1 Sep 2011, 15:57
1 Sep 2011 3:57pm GMT A couple of days ago I tried to coax some pigeons into feeding from my hand. They had descended en masse to eat some bread, and when they had devoured it they just walked around the garden aimlessly. I threw bits out to them so that they'd learn me throwing things is safe for them and provides tasty food. Eventually I threw the pieces closer and closer to me. They kept flying off at the slightest noise or sharp movement, though, to land on my roof. I'd look up and I'd see six or seven pigeons...
1 Sep 2011, 15:15
1 Sep 2011 3:15pm GMT A while ago I came up with the idea that lightweight markup languages should use emphasis as the basis of their link syntax: “When converted to hypertext and rendered in a browser, links are typically underlined and coloured, with the default colour being blue. Since this is a kind of emphasis, why don't these languages use their default emphasis as the core of their link syntax?” The script I use for that is on gist, with the catchy name Emphasis style hypertext, lightweight...
31 Aug 2011, 17:02
31 Aug 2011 5:02pm GMT The imaginary numbers weren't found solely because of the root operator, and there's nothing particularly interesting about the root operator. It's a consequence of negative numbers and multiplication. Specifically, -1 * -1 performs a 180° transformation, but nobody thought of it that way. This shows that people didn't fully understand what they were doing with negative numbers, even though they had these subset conventions of the big picture. Presumably the people who came up with the...