Who upvoted this? Please explain ....

I want to be enlightened

@Verde hehe

because of the multiple answers and several upvotes on them, it's #4 in the SE hot list...

that usually draws people from other sites who'll vote regardless of whether they understand or not

I can't find it in the docs, so: does anyone know of an internal option similar to PlotPoints for BezierCurve[] and BSplineCurve[]?

@Verde Apparently, the augmented functionality of ParametricPlot[] is not very well-known...

@OleksandrR. You've seen this book by the same guy, I gather?

@J.M. Oh, your answer is nice. I doubt that was the question, though :)

@R.M Sometimes I think they personalize the hot Q list ...

@Verde I wish they allowed us to, but no. You're force fed hot questions from other sites even if you have no clue what they're about

@Verde Yeah, I'd agree; OP was very skimpy with details...

@R.M What is the basic difference between AM and FM radio? ... a switch, obvioulsy

How do I open a terminal? ... with a screwdriver

Can a PC do anything while it is Sleeping? ... snoring?

@R.M Interesting hot questions

@Verde instantrimshot.com

It is an awesome terminal. It even unwraps cylindrical distortion.

@Verde Well, least common denominator and all that...

brb

@J.M. hehe your's and David's answers are awesome (comment by the OP) ... so he hadn't the slightest idea about what he was after :)

@Verde all 3 answers were exactly what the OP wanted :P

most curious :=)

Do we have a "canonical" "Why to avoid loops?" question somewhere? We could post it in a comment and close the horde of "How to loop ...?" questions that flourished lately.

@J.M. You here?

I was trying to find something at oeis and the Mma code there is lame. We should do something about it :)

@R.M Nice, thank you!

@Verde I am now, but I won't be here long...

@Verde A good portion of the Mathematica snippets there could use a liiiittle bit of optimization. :D

@J.M. Yep. I wonder if it is a valid procedure to post questions about those and propose the best answers in oeis

under a generic |stackexchange| user

@Verde Sounds like a plan. SE is about improving the Internet, after all...

What particular sequence had the crap code?

and oeis is a good place to get a little publicity

There are a lot of memory/processor hogs there

On the other hand, some sequences really are tough to generate...

@J.M. well, I'm confident in your skills :)

@Verde Does this have anything to do with the discussion you had with Oleksandr earlier?

@J.M. Discussion? Which one? About compression?

@Verde You two seem to have been discussing this sequence earlier...

Oh, no. I was trying to find Limit[ n^-n HarmnonicNumber[n, -n], n-> Infinity] and browsed a lot of sequences in oeis related to that

So, I saw a lot of lazily written Mma code

Well, I gotta go. Let me know if you're pursuing the "improve OEIS" project further. :)

ok. bye!!

@SjoerdC.deVries Bah, you don't allow us to enjoy homework questions

@verde Didn't you vote to close?

@SjoerdC.deVries But not to delete ...

@verde you can still enjoy it

Nah, I can't bear someone being wrong on the Internet, and stevenh was wrong

@Verde @J.M. Looks like Fred Daniel Kline has privileges on OEIS... you might want to enlist him if you plan on proceeding with your mission :)

@R.M I think almost anyone can submit an improvement

well, I don't really know how their administration and backroom politics works. Take Wikipedia, for instance. It is now a myth that it can be edited by anyone. Unless you're a top level administrator, you have little to no chance of wading through the bureaucratic bs and get your improvement to stick

@R.M Yeah :). But I guess it is much more difficult to get sued because of an integer sequence than for an article criticizing WRI. Or wait ..69..6969 ... 696969 ... perhaps not

@Verde You might have to change the sequence {5, 55, 555, ...} to {7, 77, 777, ...}

@R.M We always could try 96 .. 9696 ... 9696 ... but probably boring

@R.M could you please explain to me what you did to edit my code so that sigma looks like sigma?

@chris Σ σ

@chris usefulshortcuts.com/alt-codes/greek-alt-codes.php

full table alt-codes.net

@chris I just replaced them with unicode Greek equivalents :)

@R.M @Verde thanks... there's a saying: "I ll die less dumb"

@chris Cleverness and immortality don't need to be opposites.

@chris Another thing you can do: type in $\TeX$ like \sigma, wait for MathJax to render, then copy the text in the preview into the editing area.

@J.M. wish that worked with lower case script too

@R.M Yeah, can't have 'em all I suppose...

@Verde Well, "eyes everywhere" and all that. Just like Rome was...

@J.M. So, you CAN have 'em all

@Verde I was thinking about plebs like me... :)

@J.M. Rome called itself an Empire. Things were much easier to understand then

I think the answer to the CountryData question is that the errors and approximations to the individual countries' polygons result in a net smaller area

Other than antarctica, there are no other neglected regions

amazon.com/The-Decline-Fall-Roman-Empire/dp/0679423087

@R.M Never was a rounding error so dramatic. This time New Zealand was nuked.

I'd like those neglected islands, please... :D

@J.M. As per Vitaliy's answer, their area is negative

@Verde Surprisingly, it wasn't boring...

@Verde So, anti-islands... anti-archipelago?

@J.M. Gibbon was a genius. Did you read his bio?

@Verde No; maybe I should. Where do I look?

@J.M. Something like that. I think kiwis and Dodos imploded

@J.M. I have a little book here. Let me see if wikipedia is up to the task

@Verde (Also, I read that tome about five years ago, but never thought to look the author up.)

@J.M. Gibbon's work has been criticised for its scathing view of Christianity as laid down in chapters XV and XVI. Those chapters were strongly criticised and resulted in the banning of the book in several countries. Gibbon's alleged crime was disrespecting, and none too lightly, the character of sacred Christian doctrine, by "treat[ing] the Christian church as a phenomenon of general history, not a special case admitting supernatural explanations and disallowing criticism of its adherents".

It was 1780 ...

Imagine that!

@Verde I actually can; it's surprising how many people out there these days are onion-skinned when they shouldn't be...

@verde I am more surprised he wasn't lynched. When was the quote you mentioned (complaining about his lack of respect for the obvious supernatural aspects of this) uttered?

@acl follow the link. Although, in 1780 they lynched you if you opposed to the industrial revolution, not religion . Link :en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gibbon#Legacy

at least in Europe ...

Gibbon was a most extraordinary guy, as most French intellectuals of those years

@he was criticized by theogians! Amazing!

Just read about D'allembert

There were lots of very interesting people in many places in Europe at the time. Presumably elsewhere but those apparently are lost to us