I asked an older family member about old Scottish legends. She told me about what she heard when she was younger, from someone older still, and I suppose that puts the legend at least a hundred years back.

There are ghostly bagpipes that foretell death...there are banks of primroses, where, if you pick the wrong …

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Among certain circles, there is a general agreement that university Computer Science courses don't teach practical basics, or equip students to work with actual computers. This begs the question, what would a reasonable course look like?

When I worked at an IT outsourcing company, I would test people's computer skills. …

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Software licences neatly fall into three categories - open, closed, and the uncertain - a kind of Schrödinger's licence, which must become one of the other two types in time.

Ignorance can only end with knowledge or death. Once someone fixes a mistake in their thinking, by understanding the truth, and how they made …

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Some centuries ago, nobles learned about the riches in their estate through their seneschal, who would walk about counting things.

10 lambs, 8 sheep, 1 exceptional sheep, 2 sickly sheep, 50 pounds of turnip, 400 pounds of cabbage,...

So on and on the counting would continue, so that the lord knew how much wealth he …

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Google's began by indexing massive portions of the internet, and rating sites according to which sites had the most links going towards them. You might state the general goal like this:

We will write a program to rank the quality of writing on websites.

This worked well for a while, but people with businesses saw how …

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'Traditional' food has fat, and has sugar if the region could import lots of it in the 1800's. Traditional Serbian food includes fat-fried meat with meat on it. Traditional Scottish food includes an egg, wrapped in meat, fried in bread-crumbs. I'm guessing most European countries follow suit.

These diets were developed …

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In recent years I've slowly changed my thinking on the concept of 'faith'. Or perhaps I've been thinking about attitudes, and just made very narrow use of a very broad word. Here's the thought:

Someone with a cool mind, an impartial attitude, and some very basic arithmetic can optimize. It's fashionable to make fun of …

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The xz fiasco has made fascinating reading, and brought up some real questions about open source development and overall safety. It's also brought up a slightly malformed thoughts on 'open source vs proprietary'.

If comparisons were to juxtapose operating system safety, then it seems misplaced, given that Windows, OSX, …

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Going to a gathering in a synagogue, my partner said something about the 'Jew party'. This raised a tiny heckle, but I couldn't see why. She'd invited me to a gathering with her community. Most were Jewish, some brought non-Jewish partners (like she brought me). What's the problem?

Her native language is Slavic, and …

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Every computer I go to seems to have the same sad story. A mess of files sit on the desktop. In 'Pictures', random pictures sit (the user downloaded them before making a half-hearted attempt to organize) with a few folders, some marked 'holiday' (which one?), and others given names by the computer. Renaming the lot …
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