Notices by Nate Cull (natecull@mastodon.social), page 19

@enkiv2

Yes Brain, but where will we find a fiberglass tank, an electric fish, an electrostatically charged sphere, an oscilloscope and a permanent magnet at this time of night?

also: argh how can I already be half way through

Chapter 4:

Dustin has finally met his match in Erica

Chapter 4:

Erica gives Dustin a case of the thousand-yard stares

Apparently the UK parliament has a feature called 'pro-roguing'?

I should hope it did. We don't want *amateur* rogues running things.

@CarlMuckenhoupt This post distims me greatly.

A summary of the Space Dynasties:

Ming Dynasty (1934-1940)
Warring States (1939-1945)
Tang Dynasty (1957-1972)
Song Dynasty (1969)
Han Dynasty (1977-1983)
The Later Ming (1980)
The Later Han (2015)

I'm not sure if it's 'Ancient Roman Google Maps' or 'Ancient Roman TripAdvisor' but either way ORBIS is pretty cool

except somebody needs to tell them that Firefox is a thing

http://orbis.stanford.edu/

@zensaiyuki Also nice!

@zensaiyuki I wonder if good ol' Binary Coded Decimal is still lurking out there somewhere?

@zensaiyuki probably not! it's still a binary-based format, so powers of 10 are probably still just as nasty.

@zensaiyuki yes that headline is misleading - it means 'will replace IEEE Floating Point (tm) in scientific applications' because it can encode numbers in half the bits

@zensaiyuki which is to say, instead of exponent * fraction, it's got three parts: 'regime', 'exponent', 'fraction' where 'regime' is variable length and tells you what power the exponent goes up by.

Number go up fast!

(he recommends no more than *three bits* of exponent)

@zensaiyuki it is *A* floating point number format explicitly designed to be better than IEEE Floating Point (tm).

but I mean tell me this isn't beautiful

One 'complex infinity' number which also counts as 'not a number', but is a perfectly good number (pretty much exactly James Anderson's 'nullity'... just without also the other two infinities). No overflow or underflow states; numbers just stick at MINPOS and MAXPOS (and, I assume -MINPOS and -MAXPOS) (minimum/maximum possible) rather than zero or infinities.

That last diagram is 7 bits getting you a million times dynamic range (+- 1/1024 to +- 1024/1)

@vector

Tim: So this is the Binford 9000 with turbo-supercharged rotary Kerr-Wheeler geometrodynamic black hole engine, which could suck the aliens right out of the Schumann Resonance ! We're going to plug it into this Purity Control Erlenmeyer flask here.

Al: don't think so, Tim.

We know there are weird lights in the sky sometimes and there are voices in people's heads and other weird crap and... maybe... a few weird fragments of melted metal, and every generation or so some bright folks try to crack the mystery, and that's really about all there is to the entire Conspiracy, I think.