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Cake day: August 4th, 2023

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  • You’re in luck!

    Why would you carry an Axe over the should opposite the hand you’re holding it with?

    That’s not an axe, it’s a bindle - exactly what a fool (in french, le fou) would carry.

    What is up with his pants

    He’s wearing medieval trousers - that is in fact two ‘hose’

    These trousers, which we would today call tights but which were still called hose or sometimes joined hose at the time, emerged late in the fifteenth century and were conspicuous by their open crotch which was covered by an independently fastening front panel, the codpiece.

    And again le fou is so stupid, his junk is out and all over the place.

    See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trousers






  • Islam, just like Christianity, has many different groups that believe the same basic doctrine but disagree on many points. The main splits in Islam (that echo some aspects of the Catholic vs. Protestant split) as Sunni and Shia. Each divides and divides again into small communities centred on one mosque (just as, eg, Protestantism divides and divides down to individual congregations).

    The big question is: how do groups of people decide which parts of the religious documents, history and practice are more relevant or even correct?

    Some groups are quite ‘secular’ (like the Church of England) while others are quite ‘fundamental’, meaning that they much more strictly follow whatever the group decides are the foundation of the religion.

    Is it possible to be able so say which of these groups is right? It seems to me that we have been fighting over this since before records began, so we most definitely do not have a way to do this that any majority agrees with. I don’t think anyone can say:

    Islamist groups purposely … twist actual Islamic ideology while the Christian Right just doesn’t understand the religious text they claim to follow.






  • Actually, PDF is a turing complete programming language.

    PDF is a simplification and wrapper around the computer language PostScript - a PostScript or PDF doc literally runs on the printer or computer and outputs the rasterisation of the thing you want to print.

    PostScript is language based around a stack. You can define functions (which may be fully recursive) that run on the stack.

    Here’s a small example:

    /ANGLE {
       newpath
       100 0 moveto
       0 0 lineto
       100 50 lineto
       stroke
    } def
    
    10 setlinewidth
    0 setlinejoin
    100 200 translate
    ANGLE
    
    1 setlinejoin
    0 70 translate
    ANGLE
    
    2 setlinejoin
    0 70 translate
    ANGLE
    

    As such, PDF that’s actually similar to Python, and HTML is closer to something like a JSON or XML document.

    Note however that HTML can contain Javscript or WASM programs, but these are embedded rather than features of HTML.





  • Linux was not muscled like that in 1991 - it’s first, barebones kernel was released in September of that year.

    I remember installing Linux on a 90MHz 486 in the mid 90s and it barely ran X server with a simple window manager. And if the machine was turned off while Linux was running, you might not be able to boot again.

    Linux now, however, is unrecognizeably better.