I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.

This was, altogether, a remarkable experience - both in its sudden onset and its extraordinary course. It seemed to have resulted from some external toxic influence; I surmised a connection with the substance I had been working with at the time, lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. But this led to another question: how had I managed to absorb this material? Because of the known toxicity of ergot substances, I always maintained meticulously neat work habits. Possibly a bit of the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips during crystallization, and a trace of the substance was absorbed through the skin. If LSD-25 had indeed been the cause of this bizarre experience, then it must be a substance of extraordinary potency. There seemed to be only one way of getting to the bottom of this. I decided on a self-experiment.

Exercising extreme caution, I began the planned series of experiments with the smallest quantity that could be expected to produce some effect, considering the activity of the ergot alkaloids known at the time: namely, 0.25 mg (mg = milligram = one thousandth of a gram) of lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate.

From LSD: My Problem Child by Albert Hofmann. I will leave it to others to explain all the ways in which this is absolutely hair-raising.

In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[11][9] Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations.[12][13] Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership.[14] In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.[15]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Decline

It’s probably not quite right to call it an open source alternative, though. I don’t think that gopher or anything was established in a monopolistic way, but that was before my time. Besides, the internet was all universities back then.

It was 1943 and even in Switzerland fuel was not to be had. Incidentally, it was the same day that the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto began.

Meh. The guy wanted to integrate micropayments in HTML as soon as it took off. Would you like that better?

To be honest, I wouldn’t have been much impressed by the HTML specifications, either. An open source alternative for gopher? Oh, how cute. Be sure to tell all your geek friends.

Today, LSD would never be discovered. Guy didn’t even use gloves and lived to 102.

Hmm. Per Facebook v. Power Ventures, it could be a (criminal) violation of the CFAA to “circumvent” IP blocks.

I’m glad to hear you say that, cause after sending I worried that I didn’t make much sense.

I used that text as a little test for the AIs at DDG. Here’s from Claude 3 Haiku.

Here is the translation to English:

Complex Numbers and Polynomials

Something that hardly anyone knows is that complex numbers, in addition to their application in Complex AC Calculations (known to HTL students), also have a second, important use.

In mathematics, there is often the problem of finding a number x for a given function f(x) such that f(x) = 0 holds.

This is often the case for polynomials, as many important mathematical functions can be well approximated by polynomials.

The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra states that if we allow x to be a complex number, then there is always a solution to the problem such that f(x) = 0.

Restriction: but the polynomial must not consist of only a constant term, i.e., f(x) = 5 would be inadmissible. The x must appear at least once in the polynomial. Otherwise, there are really no restrictions :-)

PS: In the example given in the image (f(x) = x^2 + 2 = 0), a solution would be approximately x = √2 i ≈ 1.4 i.

Then I asked: “Please make it understandable to a general audience and phrase it like a pop-science author would.”

Here is the translation in a more accessible, pop-science style:

The Hidden Power of Complex Numbers

Most people think complex numbers are just some obscure math concept, useful only for electrical engineers. But these mysterious numbers actually have a hidden superpower - they can solve all sorts of important math problems.

You see, in math, we often want to find a number x that makes a function f(x) equal to zero. This comes up a lot when working with polynomials - those nice, smooth equations made up of powers of x.

The problem is, sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be any real number x that does the trick. That’s where complex numbers swoop in to save the day!

The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra proves that as long as we allow x to be a complex number (a number with both a real and imaginary part), then there will always be a solution that makes f(x) equal to zero. No exceptions!

So complex numbers unlock the ability to solve all kinds of polynomial equations that would be impossible with just regular old real numbers. It’s like they have a secret mathematical superpower.

Of course, there is one small catch - the polynomial can’t be a simple constant, like f(x) = 5. It has to actually contain the variable x somewhere. But other than that, complex numbers can tackle any polynomial problem you throw at them.

So the next time you see an imaginary number like √(-1), remember - it’s not just some weird math trick. It’s a powerful tool for solving important equations. Complex numbers may seem strange, but they’re secretly the heroes of the math world!

Electrical engineers use them for calculating AC-circuits. In a DC circuit, you only have to worry about how much volt and amperes are in each part of the circuit. In an AC circuit, you also have to worry about the phase, cause the voltage goes up and down. The phase means where in that up and down you are.

The complex number is interpreted as a point on a 2-dimensional plane; the complex plane. You have the “normal” number as 1 axis, and orthogonal to that the imaginary axis. The angle of the vector to that point gives the phase.

They can be generally used for such “wavy” (ie periodical) processes. But I think this particular field of electrical engineering is the main application.

https://annas-archive.org/volunteering

Be aware that helping Anna’s Archive may be illegal, or even criminal.

A different, more legal archiving effort is the Archive Team. It focuses on public data on the internet. https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior

In some places without a strong freedom of information tradition (like the EU), this may still be illegal.

Huh. I thought I did check OED. Maybe it’s cause I don’t have a subscription. Or maybe I just mucked up the search.

The physicist who named the particle apparently liked to come up with nonsense words in his head. Later, when trying to decide the spelling, he came across a quote by James Joyce and spelled it “Quark”. Unfortunately, the particle rhymes with fork, while the german cheese rhymes with Mark.

According to his own account he was in the habit of using names like “squeak” and “squork” for peculiar objects, and “quork” (rhyming with pork) came out at the time. Some months later, he came across a line from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:

Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Sure he has not got much of a bark

And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

The line struck him as appropriate, since the hypothetical particles came in threes, and he adopted Joyce’s spelling for his “quork.” Joyce clearly meant quark to rhyme with Mark, bark, park, and so forth, but Gell-Mann worked out a rationale for his own pronunciation based on the vowel of the word quart: he told researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary that he imagined Joyce’s line “Three quarks for Muster Mark” to be a variation of a pub owner’s call of “Three quarts for Mister Mark.” Joyce himself apparently was thinking of a German word for a dairy product resembling cottage cheese; it is also used as a synonym for quatsch, meaning “trivial nonsense.”

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/quark

However, there is another interpretation of the quote.

This passage from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, part of a scurrilous 13-line poem directed against King Mark, the cuckolded husband in the Tristan legend, has left its mark on modern physics. The poem and the accompanying prose are packed with names of birds and words suggestive of birds, and the poem is a squawk against the king that suggests the cawing of a crow. The word quark comes from the standard English verb quark, meaning “to caw, croak,” and also from the dialectal verb quawk, meaning “to caw, screech like a bird.”

https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=quark

This sounds very learned and all, but I can’t find that standard English verb in the dictionary.

It used to be, you got 3 quarks for a mark, but then it was 6 quarks, because the euro was 2 marks. Now you only get 2 quarks, though, because of inflation. It’s always just up and down. Stupid cosmologists.

You think the managers at Aldi work for the satisfying feeling of serving their community or what? Aldi cut costs in any way possible and greeters are simply a very visible way.

Aldi isn’t really a direct competitor of Walmart. There are other more similar (hypermarket) chains in Germany that directly offered the same as Walmart. For its attempt to enter the german market, Walmart bought up a bankrupt chain of such hypermarkets. The stores were in worse locations than those of their competitors. Basically, it was unwanted left-overs. The Walmart, closest to me, was right next to its competitors but on the far side. It was just a little less convenient. If they had been able to offer better prices or quality, that might have made it worth it. But they couldn’t. There were only greeters and packagers.

It is telling that Aldi is successfully expanding in the USA while keeping the same model that made it big in its home market of Germany and the rest of Europe.

When Walmart tried to gain a foothold in Germany, it hemorrhaged billions before giving up. The managers responsible covered their asses with bullshit about cultural differences or unions, but the truth is that they just couldn’t offer competitive prices. Looks like, even in the US, shoppers favor low prices over wasteful frills like greeters.

While the possession and cultivation of marijuana are already banned in Japan, the country will prohibit its use as well, setting a prison sentence of up to seven years for violation.

Ok, so that clears that up.

That reminds me of an old joke. Life in Soviet Union is not different from USA. For Dollars, you get everything.

Not true. Though the nazis certainly built a lot of additional Autobahnen to prepare for the war, they knew they would start. Fun fact: Wehrmacht logistics largely relied on horse-drawn carriages. The soviets got Studebaker trucks.

Insurance is generally for contingencies that are very rare but ruinously expensive. The average cost per person is low, but the cost to the one it happens to is extreme, like a reverse lottery. So it makes sense for a large group of people to pay a little bit of money each month, to pay for the cost to the one. This is how both health and fire insurance work. (Health care is about more than that but that’s a different and less straight-forward story.) So, anyway, that’s why sane people view it that way.

Historically, the problem with private firefighters was that you had a business that made money when there were major fires. That’s a bad incentive. You get similar bad incentives in health care, too, which is one reason why coverage for some interventions may be denied. Another thing about fires is that they are contagious. They threaten the entire neighborhood. That’s why you have, for example, the CDC in the US. Controlling contagious diseases is not left to private providers.