> "It's not an actual trapezoid that describes the shape of a field, or some configuration of the planets in space," Ossendrijver told Live Science. "It's a configuration in a mathematical space. It's a highly abstract application."
> "Actually, this particular tablet has ugly handwriting," Ossendrijver said. "It's slanted. It's like cursive if it were written very rapidly. It's very abbreviated. He left out everything that is not absolutely necessary to follow the computation."
Clay tablets texts were written in soft clay mass, just pressing the clay with the wooden stylus produces the marks. Only once it's baked it is durable.
Mir can mean numerous things. And how is it not how Google Translate works? Do you have inside information? Because the only information we have is that it scours the web, makes connections, and forms a graph. Can feed it some "corrective" data as well.
> a modern boss is tolerant, he behaves like a colleague of ours, sharing dirty jokes, inviting us for a drink, openly displaying his weaknesses, admitting that he is “merely human like us”. He is deeply offended if we remind him that he is our boss – however, it is this very rejection of explicit authority that guarantees his de facto power.
> This is why the first gesture of liberation is to force the master to act as one: our only defence is to reject his “warm human” approach and to insist that he should treat us with cold distance. We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude.
I got a copy of the first volume in this series (After Man: A Zoology of the Future) when I was 5 years old, and it was one of my favorite books growing up.
They are not brainwashed to the same extent that the people of North Korea are brainwashed, but the majority of them do get all of their news from (State-owned) TV channels and uncritically subscribe to the ruling party's ideology.
They're brainwashed to the same extent that many people in the US are brainwashed.
The wonderful thing about modern propaganda is that it has become so subtle we often mistake it for our own opinions.
As a European when I watched CNN for the first time at the early stages of the Iraq war, I first wasn't sure whether it was supposed to be satire or fiction. It took me a while to realise that this is what many people think of as "news" in the US. Makes me wonder what I miss in our own news media -- you only spot bold faced lies when you have a trusted reference you can compare them to.
BS. People use the internet. Most people support the goverment, why is hard to accept that ? Democracy only works for north americans when they like the leader....
> [instead of referring to "Mom" as an example of a non technical user] ideal nouns will refer to non-human or purely technical categories, such as cat, non-technical user, Ubuntu user, or “newbie.”
The persona for which you are designing your software is a cat? Are they going to chase the cursor? Are they illiterate? Do they lack color vision?
Similarly, "newbie" means something completely different from "my mom". A newbie is new to your software, or perhaps this class of software, but may be quite technical otherwise.
An Ubuntu user is far more technical than average.
This is an absurd level of political correctness that gets in the way of design by forcing designers to use language that's inconsistent with their thoughts. If this is really such a big issue, you can create a male persona and use his name to refer to this class of users.
> Describing software or algorithms as “sexy”, “hot”, etc.
Describing someone or something as sexy is by no means male-specific language.
The hypothesis presented in the article is that of an ancestor simulation. A future post-human civilization may very well be interested in the brains of their ancestors or creators.
This doesn't measure your personality, but the content that you choose to share on Facebook. I work out regularly and am very hard working, but I choose not to post about those things. Does this mean that I am less conscientious?
The list of words used for the Extraversion trait is all slang and poor grammar. Is it not possible for someone to be extroverted while typing status updates in complete sentences?
http://www.livescience.com/53518-babylonians-tracked-jupiter...
> "It's not an actual trapezoid that describes the shape of a field, or some configuration of the planets in space," Ossendrijver told Live Science. "It's a configuration in a mathematical space. It's a highly abstract application."
> "Actually, this particular tablet has ugly handwriting," Ossendrijver said. "It's slanted. It's like cursive if it were written very rapidly. It's very abbreviated. He left out everything that is not absolutely necessary to follow the computation."
You can read the details here:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6272/482.full
The supplementary materials give a full transcript of the tablet you linked (one of several):
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2016/01/27/3...
> 1 The day when it appears: 0;12, until 1,0 days, 0;9,30.
> 2 0;12 and 0;9,30 is 0;21,30, times 0;30
> 3 is 0;10,45, times 1,0 is 10;45.
> 4 After completing 1,0 days, until 1,0 days 0;1,30.
> 5 0;9,30 and 0;1,30 is 0;11, times 0;30 is 0;5,30.
> 6 0;5,30 times 1,0 days is 5;30. (erasure) 10;45 and 5;30 is
> 7 16;15, the total. From appearance until station the motion is 16;15.
The actual trapezoid is mentioned in another tablet, which is also translated.
To see how the numerals actually work, just look up Babylonian Mathematics. It's a pretty simple base-60 system.