GemlikeFlame

GemlikeFlame

86p

350 comments posted · 2 followers · following 3

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Deleted Comments: No, ... · 1 reply · +8 points

Multiplication generally has precedence, unless you're using a rational language like APL where operators are evaluated positionally. However, I'm pretty sure Dok meant the larger of the two numbers, so B=(W+I)*H (assuming that none of the terms are negative or zero,) Note that solving for H with W == -I produces an undefined value, and as us compiler writers say, the universe is then allowed to throw the equation and its author into a black hole or the nearest sun. It is unwise to tempt the universe to do this kind of thing, so let's just stick to the natural numbers.

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Ronald Reagan Church C... · 0 replies · +4 points

Or Catholic clergy.

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Sundays With The Chris... · 0 replies · +8 points

No solid numbers I can find, but maybe we can get an order of magnitude estimate. In 2007, according to the DOE, approximately 3% of school-aged children were home schooled, and about 9% attended a private school, for a total of around 6 million. It's probably fair to lay almost all the home schoolers to fundamentalists, and some reasonable fraction of the private schools, say 20% (which is suggested by the number of self-identified Conservative Christian and Baptist schools), to them as well. That's (if we believe the factors I'm using, which is far from certain) on the order of 1.2 million (as far as numbers go, the homeschoolers aren't a significant factor.) If we divide up the students into ten grades (for the sake of convenience) and assume that this is 5 - 7th material or some such and assuming an even distribution among the grades, 30% or so of that 1.2 million (400k) or so would need the books more or less at the same time, so I'll go out on a limb and suggest that we're looking at around half a million extant copies. It's late, my math has never been good, but that feels like the right general magnitude to me.

Edit: I said my math was lousy. 6 million private school children, not 60 million. I'll cite these numbers if anyone cares.

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Sundays With The Chris... · 0 replies · +4 points

Yeah, being dead really puts a crimp in your ability to deliver a scathing bit of social commentary. To my surprise, both he and Hunter died within three years of each other in the last decade. I'd remembered them as being much more recent.

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Announcing The Wonkomm... · 0 replies · +1 points

Everything I've heard about Grady is that he's a decent human being. He's made some very impressive contributions to the software engineering discipline (UML kind of gives me a headache, but then I program bottom up in the Lisp style. Oddly, so did structured programming.)

Booch notation has probably done more to contain the complexity monster than any other influence, but jury's still out as to whether OO programming is really Good Thing or not. Booch and Alan Kay and Doug Englebart say so and they're very smart guys, but every time I look at C++ I die a little inside.

Clojure is making a lot of inroads, especially in tools. Lightable.com is a good example. Is it Genera? No, but it's getting closer. I miss my Symbolics system badly.

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Announcing The Wonkomm... · 2 replies · +2 points

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Announcing The Wonkomm... · 1 reply · +7 points

Wonkette Nation
Team Wonkette
Wonkette Army
Ermagerd Wonkette

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Announcing The Wonkomm... · 1 reply · +8 points

Bootstrap.

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Announcing The Wonkomm... · 5 replies · +7 points

(or (lisp-p) (system::die))

10 years ago @ Wonkette - Come Cry With Us Over ... · 0 replies · +2 points

There is a disturbing lack of sideboob in sideboob. Or really, much of any kind.