One of my favorite math-related scenes in The Simpsons is where Prof. Frink is standing on stage in front of a group of scientists and not getting attention.
Prof. Frink: "Looking for some order. Some order please with the eyes forward and the hands neatly folded."
(Audience not paying attention.)
Prof. Frink: "Hrm..."
Prof. Frink: "Pi is exactly three!"
(Collective gasp from the audience. Prof. Frink now has their attention.)
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Edit: Went looking for part of the quote which I couldn't catch, found a book which seems interesting. Simon Singh, 2013. The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets [1]. Singh is also known for his 1997 book Fermat's Enigma [2] and his 1999 book The Code Book [3]. The former of the books I've heard is interesting and the latter of which I enjoyed very much back when I read it.
>Suppose that you can’t remember whether Pluto is a dwarf planet, and you need to find out by asking someone nearby—but you don’t know whether that person is a knight or a knave. What’s the one yes-no question you can ask to figure out whether Pluto is a dwarf planet?
>"Are you a knight if and only if Pluto is a dwarf planet?"
>If the person’s a knight and Pluto is a dwarf planet, then you get the answer “yes,” since both statements on each side of if and only if are true, and knights always speak truly.
I don't get how this follows. Surely, the person being a knight or a knave is independent from whether or not Pluto is a dwarf planet so a real knight would say "no" either way since the assumption is bad and a knave would thus say "yes". Thereby, you have not determined whether or not Pluto is a dwarf planet but instead whether the person is a knight or a knave.
4/10. "Only slightly worse... than a random guess!"
I already knew that 24-bit vs 16-bit would be indistinguishable for pop music but I would not have expected that the same would go for 16-bit vs 8-bit. Or, well, I was kind of expecting it since otherwise the person who put this test together likely wouldn't have bothered.
However, I don't mind. I've never claimed to be "audiophile" -- a fact which is reflected by the inexpensive headphones I use :)
I agree the site looks nice. One thing though, the cosplay guy in the illustrations on the page had me immediately thinking of Beastie which I found surprising seeing as GNU has a bit of a different ideology from BSD. GNU has long been using a gnu as their mascot so I guess the suit might be supposed to resemble a gnu calf.
Edit: Specifically I think it is the cover artwork of Kong's 2007 book Designing BSD Rootkits published by No Starch Press [1] combined with the FreeBSD logo [2] that caused me to think of Beastie when I visited the new Guile site.
When I think about zooming, I think of how Google maps work and also about responsive web design. That is to say, having differing amounts of information show at different zoom levels. It was my impression that this is how the Oberon desktop works but I may be mistaken in that assumption.
At 1:1, imagine a regular view.
Below some threshold effective resolution, imagine condensed information. Instead of miniature, unreadable windows, one might display a simplified view, say a Metro-style color coded box with -- relative to box size -- a big icon and document title.
Below yet another threshold, condense more, using conventional icons instead of Metro.
At lowest zoom level, display a one-dimensional list of everything. Searchable of course.
>Oberon’s «desktop» is an infinitely large two-dimensional space on which windows (and documents, since the distinction becomes meaningless in some ways) can be arranged [...] When people held presentations using Oberon, they would arrange all slides next to each other, zoom in on the first one, and then simply slide the view one screen size to the right to go to the next slide.
It is commonly said that Plan 9 from Bell Labs is more UNIX than UNIX. This idea of sliding the view along an infinite plane, in turn, seems to me even more UNIX than anything I've seen or heard of. Not having used -- and in fact only having heard of in passing -- Oberon before, I can't comment on how Unixy the remainder of the system is, but none-the-less, this right here seems to capture the essense of UNIX. In all the times I have been impressed by well composed presentations, never have I questioned the need for "tricks" like screenshots and videos to get a coherrent presentation of interactive tasks or information from software external to whatever tool was being used to run the presentation.
Not just unix-like, OS X is certified UNIX.