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Posts tagged with bookmarks

What the idea of civilisational "collapse" says about history

↫ 2017-11-28 bookmarks

"The idea that the Maya or Easter Islanders experienced an apocalyptic end makes for good television but bad archaeology" "[and] dwell[s] on the supposed failures of pre-modern and non-Western societies rather than stressing their resilience in the face of difficulties or recalling the Western role in their eventual cultural destruction."

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2017-11-17 posts bookmarks

It seems it's taking rather too long for me to read these pages, so I'm going to post the links here and close the tabs.

These are outliers (the 99th percentile is 4 months), but that leaves 50 odd pages that were open for a couple of years and the worst for nearly 3.5 years!

Keyboard latency - huh, how about that?

↫ 2017-10-23 bookmarks

Things you don't know until someone measures them. "keyboards are often more powerful than entire computers from the 70s and 80s! [20x the transistors running at 16x the clock speed] And yet, the median keyboard today adds as much latency as the entire end-to-end pipeline as a fast machine from the 70s."

From boiling lead and black art: An essay on the history of mathematical typography

↫ 2017-10-20 bookmarks mathematics

Typesetting be hard work: "the word "present" as a noun hyphenates differently than the same word as a verb"

Knuth on possible future changes to TeX and METAFONT: "Let us regard these systems as fixed points, which should give the same results 100 years from now that they produce today."

Following 3.0, Knuth wanted point release updates to follow the progression of π (the current version is 3.14159265). Knuth also declared that on his death, the version number should be permanently set to π. “From that moment on,” he ordained “all ‘bugs’ will be permanent ‘features.’”