kmm

That's pretty funny, I had in some sense the opposite experience. Learning Russian, at the point where I got beyond the beginner stage, I was really put off by the intense prescriptivism. As you learn languages you also learn that they all have their own pet-peeves (usually functioning like class markers). But in Russian it's taken to a point where linguistic diversity is looked down (perhaps apart from specialized slang) even in informal conversations. This is probably also related to the fact that the language famously has very little dialectical variation, which is especially surprising given the size of the country where it originates from.

I like the temperate graph halfway down the page. It looks like two decaying exponentials alternating every ~40 minutes, with the downward one steeper than the upward one. It's a neat visualization of hysteresis, where the thermostat presumably has a different temperature threshold for turning off or turning on (or perhaps there's a minimum time between state switches). Without the scale it's hard to know for sure.

Russian used to have dual pronouns too, but they all were lost somewhere in the 13th century, as in all other Slavic languages other than Slovenian.

The system used for small numbers is probably a broad extension of an earlier dual number for nouns, i.e. something like a plural but just for two things. For (some) male nouns, the nominative dual ending was the same as the genitive singular, which was then extended to all other nouns even when this correspondence didn't hold, and from just 2 things to 3 and 4 as well. Nowadays the dual has been completely forgotten for nouns, and the only interpretation of the rule is that it's a genitive singular.

Everytime people extoll the virtues of high noon, I ask the same question: why does it matter if the sun reaches it highest point near 12 o' clock? You're awake for 4-6 hours before 12, and you remain awake for 10-12 hours after it. Noon isn't the middle of the day for nearly anyone in the western world.

I understand the argument for having an early sunset, clearly having sunlight when you're awake has an effect. But who cares about having an early high noon, when there's still two thirds of the day left at best?

That's correct, but it's pretty well-hidden because at first sight there is no term that's just the year modulo 7. That's because a Gregorian calendar cycle of 400 years is coincidentally an integer amount of weeks long, so after the term modulo 400 you don't need another correction anymore.

To recover the fact that 365 % 7 == 1 from the given formula, one can notice that the sum of the coefficients 5+4+6=15, which modulo 7 is 1.

That's only if you delay renewal until the last day of the lifetime of the certificate. If you renew at day 30 you'd only get in trouble if there's more than two weeks of downtime.

Hah, the capitalization of the title of this post only just now made me realize why the GPU farm at my job is called "barracuda". That's pretty funny.

And a megabyte is depending on the context precisely 1000x1000=1,000,000 or 1024x1024=1,048,576 bytes*, except when you're talking about the classic 3.5 inch floppy disks, where "1.44 MB" stands for 1440x1024 bytes, or about 1.47 true MB or 1.41 MiB.

* Yeah, I read the article. Regardless of the IEC's noble attempt, in all my years of working with people and computers I've never heard anyone actually pronounce MiB (or write it out in full) as "mebibyte".

I think I have some sort of intuition why all the probabilities are the same.

Imagine you're standing on a randomly chosen vertex on the ring which is not right next to the starting position. At some point, the ladybug will be guaranteed to appear either to the left of you or to the right of you for the first time, and this cannot happen as the second-to-last step, because then the ladybug would have had to have visited both of your neighbors. At this point, for your vertex to be the one last visited, the ladybug would have to turn around and loop all the way around the circle to your other neighbor. But this means the previous trajectory of the ladybug and which vertices were visited before is irrelevant, as the ladybug will have to pass by them anyway. By symmetry, this situation is completely equivalent to being at the very start of the process on one of the vertices neighboring the starting position. Hence any randomly chosen vertex not next to the starting position has to have the same probability of being visited last as those two vertices. Hence all vertices have to have to same probability of being visited last.

In that case following Alice's input is still the best strategy, but you'll be worse off: you'd only be right if both tell the truth, at 80%80%=64%, or both lie, at 20%20%=4%, for a total of 68%.

In the general case of n intermediate occasional liars, the odds of the final result being accurate goes to 50% as n grows large, which makes sense, as it will have no correlation anymore to the initial input.