There are 2 plausible stories about the origin of the name for this curve which was used as an example in a calculus textbook by Maria Agnesi on how to do an integral with partial fractions. The website gives one version of the story, that the curve is named after the latin for a coil of rope which Agnesi then turned into Italian as la versaria. The other possibility is that since the curve was in a problem, she meant l’aversaria (our adversary/opponent, but crucially the feminine version of this noun). In any case, when it was translated into English, the person translating said something along the lines of “Well aversario is the devil, so aversaria must mean ‘witch’” and so the curve became known as the “Witch of Agnesi”.
Decartes and Fermat had a massive falling out via letters over trying to get a method of deriving the tangents of this curve, with Decartes insulting Fermat because Fermat’s method was insufficiently rigorous even though Decartes was unable to take the tangent using his method and a modern calculus student would recognize Fermat’s method as very similar to the modern definition of the derivative as the limit of the difference quotient. Decartes was very uncomfortable with the fact that it seemed to be dividing by zero.
There are lots of people who write math in a way that is very easy for others (of an appropriate level of experience let’s say) to understand. I also didn’t find this particularly hard to follow, although some of it is I think a little fast and loose. eg
> In general, given two finite-dimensional vector spaces U and W, then U ≃ W exactly when dim(U)=dim(W).
Is that really true? I don’t think it is. Specifically surely at least they have to be vector spaces either over the same field or over fields which are themselves isomorphic. I’m thinking say U is a vector space over R and W is a vector space over Q. Dim(U) = Dim(W)=1 but U and W are not isomorphic because there exists no bijection between the reals and the rationals.
As someone who hasn’t played for 20 years+ seems weird that they worry about spoilers in the release notes - back when I played literally the only way to learn certain game mechanics etc (eg the e-word) was to read the source code, and when you did that you found a bunch of things that were incredibly overpowered to the point of basically trivializing a lot of the game. (It’s been a long while but I seem to remember discovering very easy ways to find very powerful weapons and armour).
It seems to me that for what I was after at the time, DCSS is actually a better nethack than nethack is in that the game is more discoverable and fair and less arbitrary.
NetHack was my very first Roguelike and I ascended for the first time in 2009. I have since gone on to play many other Roguelikes, including DCSS.
I managed to win DCSS with all species, backgrounds, and gods over a period of a few years. Since then I’ve mostly lost interest in playing, and have returned to NetHack which to me feels as cozy as an old pair of slippers.
With what I know of both NetHack and DCSS, I prefer NetHack these days. DCSS is very interesting, tactically, in the early game but as you go along it becomes more and more about “keep doing the thing this character is good at” and the tactical variety vanishes. NetHack isn’t a whole lot better in that regard, but NetHack isn’t purely about tactics anyway, so it matters a lot less.
The Roguelike I most enjoy for its tactical prowess is Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which is far more interesting on that level. It has much more customizable characters, with talent points and a nifty scroll of upgrade system for weapons, armour, throwing weapons, wands, and rings (a system it borrowed from the game Brogue, a reimagining of the original Rogue). This character customization system is combined with a more interactive dungeon (full of traps you can trigger against monsters, spreadable water/grass/fire/poisonous gases) and a highly in-depth alchemy system that lets you recycle “junk” items into extremely useful and powerful resources.
On top of all that, SPD features a challenge difficulty system with up to 9 challenges that can be toggled independently and in combination, with the full 9 challenges presenting a worthy foe even for seasoned veterans of the game.
I started with DCSS and I played Nethack a few times. After reading some of the spoilers and realizing what I would have to memorize to win the game, I stopped playing it.
DCSS focused on tactical encounters which I enjoy a lot more than reading up what word to inscribe on the floor to make myself invincible or whatever.
I still enjoy the idea of Nethack, it’s very clever and incredibly deep, it’s just not for me.
For goodness sake no-one tell the author about London.
In almost every area of London there is a street called “high street”, and most of them have a “church street” also. Locals (and many maps) helpfully prepend the area name onto the street eg “Chiswick High Street”, “Kensington High Street”[1], “Stoke Newington Church Street” etc, but the actual address is “High street” or whatever meaning just several completely different streets. Not to mention many many other streets that are straight up duplicated (eg there are at least 10 “Bath Road”s) or confusingly similar.
There are also streets that have one name but are not contiguous for historical reasons. Eg my street crosses another road but the two halves are not directly opposite each other. Several times I have been on the phone with a confused delivery driver who is on the wrong side of this and is trying to convince me that my house doesn’t exist because the numbers only go up to 50 or so. Our street is also confusing because for some of the way the numbers are conventional (ie even on one side, odd on the other) but for some of it there are no houses on the other side, so adjacent houses have sequential numbers.
[1] Also the tube names this “High Street Kensington”, not “Kensington High street”. Tube names are also confusing. I live near “Turnham Green” tube which is thus named because it was the site of the battle of Turnham Green in the English civil war. This tube opens out onto a green which is not called “Turnham Green” it’s called Acton Green Common, and it is in Chiswick, not Acton. The green in Acton is called Acton Park. The actual Turnham Green is closer to another tube called “Chiswick Park”, which also opens up on a park that also isn’t called “Chiswick Park”, it’s called “Chiswick Green”. This park is incorrectly named on most online maps because at some point they probably just gave up at the insanity of it all and the boundary isn’t obvious.
Dublin has a very large urban park, called Phoenix Park, with a commuter train line running to the north of it. There's a station close to the park, within 10 minutes walking distance. About 20 years ago, Irish Rail opened a new station, 20 minutes from the nearest edge of the park. Obviously, they called _this_ station 'Phoenix Park'. And then had to put up posters in other stations warning people that if they wanted to go to Phoenix Park, they shouldn't go to the station called Phoenix Park, they should go to Ashtown. Obviously.
(It eventually got renamed; it's now called "Navan Road Parkway", the 'parkway' referring to a park and ride facility, not to the park. This may seem like a reasonable rename, but it's actually a masterstroke in forward planning for confusing names, because the line is being extended to Navan.)
Reminds me of this bit in Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” about London’s topographical mysteries:
”With a turn to the left Mr Verloc pursued his way along a narrow street by the side of a yellow wall which, for some inscrutable reason, had No. I Chesham Square written on it in black letters. Chesham Square was at least sixty yards away, and Mr Verloc, cosmopolitan enough not to be deceived by London’s topographical mysteries, held on steadily, without a sign of surprise or indignation. At last, with business-like persistency, he reached the Square, and made diagonally for the number 10. This belonged to an imposing carriage gate in a high, clean wall between two houses, of which one rationally enough bore the number 9 and the other was numbered 37; but the fact that this last belonged to Porthill Street, a street well known in the neighbourhood, was proclaimed by an inscription placed above the ground-floor windows by whatever highly efficient authority is charged with the duty of keeping track of London’s strayed houses. Why powers are not asked of Parliament (a short Act would do) for compelling those edifices to return where they belong is one of the mysteries of municipal administration. Mr Verloc did not trouble his head about it, his mission in life being the protection of the social mechanism, not its perfectionment or even its criticism.”
I believe it’s pretty common for cities that used to be several independent municipalities that were merged relatively recently, or at least where street names were already too established to make renaming for uniqueness feasible at that point.
Edinburgh has some confusion of its own too, where streets will have two names. Usually because several smaller streets eventually got joined up and became one.
So walk in a straight line and you pass along Nicolson Street -> St.Patrick Street -> Clerk Street -> Newigton Road.
Sometimes you see these signposted in a fun way too with signs for both the individual components and the "main" street:
Or Mannheim, where the streets in the central Quadratestadt area have no names. Or Japanese addresses which don't have streets. Or Queen Street in Australia/NZ, places largely settled during the reign of Queen Victoria so absolutely everywhere has a Queen Street. Or any city over a certain size where, through simple statistics, you're going to end up with streets with similar-sounding names.
That’s what it means in chess. When in zugzwang, you’re in a position where anything you do makes things worse. You would like to make “no move”, but “no move”[1] isn’t an option, so you are forced to do something.
[1] In chess, unlike say go, you can’t pass your move. You have to do something.
Yes. “A lifelong dream has been crushed by a group of locals,” You don’t have some kind of built-in entitlement to success just because it’s your dream. Yeah it’s unfortunate you didn’t succeed, but if you don’t win your locals over, you’re going to struggle to run a restaurant.
A good live demo would be to set it up pointing to a fishtank. You fire up the demo, you see the fish. No privacy invasion but everyone gets to see how the camera behaves.
Unfortunately, it does need to show that you can identify individual people in large rooms, long hallways, outdoor facilities, and vehicles or plate #'s in parking lots, roads, etc.
But the live demo should be Flock's own offices, not their customers.
They came to do a "deep dive" developers' workshop with us and all the materials were things that are literally on their public website. Let that sink in: Their idea of a deep dive for developers was to have some sales guy read us parts of their website.
You know the linux kernel is a free software project right? If you think “somebody should” do a thing but you aren’t prepared to do it yourself then you should maybe ask for a full refund.
That is not at all how it was and this is strangely similar to the (also untrue) astroturf narrative that got repeated about Martin Shkreli after he got imprisoned for fraud.
FTX users lost money to Alameda by Alameda being able to trade without collateral. He literally stole money from users of his exchange by allowing this.
It absolutely is not lack of rigor and discipline - He was dishonest about it.
There are 2 plausible stories about the origin of the name for this curve which was used as an example in a calculus textbook by Maria Agnesi on how to do an integral with partial fractions. The website gives one version of the story, that the curve is named after the latin for a coil of rope which Agnesi then turned into Italian as la versaria. The other possibility is that since the curve was in a problem, she meant l’aversaria (our adversary/opponent, but crucially the feminine version of this noun). In any case, when it was translated into English, the person translating said something along the lines of “Well aversario is the devil, so aversaria must mean ‘witch’” and so the curve became known as the “Witch of Agnesi”.
This curve (the folium/leaf of Descartes) is also very cool. https://www.2dcurves.com/cubic/cubicf.html#folium%20of%20Des...
Decartes and Fermat had a massive falling out via letters over trying to get a method of deriving the tangents of this curve, with Decartes insulting Fermat because Fermat’s method was insufficiently rigorous even though Decartes was unable to take the tangent using his method and a modern calculus student would recognize Fermat’s method as very similar to the modern definition of the derivative as the limit of the difference quotient. Decartes was very uncomfortable with the fact that it seemed to be dividing by zero.
reply