K‮ly‬e @khird@qoto.org

@freemo So ideally you'd want something "black" to visible light and "white" at infrared wavelengths to both absorb external radiation and reflect internal black body radiation inwards. Assuming you can only have one or the other, a quick back of the envelope calculation suggests that the sun's radiation, which is on the order of a kilowatt per square metre and would be irradiating roughly your frontal area (let's call it one square metre, total 1kW) at polar midsummer, is the dominant effect over your body heat, which I estimate as 2000 kcal/day, roughly 100W. So I'll go with black.

@freemo

White clothes are better camouflage in a snowy environment. Getting killed by a polar bear would cause your body temperature to drop to ambient; thus white clothes are an advantage for staying warm.

@valleyforge

@valleyforge I remember trying to figure out what that project was a while ago - I eventually concluded that it is the zombocom of software

@freemo is this the same principle as groundwave/skywave differences that make AM radio much better at night?

@rchrd

@namark enough bells & whistles to make it worth it. Little file browser follows you around, resizable tabular view of variable matrices like spreadsheets, command history log, it adds up to a rather nice experience. The built in IDE can go choke on a porcupine though - its auto indentation in particular really fights me every step of the way.

@aluaces It appears to affect more than one desktop environment (but only Octave, not other programs on the machine). I'm experiencing it on Cinnamon, and [here](https://reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/hg2xjm)'s a guy with the same kind of problem on something called Pop Shell.

Does anyone use GNU #Octave #GNUOctave on Linux? Every time I switch workspaces it keeps hoisting itself on top of the other programs I have running - I would love to learn how to disable this behaviour.

@shoshin I'm not sure what you gain from airing this publicly - if you violate the rules you won't be welcome on this server. I did you a courtesy by only removing the post and warning you since racism is technically a banning offence. Racist jokes don't get a free pass because they're humour; they are subject to the usual rules about racism which you can find at qoto.org/about/more.

tagging @freemo re: report 2181

@louisrcouture thanks for these posts! I really appreciate the very literal translations because I frequently learn a new word or two after puzzling over the French and then seeing the English later.

@worldsendless [Feeder](https://gitlab.com/spacecowboy/Feeder) is nice. I like that I can set specific feeds to trigger notifications while others just silently add their contents to the overview.

From its readme:

> Feeder is a fully free/libre feed reader. It supports all common feed formats, including JSONFeed. It doesn't track you. It doesn't require any setup. It doesn't even need you to create an account! Just setup your feeds, or import them from your old reader via OPML, then get on with syncing and reading.
>
> Features
>
> - Parses HTML and displays it in a native TextView
> - Offline reading
> - Background synchronization
> - Notifications
> - OPML Import/Export
> - Handy access to enclosure links
> - Material design

Anyone with a #stats #statistics background:

I have a record of several hundred events. Each event occurred at a particular univariate condition x and had a binary outcome y. I don't get to choose x; there are about a hundred values that occurred exactly once, up to a maximum number of fourteen repetitions at one value of x (to measurement precision). The samples are roughly clustered around a central value of x, not uniformly distributed.

Is there a recommended way to estimate the local probability of y as a function of x (that is, if I measure the conditions as x=X, how likely is it that y will occur)? Simply averaging all samples at x=X doesn't give a usable curve, because all the single-sample values swing it wildly to zero or one, regardless of what any neighbouring samples have done. Currently what I'm doing is summing the averages over all samples where x<=X and the average over all samples where x>=X, then subtracting the average over all x. It looks more or less like the smooth curve predicted by theory but I'm pretty sure this counts as "misuse of statistics".

I'm especially interested in identifying regions (intervals on x) where I can say the observed probability differs from the prediction of theory by a statistically significant amount. I think coming up with a formula for a confidence interval would be the way to go, but feel free to point me in another direction.

@valleyforge Well, for certain values of "you":

> City, county, state and federal agencies, public schools, public and private institutions of higher education, public hospitals and political subdivisions are eligible to buy from TCI.
>
> Ineligible entities include, but are not limited to, non-profit corporations, private schools, private hospitals, private enterprise and individuals.

@valleyforge I'd say right-wing and left-wing groups are both deontological, but with different orders of preference in their rulesets. The political centre is where you find people who value pragmatism over principle.

@realcaseyrollins couple Canadian ones I know of relating to Sikh religious objections to dress codes:
Sikhs may not trim their hair, including facial hair, in respect for the natural state of their body as intended by God. In the military, they can legally be ordered to modify their hair for operational need (e.g. to accommodate gas or oxygen masks), but in the absence of such orders, are exempt from the normal regulations concerning hairstyles.
Sikhs must carry a dagger, to maintain readiness to defend the helpless. Schools cannot prohibit the wearing of the dagger, but can require it to be immobilised in its sheath so it cannot be drawn.

@louisrcouture Crazy Richard's

@Acer "cardinal direction" for north + east + south + west. Maybe "handedness" for the other pair, but that implies only a subset of the possible meanings of the original terms.

@realcaseyrollins

Open the developer tools and check the network tab. Are you seeing a lot of JSON responses that say "rate limit exceeded"? I think their client software may be accidentally DoSing the servers.

@freemo From *Letters on Infidelity*, 1786:

> Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity thirty pages to answer. When this is done, the same question shall be triumphantly asked again the next year, as if nothing had ever been written upon the subject. And as people in general, for one reason or another, like short objections better than long answers, in this mode of disputation (if it can be styled such) the odds must ever be against us; and we must be content with those for our friends who have honesty and erudition, candor and patience, to study both sides of the question.

@realcaseyrollins I'm glad it interests you!

Here's a simple demonstration. Grab something like a DVD case and toss it in the air three times, spinning it a different way each time:
- First, toss it with a flat spin around the shortest axis
- Second, toss it with an end-over-end spin around the median axis
- Third, toss it with a lengthwise spin around the longest axis.

What you'll likely notice is that the first and third spins maintain their direction a lot better, while the second one starts tumbling and twisting in midair, no matter how careful you are to spin it evenly. This is because a rotating object's response to a perturbation depends on its axis of rotation, and random currents and eddies in the air start affecting the DVD case as soon as it leaves your hand.
- If it spins around the axis with the greatest moment of inertia, the perturbations diminish, leading to stable frisbee-like throws.
- If it spins around the axis with the least moment of inertia, the perturbations diminish, leading to stable football-like throws.
- But if it spins around its intermediate axis, the perturbations tend to grow, so even small imbalances end up having large effects, and the motion is wild and chaotic.

The [Wikipedia article on the subject](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_racket_theorem) has videos and shows the mathematical analysis.

@realcaseyrollins It's actually a really important subject in my field. "Perturbation analysis" is a method of calculating how something reacts to being disturbed from the condition it's supposed to be in. For example, let's say you have an aircraft that's supposed to be flying level, and a gust of wind or something causes it to dip just slightly below level (it's been "perturbed" from level flight). It's important to know whether the aircraft will tend to return to level flight (the perturbation tends to diminish, so it's stable) or tend to dip further away from level flight into a steep dive (the perturbation tends to grow, so it's unstable).