doug1001

No idea about the most important, but one US law that had massive (and apparently unintended) economic consequences is the IGRA (Indian Gaming Regulatory Act)? not a lawyer, but I believe this Act was the legal catalyst for the proliferation of casinos on Native American tribal lands ("reservations")

fwiw ,except for election day, viber has been up continuously--used it every day to communicate with family

is the former pilot you are referring to, Ron Bliss? He passed away in 2006; he and i were neighbors; i knew him very well

exactly! or break a chair over someone's head so that they fall backwards through the doors and out of the saloon. Every epiosode of Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Wild Wild West, et al that i've ever seen.

also an ESS user; do you still use/prefer ESS vs RStudio for package development?

graphviz: rock solid, and bindings for just about every language

wow, so much for disrupting the underwears space

really fine, fine writing. Eg:

>I’m not from the South and don’t talk as if I were. Most telling, and the other guys can sense this somehow, I do not for a moment think I’m a symbol of some bygone ideal of Wild West American freedom or any other half-mythic, half-menacing nugget of folk nonsense.

maybe ageism will be stimgatized as form of bigotry

i'm a regular reader of this blog; there's always something non-obvious (at least to me) plus just really fine, fine writing--eg,

"Some Dart users really dig a functional style and appear to be playing a game where whoever crams the most work before a single semicolon wins."

sort of the Dave Eggers of software engineering

i love redis and have been using in production for over five years. But i'm interested to read the story of this fork because the practicioner-focused redis book this guy wrote is one of the best software-related texts i've read in the past 7 - 8 years. ("Statistical Rethinking" by Richard McElreath, and "The Art of SQL" by Stephane Faroult are two others that had the same impact)

in Roblox; i am building a simple game with my 7-year old daughter on the Roblox platform. A nice combination of gui-based building and scripting and a cool objective (a completed game added to the registry of games on the platform so others can play it.

i am

seems to be about some new dating site for Spanish geologists

nice one

fire up the redis server--you'll see some ascii art there

read through the OP and scanned a few examples on the J Project Wiki

i suspect that, to capture the full value of J, one needs to already know the array-oriented paradigm (or at least have a strong motivation to learn the two in parallel)

knowing the AOP paradigm also helps understand the programming patterns as well as the syntax

still, the dense syntax has extraordinary power

for instance, n-queens in J (from Rosetta Code) is just 4 short lines:

    perm   =: ! A.&i. ]             
    comb2  =: (, #: I.@,@(</)&i.)~    
    mask   =: [ */@:~:&(|@-/) {
    queenst=: comb2 (] #"1~ mask)&.|: perm

a fundamental AOP patterns is evidenced here:

line 1: create the 2D array (n x n chessboard)

line 2: populate the array with candidate solutions

line 3: eliminate invalid solutions ('mask' them)