I haven't bothered with the new design. I don't care.

sigh

I'm on the new design all the time.

I'm not noticing anything really.

you're probably on a lot of other things right now.

Other than @tchrist meddling with the kerning every other week.

The fonts, they are a-changin'.

@Mitch well I did say I was watching Céline Dion. Can't do that sober, dude.

eternal truths

Why are you killing yourself watching Celine Dion?

I'm sure she's nice and all but

Nah it's just a figure of speech.

I'm watching other things now.

Also I was drinking yesterday so tonight I'm just sitting here with an ice tea.

And not the Marge Simpson kind.

I also actually didn't image search for topless ladies.

Because someone smart said I shouldn't.

@RegDwigнt oh. hm.

And if I did?

Yeah and now you're left wondering just how many more lies I have told you over the years.

topless in a box though

@RegDwigнt I'm still not

The answer is all. All the lies. And there's even more lies where these came from.

I care less about your lies than I do about font kerning

which is a pretty minor care.

That's a stab at Tom, not me.

So wevs.

There should be a question on ELU about "What is nougat?"

It's the full version of @Cerberus's favorite phrase.

I don't care about that either but I feel like we should go for comprehensive coverage.

He says NOU all the time, but really he means NOU gat.

And by gat he means Johnny Gat from the Saints Row franchise.

Because he's a gamer, that Cerberus, you know.

Hope that helps.

gamers. pfft.

ikr

aren't we all gamers?

some just take it more seriously

Well some are gay. Others are ers.

And that one guy, he's M.

that guy

Yeah he's dead now.

Got himself involved with matters secret.

I mean I feel bad for his family but

Oh that's a good question for ELU.

I am an old person. All I know how to do is 'Press A to continue' but only if someone expressly tells me to do so.

single-word-requests What is a gender neutral-word for "family"? I googled "masculily", but found nothing

@Mitch oh so you're that guy they implemented the "press A to pay respect" for.

Also "press A to not die".

after the nougat question someone should ask about 'fam'

The Great Irish Potato Fam.

@RegDwigнt you making fun of me but I don't know what that means.

two joy sticks just is super hard to learn

unless you're under 10 years old and spend 168 hours a week practicing

It's a meme.

That was in some Call of Duty or something.

knowyourmeme.com/memes/press-f-to-pay-respects

Yup, CoD: Advanced Warfare.

I've heard of Call of Duty. Everyone just says COD and all I can think of is that it means Conduct of ...

War

Fuck, I really do remember things.

I never played a CoD, ever.

Why is there now a popup on KnowYourMeme saying "we value your privacy"?

What kind of meme is that.

I will not click on that link

I think it might only be for Europeans.

unless maybe you can promise topless in a box

Well I can promise it.

oh nice.

it's something

You don't need to click anyway I gave you everything you need already.

Synopsis: Reg was right all along, again.

googles for box

You might find Chris Eubank.

Which sounds like a bank in Frankfurt, but that's a deception.

Well that's one double-entendre title.

Actually I'll just go watch it now. Haven't rewatched in months. Slacker.

@RegDwigнt Nougat is passé, it's Android 7. We're at Oreo now, number 8.

And I am hardly a gamer.

The last time I played a time is quite a while ago.

@Jasper have you had a second dinner? Ir is it time for breakfast?

@Mitch I just woke up in the morning. I am not hungry. Might not eat until dinner time.

well yeah now I see the need for two dinners

i have to start eating right after I wake up

so hungry

@RegDwigнt Among other things.

Anyway, the new Macbook Air comes in three colours: gold, silver, and grey, and I think the gold looks very cool.

Although there are many silver, plue, and even pink laptops these days, gold is still quite rare.

can't you just get a skin for anything nowadays?

A gold laptop certainly looks better than a gold watch. I would never get a gold watch.

get an Alice in Wonderland 4 dimensional mind suck?

Of course, it is not real gold.

Oh yeah, you can get gold for your desktop colour as well.

By desktop I mean the thing with the desktop icons.

@Mitch My first dinner was rice and fish and my second dinner was noodle and beef last night.

@Jasper I don't see the point of a watch any more, unless you're in a meeting and want to know what time it is without making everybody aware of the fact that you're bored as shit and would prefer to be cleaning toilets than be with those other people talking about 'business' and 'strategy' and 'ethnic cleansing' and 'user compliance' and stuff. JUst get your job done man

@Jasper mmm

I discovered that you can freeze noodles and they unfreeze in the microwave really well.

So I wonder why they aren't sold in stores like that.

@Mitch Of course people just check their phone for the time, but I still prefer a watch to see the time anytime easily. I think Swatch watches are cool, the ones with colourful straps, and I have one that is almost completely blue.

why bother boiling noodles. takes time and a pot to clean.

@Jasper Cuckoo clocks. Everywhere should have cuckoo clocks. makes a big efffing noise when it's time to stop. and you just have to stop immediately.

Yes, where I like to walk most of the time here in Antarctica, there is a big clock that makes a big noise.

I've been popping in to math.SE.chat lately. all they talk about is math. I don't get it

@Jasper I like clocks a lot, but they can really wake you up at night

@Mitch That's because I don't go there anymore.

I mean a little math doesn't hurt, but all the time?

Shows a lack of imagination

@Mitch I am not an expert in clocks, but are there watches that don't need batteries to run and you just need to move your hand now and then to provide power? I think so.

@Jasper haha

and all they talk about is math that is dumb stuff I don't care about.

I don't do math now, which is why I go to chat and talk. If I do math I would just work on my own quietly.

and then there's the 'logic' chat, which I think I would like, but there's only two dudes there talking. sometimes just the one.

I never discussed any problem with anyone even in uni. If I can't solve the problem I just leave it alone first.

@Jasper math is hard. I was watching 3blue1brown on quaternions and rotation in 4d.

Excellent animations.

I understand the view that exercises are needed for some people to learn math properly, but finally I found a respected author who said it is better to do research than exercises which are wasting one's time.

but then I tried to do some examples of 2x2 matrix transforms (for just the complex case) and I could barely write the start of examples down, much less derive anything.

mathematica is a crutch.

I think some things look simple but when you actually sit down to try to do it it is hard.

That's when you realise you never understood it.

@Jasper haha I was just thinking to myself that it is really hard to see the theory without dong lots and lots of examples.

That's why some people need exercises. But that's not how I learn myself.

I don't know if you care about using a symbolic math package to do all your examples for you but...

I'm going to give you the link anyway...

develop.wolframcloud.com

To me, if a result is so important it should be done in the book as a theorem, not an exercise.

it's online free mathematica

it's great

because it is free

And if it is not so important, then they are just mostly routine exercises with not much value.

@Jasper Oh yeah, I hate the examples at the end of the chapter that are really theorems

@Jasper I've heard that language learning is really much faster if they give you example after example with very small changes.

I think there are theory builders and problem solvers in math, but that is another matter, not the same as doing many exercises or not in a textbook.

Like number theory, you can have lots of general theorems, or you also can have very specific problems to solve.

I mean sure you need to have the declension table, or the conjugation of the subjunctive passive plusqueparfait

I woke up and I got a few more views on my channel. Quite a surprise.

@Jasper a lot of the examples on math.SE are of the magic sort where it says what is 1728^(10^9-1) mod 13

I haven't watched a movie in a cinema for years. Maybe I should watch Halloween in a cinema today...

which if you happen to know the thm, the answer is almost immediate

@Jasper movie theaters are good for big action movies

@Mitch 1730

I personally don't care for horror movies.

like watches, they scare me

@Mitch Ah yes I don't like those problems, but I would not go so far as to close them. Some people close questions with no useful context, but I think they should be left open, because a problem is a problem.

i can be scared by watching the news

@tchrist Is that done using the computer?

@Jasper Oh, they're totally not closable (even though they are very much most likely homework). I just don't care.

There is a user on Math SE who is like really an expert on computing integrals of all kinds.

that's a great art

Good.

mostly because there's no algorithm

you just pick up intuitions

She really can compute amazing integrals. Unbelievable. She might be the best in the art of computing integrals in the history of mankind.

like throwing a baseball

And she is one of the people I talk to a lot in that chat, though she doesn't say much to most others.

also, it's not a particularly useful skill

I think she is writing a book on limits, series, and integrals, but I don't know when it will be published.

I always equate her to Ramanujan.

because 1) there is a good algorithm for functions of elementary functions (in all the symbolic math things) and...

@Mitch That's basically how math works.

You just pick up intuitions, scribble them down, hand in your paper.

... 2) the ones that are not elementary function, people have written their phds on it and it's a one-liner in some reference.

@Mitch (1728 ^ ((10 ^ (9 - 1)) % 13) xors 1728 with the gunk in the other operand.

Whose 2 bit was apparently on.

@Cerberus Anyway, I am wondering whether you watched the 1981 movie Clash Of The Titans? I can't remember but there might have been a Cerberus in it. I know for sure there is a Medusa in it.

@Cerberus there's the part that is algorithmic (or rote application of rules) and there's the artistic part. there's a lot of controversy about all that.

@KannE That is amazing.

because the rote part is boring, but of anything in the world, that part is one where things are incontrovertibly true.

@tchrist what's funny is that you could probably do that in mathematica by direct computation in a second.

@Jasper I have not.

@Jasper yep, he's in that

Oh I wanted to mention one more thing about the Apple laptops. It seems that the prices they sell for are more or less fixed, unlike other laptops. It seems Apple controls the prices.

@Mitch Oh, yes, I usually do my math with a Chinese calligraphic brush.

played by lassie but with CGI to get it realistically with three heads

So there is never a huge discount or anything like that.

Yes.

@Jasper Apple is weird

@Cerberus I bet you do crosswords in pen

Their prices are just so high that shops can't add a lot of margin on them, or people would buy the exact same device elsewhere.

@Cerberus I think Chinese calligraphy is hard. I tried it once because they got an instructor to come to my school to show us, and I didn't like the art.

@Mitch ^ is bitwise exclusive-or; the power operator is **

Apple products are like a commodity. They're 100% interchangeable.

@Jasper Sounds cool!

@tchrist In logic, /\ means "and".

As you probably know.

So I'm surprised to hear that somebody should have used ^ for "or" instead.

@Cerberus If you want to learn the characters, this is a nice book:

@Cerberus in logic you need to prove that '->' is the same as '=>', because in some logics it is not.

amazon.com/Reading-Writing-Chinese-Characters-Compounds/dp/…

also mutatic mutandis for '|-' and '|=' on meta-mathematics

which is not the same as logic

but is kind a lot alike it

How come it doesn't expand anymore?

Maybe the link does expand in other people's browsers.

did amazon ever expand?

It did for me.

oh. not for me

etymonline should expand, but it doesn't

That book contains all the characters required in this proficiency exam by the Chinese government.

So it is like your SAT or something.

OK I'm already officially sick of Halloween candy

I was informally sick of it before but I didn't want to have a press conference about it until now

There is another version of the book that teaches the traditional instead of the simplified characters.

Simplified is used in China and traditional is used in Taiwan.

Is that a good learning book?

It's good for the characters, not for the language itself. It's basically character strokes and nothing else.

yeah just characters

@Mitch I had chips & dip for supper...a lot...I feel so sick now.

it looks good. but you need character exercise paper to practice

I read that some Japanese characters are simplified Chinese, some traditional Chinese, and some a modification of them but neither of the two, and of course some are completely non-Chinese.

@KannE what kind of dip?

@Mitch I didn't even think of that. I would just use normal paper, but that might not be the best thing for beginners.

@Jasper Japanese writing seems unnecessarily complex, well beyond the unnecessary complexity of Chinese characters, which is well beyond the unnecessary complexity of English orthography, which is itself unnecessarily complex.

I'm watching this:

Sorry.

@Cerberus I got news for you. It's all old people on Facebook.

Just not yours truly.

@Cerberus You're forgiven...for the moment

@Mitch French onion with Ruffles because...It's a holiday! My husband said it's not, but I convinced him it is, and now I need Tums...and maybe a cupcake.

@Robusto I know: kids scatter from Facebook (where there parents are now at) like ants from a foot.

Ugh, I messed up that sentence.

I was going to say ...

It was supposed to be something else and then I misedited...

Anyway.

I was on facebook for about a nanosecond.

Long enough for them to steal my data.

The total number of active Facebook users in Europe has been declining for a while now, and that is despite the number of old people discovering Facebook...

Alas.

I hope you didn't put too much on it?

@Mitch You're too kind.

@Cerberus Nope. Never trusted it.

@KannE I know that feeling.

cupcakes sound like it would be the right remedy, but trust me, it makes things worse

@Cerberus there are more and more old people everyday

@Cerberus de nada. that's what I'm here for

@Robusto about 5 years ago, all the kids wher itching to get on facebook, waiting to get to age 13 to do so...and then they got there found all their parents, and so left.

too many parents saying can I 'friend' you

makes everybody very uncomfortable.

and now the kids are on snapchat and instagram giving away their personal information there anyway, just not in front of old people

> children

This one wins.

His Facebook suddenly split in half telling him things about children to be wrapped in a block.

wrapped in a block

Nasty stuff.

these computers are horrible

It's cyber space options.

cyber space sounds worse

SO dangerous, those random cyberspace options.

And they ignore rulesets, too!

in their defense, it's very hard to find the spot to dismiss that dev screen, and old people just can't see things that well.

that seems lame, but that's exactly it. we can see things that they just can't, so we can't tell why old people seem so stupid.

@Cerberus that can lead to no good

@Mitch Yes, sure.

But still hilarious.

From this video 'twas.

but young people can't deal with estate planning and probate court for when people die

sigh

so there are different skills

Quite so.

that video takes forever. where do they find the clips? In other one-off youtube videos?

I think they make the video clips themselves?

I don't know where they get the screenshots.

Maybe Reddit? Four Chan?

@Mitch Yeah, I went to a birthday party last weekend, and my friend was going to throw away the rest of the cake...so I ate a whole block of Mister Rogers' neighborhood...or the pretend place where the trolley goes; I forgot the name of it...but I gave the BD boy the motorized trolley and an Elmo video, so he knows how to get there and to Sesame Street, too.

@Cerberus Haha. Happens to me all the time. I'm a connoisseur of "under the hood" ...

@Robusto You accidentally open the console all the time?

I usually open the bookmarks toolbar, for some reason.

Which I have never actually used in my life.

No. When I open the dev tools (of which the console is a part), it's on purpose.

Yay.

Even when I'm not doing development, I often want to see what is going on with a particular website.

Or I just want to do some math without getting a calculator.

Well, don't we all use the developer tools?

What does happen to me is that I accidentally close Chrome when I press control-shift-Q, which opens the network tab in Firefox.

@Cerberus Most people my age wouldn't know a dev tool if it bit them on the ass.

@Robusto I suppose that could be useful.

@Robusto Right! Nor would most people of any age...

Sure. Just write your problem on one line of the console and it gets evaluated all at once.

New Chrome does the eval even before you finish.

By problem, you mean a mathematical problem?

why bother thinking any more

I think I use Google for that.

@Cerberus Yes.

@Cerberus Well, you're using Google either way ...

@Robusto You almost sounded like the guy on Facebook with the apple-sauce problem...

@Robusto Firefox uses Google to evaluate math problems in the console?

...

@Cerberus Oh, I thought you were a Chrome user. Sorry.

what does one eat in Ireland? I mean just to keep alive?

Certainly not! Only occasionally.

So Chrome does that using Google's service, interesting.

@Mitch Guinness can be very nourishing.

@Mitch Dried Guinness residue?

fortified w vitamins?

Jinx!

@Cerberus No. Chrome is a Google product, ergo it is using Google software to do anything.

I would have expected that line to start with "yes", but OK.

@Cerberus It would have started with "yes" had you not specified Google's "service" (which could be different in the browser address/search bar than it is in the console, though not necessarily). I was just looking for more precision from you, and had to adjust my response accordingly.

I had no idea what to call it, but Google is providing a service allowing us to solve equations, so I settled for a generic word.

I also use it for measurements and currencies.

Opera and Chrome are so similar, don't know why.

It seems reasonable to suppose that what gets evaluated in the console is a different bit of software than what gets evaluated in the address/search bar.

I meant just what happens when you actually type the equation into the search field on google.com (for which I use a bookmark with keyword).

But, by golly, it also works in the address bar!

But all the browsers are copying each other, so they are becoming more and more similar with each new version.

I rarely look at the search suggestions in the address bar.

All browsers allow you to search using the address bar now.

However, it gets less than an actual Google search does, at least for me:

@Cerberus I often do, since most of the things I want to know someone else has already wanted to know as well.

sqrt((6*7)²)

This works on the google.com page, but not in my address bar.

I turn off the suggestions in the bar so that I don't get distracted from what I really want to search for.

And I use the quote marks to search for the exact string, for example "Cerberus is lovely".

@Cerberus Use JavaScript syntax for the console: Math.sqrt((6*7),2)

@Robusto But stopping to look, considering how many times to press the down button, then pressing enter(?)—that somehow feels like more trouble to me than just typing my full query. Oftentimes it wouldn't be exactly what I wanted anyway. I only use it on my phone, where typing is such a fuss.

@Robusto Right!

But that means more typing.

@Cerberus What else have you got going that you can't type a few characters?