Alexey_Nigin

I had a similar experience in Thessaloniki, Greece. In this city, there is a famous tourist attraction called The White Tower (which has grey color, by the way). One day, I had to wait in Thessaloniki for a couple of hours, and I decided that it would be a great idea to sit down near the tower.

Well, it turned out to be a bad idea. A few hundred meters from the tower, I was greeted by someone who self-identified as a "friend from Jamaica". He tried to advertise something, but walked away after I asked him politely. As I continued my journey, I met more and more of these "friends". When I eventually reached the tower, I discovered that about 10 of these guys were circling around it. They were all very polite, but they advertised their stuff every time they stumbled upon me, which happened about once per minute. After some time, I decided to find a different place to rest.

I tried viewing the article on 4 different monitors. All monitors had default settings except for brightness. Monitors A & B were on new laptops, monitor C was on a very old laptop, and monitor D was on a smartphone. Here are the results:

FIGURES 1 & 2. On monitor A, all bands of color in figure 1 were easily discernible. The first four bands of color in figure 2 looked identically. Figure 1 looked more evenly spaced than figure 2. On monitor B, all bands of color in figure 1 were easily discernible. The first five bands of color in figure 2 looked identically. Figure 1 looked more evenly spaced than figure 2. On monitor C, all bands of color except the last two in figure 1 were easily discernible. The first three bands of color in figure 2 looked identically. Figure 1 looked about as evenly spaced as figure 2. The result from monitor D was the same as the result from monitor A.

FIGURE 12. On monitors A and B, the color of (A) was closer to (B) than to (C). On monitor C, (A) appeared equally close in color to (B) and (C). On monitor D, the color of (A) was exactly identical to (B).

CONCLUSION: On monitor C, gamma correction had neutral effect. On all other monitors, the effects were negative. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a standalone PC monitor for my comparison. It is entirely possible that a PC monitor would give a different result. However, since most people use laptops and tablets nowadays, I doubt the article's premise that "every coder should know about gamma".

In my opinion, getting used to living in small space is the simplest thing about surviving on Mars. It is much more difficult to maintain a steady supply of oxygen, water, food, and energy. Also, there is always a possibility that something important will suddenly break down and the colonists will need to repair it using only what they have at hand. I would be much more impressed if they tried to test how humans and current technology cope with these hard tasks.

The planet in Nemesis had one major difference which may turn out to be crucial: it was not actually a planet. It was a moon. Since Proxima b is a planet, it is probably locked with one side always facing the sun. In Nemesis, Erythro was locked around the gas giant it was orbiting, but not locked around the star, allowing normal day-night cycle.

From my experience, the votes are rarely a sign of a constructive comment.

For example, my top comment is the one in which I basically said that learning natural languages is hard. Pretty original remark, huh? In my second most popular comment, I posted a link to a funny image that didn't have much to do with the conversation. And my most downvoted comment is a detailed explanation of why I'm not impressed with Twitter's plans to use advanced machine learning.

I am not arguing that we should abolish votes, since I don't see an alternative. But tweaking the existing system to see if it becomes better is a sensible idea.

Also, I would like to make a point that comments at the bottom of the thread aren't always off-topic and boring.

Actually, declining numbers is something most native Russian speakers can't do. Even people on TV, whose job is to speak correctly, often struggle with it. Moreover, in the Russian translation of the Empire Strikes Back, C3PO's line "Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately three thousand seven hundred and twenty to one" has the number declined a wrong way.

I would like to point out that learning a computer language usually takes between a week and a month, while learning a natural one takes about a decade. I agree that knowing a natural language broadens the mind to some extent, but spending so much time to get such little reward seems a bit wasteful.

I (sort of) agree that having many languages encourages diversity and coexistence of different cultures. However, I think that apparent drawbacks outweigh any potential benefits.

As a native Russian speaker, I know just how excruciating learning English can get. I have been learning it for 12 years, and most of the time it was no fun. For example, I once literally memorised 1500 words over a few months. Still, I cannot say that I speak as well as native speakers do. Most Russians never make it past learning to say "I don't speak English" with a funny accent. By the way, if you are an English speaker, you probably don't realise what it means not to know English. Let me assure you: it's horrible.

This is very sad news.

The #1 reason why I moved from Facebook to Twitter was that the latter service used straightforward algoritms for deciding what to show me. When I opened Twitter, I could be almost sure that the timeline would only contain posts from people I followed, arranged in chronological order.

Of course, there were some exceptions. Firstly, they always had ads. I see how many people here get angry about it, but I think ads on such site is perfectly normal. After all, they have to make money somehow, right?

Secondly, there were times when I saw "While you were away" box. This was the thing I found annoying from the beginning. How did Twitter infer that I was interested in these five posts more than in those five posts? It got worse over time. In fact, now this box shows up after a few hours of my absence, as if I am expected to check Twitter 10 times a day.

And it appears that they are planning to take these features to a new level. I really hope they don't do everything they talk about, but if they do, maybe I will have to seek a new social media service.