dwcnnnghm's comments

The dialogue you refer to is Meno and the idea is a solution to “Meno’s Paradox”.

If you’re in America and want to help your native butterflies (and moths), the National Wildlife Federation has a tool for finding local plants and their respective pollinators.

https://nativeplantfinder.nwf.org/

Japan’s national bird (green pheasant) is, IIRC, the only national bird that’s also a game bird. There’s not many stories or symbolism with green pheasants (as opposed to, say, cranes) and it’s mostly known in the country as food. I’ve seen it argued that it was selected because it’s delicious (though the official line seems to be their ability to recognize earthquakes)

Corner Café in New Providence, New Jersey.

From Rob Pike’s blog: https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2020/01/utf-8-turned-20-y...

By “two held out hands”, do you mean a person’s wingspan? Is there something similar for centimeters? I’m asking out of genuine curiosity and not antagonizing. I would love to have more tools at my disposal. An inch, for example, is the length of the first digit of the index finger. [0]

With length, I find that most of my use cases are division into equal parts as opposed to scaling. The imperial system was designed for this (frequently using base 12) [1]. I understand that this may be due to my framing.

I agree with the sibling comment about temperature granularity. Fahrenheit set 0 degrees to the coldest temperature in his hometown, then used freezing water and body temperature as reference points. 100 degrees is about body temperature, and around as hot as ambient temperature gets for many people.

[0] Useless trivia: an acre is one chain (66’) by one furlong (660’) and was supposed to be the amount a field a single ox could plow in a day. Neither of the latter two measures are commonly used anymore but a mile was redefined from 5000’ to 5280’ to make it an even 8 furlongs.

[1] Apparently this is the reason that the French failed twice to establish Metric Time

Having lived in the UK, I found the balance between systems to be quite nice. I think that the Imperial System is actually underrated for daily use: most of the measurements are intuitive (based on sensory information and easily visualizable objects) and align better with common uses of measurements (rough approximations and division into equal parts). I think the metric system is beautiful and elegant, but for non-scientific tasks I don’t think it’s as valuable.

Miles and kilometers can be estimated by the Fibonacci Sequence. The conversion (mi -> km) is very nearly the golden ratio (1.61 and approximately 1.62, respectively, IIRC). For any number in the sequence taken as miles, the subsequent number is the distance in kilometers. Your way is probably quicker, but it’s a fun bit of information.

There’s an app for this [0,1]. It follows the calendar and shows you the current season, it’s haiku, seasonal foods, etc. It’s free to view the current season, but you can pay (one-time) to access to the entire calendar. The company that makes it [2] publishes a book as well, though last I checked, it was only in Japanese. They also have an app [3,4] for Nara, showcasing local activities in the area during each microseason.

[0]https://apps.apple.com/lv/app/72-seasons/id1059622777

[1]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.heibonsh...

[2]https://www.kurashikata.com/72seasons/

[3]https://apps.apple.com/id/app/72-seasons-nara/id1163139998

[4]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.heibonsh...

I appreciate you having a look! I totally understand if it's not enough to make a switch, but I'm glad you were able to see that it's not so bad on this side of things. There's definitely not enough niceties for the average computer user (GUI editing and installing) and some missing for any user (package manager). I will stand by piping as a matter of taste (the biggest benefit for me is it allows for using the tools I'm already familiar with, awk and grep or plain c/zig).

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My interest in neatroff is mostly the code itself. A tiny and opinionated project with readable source that still achieves quite a lot (all that I need anyways). But it's definitely not for everyone! The author doesn't use a windowing system, for example, and instead uses the framebuffer for pdf viewing and editing (both custom implementations). It is ISC, by the way. It's included in the bottom of the readme.

My apologies. I think I misunderstand what you mean by "ecosystem". All of your requirements are fulfilled by the tools I suggested. The guides I provided show complex typesetting (mathematics and otherwise), eqn does complex math expressions (more powerful than TeX according to Lorinda Cherry, the neateqn implementation by Ali Rudi allows for using TeX bracket syntax as well), pic and grap provide complex (2D) graphics, refer and bib2ref/ref2bib provide bibliography management, and all of it installed from a single repository and makefile (maybe this is different than an installer framework?) to under 43MB (including demos and acm fonts). XeTeX/XeLaTeX seem to only add support for utf8 (as I mentioned, natively supported by the plan9 *roffs) and various font formats (at least supported by neatroff, I haven't checked the others). Of course, pretty PDFs was the original point you quoted in the parent.

You should at least check out the neateqn guide for examples of math typesetting (even output in Computer Modern). But the original guide, as well as the others will show many more and different examples. These aren't groff guides. You might be surprised.

Plan 9 troff might work! It works with utf8 out of the box[0], and while I haven't used it for complex math typesetting, there is a command (eqn [1]) that was developed for it. I'd recommend Ali Rudi's port (neatroff [2][3]) for a minimalist implementation. There's also Heirloom Documentation Tools [4] which is an implementation of *roff-and-friends that uses Knuth's paragraph-at-once algorithm (instead of the original line-wise one) for typesetting, plus some other interesting features.

The authors of eqn wrote a paper about it: "Typesetting Mathematics" by Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry. Kernighan also wrote two manuals (one in 1976 with a revision in 1992, and one in 2007 with updates for the Plan 9 version). [5].

[0] utf8 was developed by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike during the creation of Plan9. The entire OS is compatible. Story here: http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history

[1] http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9/1/eqn

[2] https://github.com/aligrudi/neatroff

[3] PDF manual for neatroff: http://litcave.rudi.ir/neatroff.pdf

[4] https://n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html

[5] These (and more) can be found here: http://www.kohala.com/start/troff/troff.html

In the early days of computing (that is, when computer companies and universities were finding the first people to learn programming) music experience was a strong signal for programming ability! Playing music prepared them for focusing on the low-level details while holding the big picture in their head. [0]

[0] The Dream Machine by Waldrop

> Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind.

For the next level up here's Ken (in a very interesting conversation with Brian Kernighan about the history of Unix) describing McIlroy:

> McIlroy keeps coming up. He's the smartest of all of us and the least remembered (or written down)... McIlroy sat there and wrote ---on a piece of paper, now, not on a computer--- TMG [a proprietary yacc-like program] written in TMG... And then! He now has TMG written in TMG, he decided to give his piece of paper to his piece of paper and write down what came out (the code). Which he did. And then he came over to my editor and he typed in his code, assembled it, and (I won't say without error, but with so few errors you'd be astonished) he came up with a TMG compiler, on the PDP-7, written in TMG. And it's the most basic, bare, impressive self-compilation I've ever seen in my life.

This story, by the way, leads into how Ken created B (and how that was eventually improved by Dennis Ritchie into C).

[0] https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=2314

The discussion on Ghoti[0] around language standardisation reminded me of this essay. It's a review of an American Usage Dictionary[1] that centers primarily around the question of the purpose of dictionaries (as a prescription for the way language should be used, or as a record of use).

The post links to Harper's hosted scan of the original printing but it's a little difficult to read. There is a copy meant for screens [2] (under the title Authority and American Usage, subtitled or "Politics and the English Language" Is Redundant, as it was published in his collection of essays Consider the Lobster[3]).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23581841

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garner%27s_Modern_English_Usag...

[2] https://github.com/borges-paradise/DFW/blob/master/dfw-autho...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_the_Lobster

This is definitely true, but I think it's also valuable to ask "how much and how fast?"

I do think this is a great point but I do think the idea is fun to consider anyways. My first thought would be some (silent) {super,sub}script symbol/letter to indicate distinction between them. Obviously this feels like we'd be right back where we started but if every non-homophone was neatly standardised (and, as my sibling comment pointed out, every homonym made unambiguous) that seems promising! This is, of course, operating under the assumption that homophones are primarily edge cases (or that the other words in the homophone group are not often used in the same context, or at all).

Minimal research turned up two lists. One only lists groups of n > 2 (88 triples; 24 quadruples; 2 quintuples; 1 sextet; and 1 septet) [0]. The other is for British English (441 groups) [1].

Your example, by the way, is a particularly interesting case! From the Wikipedia page [2]: 17% of Americans (primarily in the Northeast and most clearly in Philadelphia, New York City, and Rhode Island) pronounce each distinctly, with a further 26% merging only 2/3 pronunciations. Accordingly, their distinct IPA pronunciations are /ˈme(ə)ɹi/, /ˈmæɹi/, /ˈmɛɹi/, respective to your ordering (the last, merry, is the one we've converged on). More frustrating still, the list of "multinyms" in [0] excludes this example so it's especially difficult to know how many there may be in practice.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160825095711/http://people.sc....

[1] http://www.singularis.ltd.uk/bifroest/misc/homophones-list.h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes...

Do you have any recommendations for next steps beyond Spock?

I learned Haskell at uni and am interested in going back to it for web work (instead of Erlang). Any insights you might be able to share would be really helpful!

I'm not sure if you mean that the murder was mentioned without reason or if Chris was the victim of a murder without reason. I think it's a bit unclear in the writing style (at least it was to me) that the book is a real story, about a real experience: and so it was terribly sad but (IMO) necessary to mention. Pirsig wrote about an important journey he took with his son and closed it with a mention of the end of Chris' life [0].

To anyone reading this thread, I also recommend Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals [1] by the same author. It's set some time after Zen, as the author struggles with the exact topic of the OP (the fame of the book and the challenges against his "Metaphysics of Quality" [2] that he introduces in Zen). He expands on the idea a bit more and goes into some unclear details from Zen. I thought it was an excellent book, maybe even better than the first.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig#Personal_life

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Lila-Inquiry-Robert-M-Pirsig/dp/05532...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirsig%27s_Metaphysics_of_Qual...

I had believed something similar. They are definitely remnants of a 10 month calendar, but July and August were existing months (Quintilis and Sextilis, respectively) renamed for the emperors. January and February appear to be the additions [0]. There is quite a bit of interesting history in the rest of that article about how the months have changed.

I can't remember if I'd read about a past society that did this, or it was an idea someone had proposed for a future one, but I love the idea of a 360 day year (12 months, 30 days each), with a 5 or 6 (leap year) day festival at the end commemorating the New Year. It would change birthdays for everyone born after January 30, which seems like it'd cause enough outrage to prevent it, but it's a fun thought!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar#Legendary_10-mo...

The French [0] tried to implement this twice! They failed both times, and I think it's due to more than having everyone in the world (or country) relearn to hold time in their head. Ultimately I believe it becomes less practical in day-to-day usage. 12 (and obviously 60, as a multiple of 12) can be divided by 2,3,4, and 6, while 10 can only be divided by 2 and 5. This would be the most difficult change for people, as a quarter or third of an hour are important metrics for daily life (I understand that seconds expand the divisibility for the sake of quarters (thirds remain unattainable), but this can happen in our current system and it's not often people speak in eighths of hours). I think this is a more common usage than the expansion of seconds-to-minutes, hours-to-seconds, etc. (a use-case where the decimal system really shines). Though, perhaps with the simplicity of the scaling, people would change their perspective on how they think/speak about time! It's definitely interesting to think about.

As an aside, I think this makes for a lot of practical uses for the imperial system of measurement. In a scale-intensive environment (science labs, kitchens, etc.), I think it would be foolish to not use metric. However, with small, one-off projects (mostly w/r/t length) I think it makes great sense to use feet and inches for halves, thirds, and quarters.

[0] http://mentalfloss.com/article/32127/decimal-time-how-french...