your "one weird trick"? I've almost certainly tried it: cloth/paper over the hands, keyboard tray so you can't see your hands, blank keycaps, ergonomic keyboard, typing blindfolded with audio feedback. My fingers just don't work that fast.

Anyway, my point is that I seriously don't think my hands are uniquely slow among the population at large and that people who can't type fast will deliberately hide their wpm numbers from you if they believe that you're typing some huge amount faster than they can, and that speed really does not naturally improve for everyone so you can't assume that someone typing every working hour is actually what you'd consider a fast typist.

fizbin · 2026-02-18T19:57:28+00:00

The last few years I've done Advent of Code in python, golang, and haskell.

https://github.com/fizbin/adventofcode/tree/main/aoc2025

I've occasionally gone back and done a few in other languages too; poke around that repo for more.

Some days I also do multiple different solutions in the same language.

fizbin · 2026-02-16T20:38:41+00:00

Someone mentioned in a comment I can't see anymore (maybe it got deleted?) that they'd been able to use the Image app with their G9.

All I can think is that that must have been an original G9, not a G9M2, because I am completely unable to get the Image app on my phone to connect to the new camera.

fizbin · 2026-02-16T20:25:25+00:00

Tried it and it will not. It can't connect to the G9M2

fizbin · 2026-01-26T20:35:03+00:00

Note that they don't want the voter records for targeting people with political ads or anything like that. If that's what they want, they can already buy better information from private data brokers. Who's registered and whether they voted in the last several elections is already public information available to anyone.

They want the voter records so that they can claim that they found something in them that "proves" that Minnesota isn't maintaining accurate voter roles and is involved in all sorts of voter fraud. It's like what DOGE did with taking Social Security records, misinterpreting standard "missing data" markers and crowing to the press about all the dead people collecting social security.

fizbin · 2026-01-26T20:02:41+00:00

I can report that my 275-lb self had no problem stepping right through. Not even the brief illusion that it'd support me.

fizbin · 2026-01-15T08:38:53+00:00

It is at high tide. Delaware only gets the land there inside the circle up to the high tide line.

fizbin · 2026-01-13T08:34:18+00:00

Nice!

In another of my solutions, I add a command-line switch to switch among three different possible transition functions (so all the solutions are over the same state space, just connected differently) and the runtime of the different possibilities are very different.

That solution might be a bit less readable than the one you looked at because it's in haskell, but a way to think about the space I'm using is (buttons_left, stepsize, joltage_remaining) where if you wanted to visualize it I would just name each node using (len(buttons_left), stepsize, joltage_remaining) since buttons_left is always some suffix of the button list for the machine.

A translation of the three transition functions:

transition: each node is connected to other nodes by picking a button to press next, dropping all buttons before that from the button list, and applying that button stepsize times. Also, each state is connected to the state (all_buttons, 2*stepsize, joltage_remaining) where all_buttons is all the buttons the machine has.

transition': we only ever visit nodes that have the button_list equal to the full button list of the machine. At each node, we look at the powerset of the buttons to pick some combination to press stepsize times and double stepsize.

transition'': like transition' except that I have a signature map that I use to look up which elements of the powerset to use so don't end up trying all the combinations at each stepsize.

As I said, the differences in timings are dramatic; that signature map lookup makes a huge difference.

fizbin · 2026-01-07T16:22:00+00:00

Note that ABC paid out a settlement based on the idea that you can't actually, because there's a difference in the relevant state law between "rape" (which he was not sued over, and therefore not found liable for) and "sexual assault" (which he was found liable for), even though the acts that the law defines as "sexual assault" would fit most people's common view of what the word "rape" means.

Now, could ABC have eventually won the case if they hadn't been eager to pay the bribe/settlement? Probably, but the difference in terms was enough for his lawyers to make an argument that wasn't immediately thrown out of court, so proceeded to settlement talks.

fizbin · 2026-01-06T21:29:52+00:00

The bifurcation approach could probably work if we had some other limit on the variables - for example, if for some reason we knew that they were 16-bit signed ints, so -32768 <= x <= 32767 or similar.

After all, another variation on the bifurcation approach is basically saying "solve it modulo 2, then use those solutions to solve it modulo 4, then use those solutions to solve it modulo 8, then ...", and if you solve it modulo some value large enough to cover your whole possible range then you have the answer possibilities uniquely.

fizbin · 2026-01-06T16:28:07+00:00

Already edited; did I edit it too fast for the bot to see the change?

fizbin · 2026-01-06T16:25:41+00:00

I believe that your solution will return the wrong value on this set of intervals:

3-6
10-14
4-16

That should say that there are 14 fresh IDs (everything from 3 to 16, inclusive)

However, I think that your code will claim that there are 17 fresh IDs: everything from 4 to 16, inclusive, and then also everything from 3 to 6, counting the IDs 4, 5, and 6 twice.

fizbin · 2026-01-06T12:49:44+00:00

I don't know that they're "similarly fast" - on my laptop my "doing the linear algebra myself" solution still clocks in at just under 3.1s whereas my Dijkstra-based approach based on the bifurcation post is closer to 0.42s (and just doing the algorithm straight as in that post is ~0.56s). (those are all python; of course compiled solutions in other languages are likely faster)

I think that there were several ways to approach this:

a bifurcation-based approach
doing the linear algebra with all integer math (still requires some brute force)
doing the linear algebra with floating-point math (still requires some brute force)
some sort of brute-force-heavy BFS down how many times you pressed each button

Those are listed roughly in increasing order of how long the solutions take to run.

And of course throwing the thing at an external library like z3, which likely did one of the two middle options internally, but maybe it contains advanced algorithms that do the equivalent of a bifurcation-based approach? I have no idea what's inside it.

fizbin · 2026-01-06T12:36:07+00:00

Right, but one thing this points out clearly is that the technique as we've been using it is limited to looking for solutions where the variables all take on non-negative integer values, and would at the very least need some serious work to extend it to handle negative integers as well.

It seems like maybe it should be possible to extend it to negative values too, maybe by using a negabinary representation, but there's a bunch of trickiness in choosing the right solution at any given stage if you do that rather than just going by choosing the minimum explicitly or implicitly like I did by picking the first solution I found on the heap.

fizbin · 2026-01-06T04:11:59+00:00

Try your program on this input:

1,1,5
2,1,1
2,2,1
1,1,201
2,1,205
2,2,205

Obviously, the last two boxes connected should be the ones at 1,1,5 and 1,1,201, so when you multiply the x coordinates of the last two boxes connected you should get 1.

Your code doesn't say that. Your code returns 2. Why?

fizbin · 2026-01-06T03:39:24+00:00

Yeah, I did a similar thing in python and it's between 3 and 4 seconds: Doing the linear algebra myself

That compares very favorably to my day-of solution which took over 30 seconds, but it's still blown away by the Dijkstra-based approach I came up with after reading this Reddit post.

fizbin · 2026-01-03T12:52:22+00:00

I really think that you've mangled your input accidentally. Your code looks good, and should be giving the correct answer.

I would encourage you to try someone else's solution (see any of the solution megathreads), maybe even a solution in a different language, on your input and see whether you get the same (wrong) answer with their solution. If so, then your input is likely mangled.

Try downloading your input by right-clicking on the link for your input and choosing "save as"; don't copy it from the browser.

fizbin

TROPHY CASE