blintzing's comments

Check it out here: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs140e/

http://dilbert.com/strip/2011-02-12

CSS-Tricks has a pretty handy guide, too. If I need a quick reference when developing, that and MDN are my go to.

The Latin librae, solidi, and denarii became pounds, shillings and pence.

There are 12 pence in a shilling, and 20 shillings in a pound.

So, "£6 30s 4d" is (6)+(30/20)+(4/240)= £ 7.51

It's rather odd that such an exact amount was given, which is what the sentence points out.

(Also, not to be picky, but I see no mention of Google+ Photos (let alone its status as "deprecated legacy") on the announcement blog post: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/picture-this-fresh-ap...)

It's confusing to me, but trying to explain it to my mom is absolutely impossible. I wonder whether the average user even knows there's a difference between the two. It's a perfect example of unnecessary redundancy.

I think the idea that brilliant minds have been 'wasted' on prime numbers is nonsense. Don't 'highly intelligent people' have the right to pursue what interests them, and even disregarding that, won't they do their best work on problems that interest them?

Even further, is learning anything that is not practical or useful a 'waste'? Certainly not. Calculus might not be of the utmost importance career-wise for an aspiring musician, but learning it helps us think in new ways.

> The vast majority of "useless" mathematics really do turn out to be useless.

That's fine! So long as we strike gold every once in a while (cryptography, which is pretty essential to the internet functioning as anything more than a bulletin board), math is doing it's job.

I think a great example of this is cryptography. The foundations of it come from number theory (prime numbers, modular arithmetic, elliptic curves), but the subject of number theory, before the advent of computing, was possibly the most useless kinds of mathematical 'art' that could have existed. I imagine it was the mathematical equivalent of frolicking in the fields.

Mathematicians explored Fermat's little theorem starting in 1640, but they didn't do it because they knew it'd be useful several hundred years later in RSA. They did it simply because math is worth exploring in itself.

Even if you don't subscribe to the idea that we should pursue math for math's sake, history shows us that it's very difficult to know what parts of math will be useful to humanity, especially hundreds of years later. Since people work best on what they find interesting, mathematicians should continue exploring the topics that most interest them, because we really can't say with any certainty what will prove useful (or even essential) to future generations.

Neo4j, though marketed differently, is a similar approach (but the Community version is GPLv3 and Enterprise is AGPLv3). The Cypher query language is declarative in a similar way to Datomic - the biggest missing feature is transactions.