Random Thoughts XII - Floccinaucinihilipilification

[Aiken_Drumn]

Most non serial threads spring from some sort of current (then) event or thinking that was relevant at the time. With very old threads, many of the participants are no longer even here. For the staff, if such an old topic is still relevant, a new thread is a better vehicle for the discussion. 2022 is not 2009 and sensibilities are likely different and even the language used may have changed. Digging old long unused threads is not a good substitute for crafting an interesting OP on the same topic that is suited to today's conversations. If you like reading through threads from 2005, you certainly can; you could even start a thread about how things have changed since then and provide links to the past.

Is there any dispensation for the OP bumping their own threads..

 

[Takhisis]

Are you asking for a friend?

 

[Takhisis]

This too is luck, according to Takhisis ^_^

(ala Diogenes and a plucked chicken)

Oh? Well, if you like it, then look at this picture.

Getting a mild cold sucks. I wish we had the technology to get over it faster!

Drink hot tea

I recommend orange-flavoured tea, which I'm using right now to get rid of a cold.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

Are you asking for a friend?

That would require friends.

 

[Takhisis]

Hmmmm. After checking my hard drive, the best I can offer you is a package of 300 Twitter accounts which will give you a like every day.

 

[Farm Boy]

I guess I understand that it's conventional internet logic to lock old threads. I just remain confused as to why it makes sense, even after the explanation. I still think it says something sad.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

Hmmmm. After checking my hard drive, the best I can offer you is a package of 300 Twitter accounts which will give you a like every day.

I'll take it!

 

[Takhisis]

It's just one like between all 300 of them.

 

[Synobun]

It's election season in Vancouver.

One of the socialists running for the parks board has the last name Pinochet. I wonder if they genuinely have that as their last name or if they changed it to be that.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Is there any dispensation for the OP bumping their own threads..

Persistence is not always a virtue.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

Persistence is not always a virtue.

We are too long in the tooth to imagine I'll learn this lesson Beej!

 

[Synobun]

Hockey season starts today. I find myself... uninterested.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I guess I understand that it's conventional internet logic to lock old threads. I just remain confused as to why it makes sense, even after the explanation. I still think it says something sad.

Be glad CFC isn't like a forum I used to belong to. Any thread that had no replies within 3 days was locked, as the "logic" used by the staff there was that nobody was interested, so it didn't matter if someone just found the thread on the 4th day and wanted to reply to it.

Besides, if you look at the older threads from 10+ years ago, some of them have formatting issues, as links, images, and codes have turned into alphabet soup. Some posts have been rendered basically unreadable due to that.

Hockey season starts today. I find myself... uninterested.

Same here.

Speaking of hockey... some ambitious people in Calgary want to try again to put in a bid to host the Olympics. They just don't seem to get that it's neither wanted nor affordable these days.

 

[Kyriakos]

Nearing the end of the Conway biography :/
At some point he says that he didn't like one proof of something, by a colleague, because to Conway it felt like it wasn't a proof that shows why the thing is so; merely a proof of how it would be impossible for it to not be so.
This is, of course, very true and nice. An easy example of such proofs that don't tell you anything at all about why the thing they have proven is true, is those proofs which attack the problem from an angle that is outside of it - eg you want to prove some property in a triangle inscribed or etc in something, and you go by menial relations between sides: this is a proof, but you learn nothing about why the property actually is there, just that it is indeed there.
Conway was always favoring geometrical proofs, but also was into numerical demonstration when the first was impossible (famously in the case of his very-many dimensional symmetry group objects).

The good thing with so simple shapes (triangles, circles and so on) is that even when they are related or nested, you can still visualize their translations and rotations, which is likely the most intuitive way to see what is going on.

 

[Arakhor]

Is there any dispensation for the OP bumping their own threads..

Given that you only joined a year ago, I think you would find it hard to find an old thread that you started, eh?

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

Given that you only joined a year ago, I think you would find it hard to find an old thread that you started, eh?

Oh I'm merely inquiring for others that may wish to one day revisit some of their older concepts.

 

[Samson]

When they rescue people from drowning in films they should make the resuscitation process realistic so people have some idea how to do it IRL.

 

[Aiken_Drumn]

Doesn't exactly make compelling viewing, but if it saves a life?

 

[tjs282]

One of my bugbears is Hollywood's steadfastly maintained belief that CPR brings people back from the dead.

Spoiler alert: It doesn't. It just keeps the corpse oxygenated until it can be defib'd...

 

[Takhisis]

But if it can be defibrilated then it isn't a corpse…