I switched to a left-handed mouse for the first time, at the ripe age of 38. It's unviable, so I've stopped. Finding a mouse was easy - my mouse is already symmetrical. Reversing the keys was just one command. But you can't use a computer with that mouse. All the GUI shortcuts - Ctrl + c, Ctrl + f - all focus on the …

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I used to think of programming as something natively binary. 0's and 1's, [ True, False ], just like the Propositional Logic in first year Philosophy. And filesystems do work that way on the disk - every picture is made of 0's and 1's. However, Philosophy, or Logic in general, has other systems. Some of them use 'True' …

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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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