aoanla

Yeah, this isn't flipped classroom (that's "students do reading before the session on the set topic, and then question the lecturer - hence flipping the direction of "control" in the session). This is active learning with small group work and peer learning - which students tend to actually quite like. (Flipped classroom works better the more engaged the students are in the topic - for electives, fine, for mandatory courses, less good.)

Not only did Babbage's Analytical Engine use punched cards, it was specifically inspired by the Jacquard Loom, as Babbage was a massive fan of it (and owned a portrait made on one!)

Haven spoken to the authors, the really nice layout was done by the journal itself - the source paper is available on arxiv, and whilst a nice paper still, does not have the fancy photos of the authors embedded in sidebars and the like.

I am not really that surprised - people generally do only a small set of tasks on a computer, and many of those are really "using a web browser", which actually makes it easier to support them with Linux (or any other OS...) than it was a decade ago. The problem is power users with some specific needs, who also tend to be the more vocal in tech circles. In that circumstance, the usability of Linux depends strongly on what kind of needs they are - programming is obviously not a problem, but it's a harder sell for, say, photography (I like Darktable, but I have found it v hard to sell Lightroom users on it).

I mean, most of the researchers I know at least use PyRoot (or the Julia equivalent) as much as possible, rather than actually interacting with Root itself. Which probably saves their sanity...

I think that's sort of true, but unlike Disco Elysium - which I simply loved - the bits of Outer Wilds I loved were at odds with the fact that basically all of the worlds gave me anxiety from their specific quirks (plus, I found them all being so small - especially the ones closest to the sun - made me constantly worried about falling off), and I couldn't finish it. (I did watch a YouTube play through to get some of the experience without the terror later)

I mean, it does - people search stuff all the time now, rather than thinking about it.

N-body problems can't be analytically solved. However, you can still compute integrals into the future (with some acceptable error), you just need to step through all the intermediate states along the way

In the case of the solar system, yes, it helps that the Sun is much more massive than everything else (and then Jupiter is 4 times more massive than Saturn, the next biggest) - you can go a long way to a "reasonable" solution by starting with the 2-body solution if only the Sun affected each planet, and then adding in the perturbation caused by Jupiter and Saturn. (In fact, that's how we predicted the existence of Neptune, by noticing that there were extra perturbations on Uranus beyond those, and hence another massive planet must exist, far enough away from the sun to only significantly affect Uranus).

Right, except the author also mentions two obscure languages with very little uptake at all, so it can't simply be a popularity thing - they're not useful at all, by that limited metric.

It's also a weird thing to bring up (Numba being great because it can jit-compile python to any arch, including GPUs) when the author discounted Julia... which has exactly the same property.

Effectively, it does - one of the things recent releases of Julia have done is to add more precompilation caching on package install. Julia 1.10 feels considerably snappier than 1.0 as a result - that "first time to plot" is now only a couple of seconds thanks to this (and subsequent plots are, of course, much faster than that).

Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could easily make new games without needing access to the full engine source. (And QuakeC was supposed to be simpler as a language than C, which it... is, but at the cost of weird compromises like a single number type (float) which is also used to store bitfields by directly manipulating power of two values. Which works, of course, until your power of 2 is big enough to force the precision to drop below 1...)

The classic of this field of books is Abramowitz and Stegun's "Handbook of Mathematical Functions" - although the two listed names are merely those of the compilation editors, as the calculations of the numerous tables of values (and sheets of mathematical identities) required hundreds of human computers operating for years. Ironically, on publication in 1964 it was just in time to see the dawn of the electronic computer age that would supplant it.

Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing one session generates a huge unsurmountable backlog. It's bad and consistent enough for me that I just stopped trying to use Anki at all.

Adding to the replies which list SF examples of this idea:

The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy) has a plot built on a combination of this idea and extrapolation of the consequences of the fringe theory that gravity is really due to high frequency quantum oscillations. (Almost everything in it's future is made of configurable quantum dot "pseudo-atoms" that can be reconfigured to states that don't exist in natural atoms.)