Comments for The New Blather

Comment on Twitter suspended me by S P Hannifin

S P Hannifin — Sun, 12 May 2013 04:50:42 +0000

I would tweet about it… but I can’t…

Comment on Twitter suspended me by Scott

Scott — Sun, 12 May 2013 04:26:00 +0000

Hmm… that tweet was opprobrious…. which incidentally is the word of the day.

Comment on Twitter suspended me by S P Hannifin

S P Hannifin — Sat, 11 May 2013 18:48:50 +0000

Yes, if I get restored, I will have to amend my ways, letting my tweets gush with good will and merriment. Perhaps tweets like: “Watching TV, and good fortune to you!” and “Working on my novel, and you look great today! Probably.”

Comment on Twitter suspended me by LanthonyS

LanthonyS — Sat, 11 May 2013 13:41:23 +0000

Your tweets are so nefarious!

Comment on Professor turns test into a game, blogger remains unimpressed by LanthonyS

LanthonyS — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:38:28 +0000

Totally agree.

Comment on Slash as a conjunction word by S P Hannifin

S P Hannifin — Sat, 04 May 2013 23:54:21 +0000

I guess they learn the rule that putting “un” in front of a word means “opposite of” so we can put it in front of any verb. Like the rule that adding “-ed” makes something past tense, leading to childhood mistakes like “I woked up! I eated my breakfast! I rided the bus to school.”

It tells us a lot about how humans learn; it seems a rule is naturally taken to be universal until some new rule makes an exception.

Even more interesting because society has all these social definitions of what it means to be “intelligent” yet young children learn language innately, something we can’t program a computer do.

Comment on Slash as a conjunction word by LanthonyS

LanthonyS — Sat, 04 May 2013 20:33:59 +0000

In a Sunday school class I volunteer with, we had them doing an obstacle course where one kid was blindfolded and had to trust another to lead them by hand and voice. In one pair, the leading kid said, “Duck… okay, now unduck.” Just to confirm my intuition, I asked another kid after the class whether “unduck” is a word. What’s neat is that even though we all feel this would not appear in a dictionary and is not “a word”, we all understand it perfectly. (The kid who told me it wasn’t a word even suggested some synonyms for me.)

Comment on How to easily recite a million digits of pi by LanthonyS

LanthonyS — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:34:14 +0000

Meanwhile, your blog doesn’t want me to post a million digits. “Error: please type a comment.”

Comment on How to easily recite a million digits of pi by LanthonyS

LanthonyS — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:21:53 +0000

Indeed — adapting that code to Python, it protests a Math.range error ;)

Comment on How to easily recite a million digits of pi by S P Hannifin

S P Hannifin — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:05:16 +0000

Hahaha… you’re right, whooops… what I meant was…

import random;
int i = random.randint(Math.pow(10,1000000), Math.pow(10,1000001)-1);
print i;

(But the efficiency is tongue-in-cheek, since it wouldn’t work anyway.)