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The fit is (almost) trivial.

That's confusing copyright with patents. The right to publish Newton's books is separate from being able to apply the knowledge which a patent protects. Note that math equations cannot be patented.


> Note that math equations cannot be patented.

RSA can if you equal factors to 0.


"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."


Make like a tree and leaf?


Pretending to be a tree is, literally, the worst possible strategy imaginable if you’re trying to avoid being bitten by a beaver.


> I liked the film noir voice-over.

I remember the voice over the first time I saw the movie, possibly in a cinema. I liked it, and was surprised with the general level of dislike it has received. The film was meant to be a mid-20th-century film-noir detective drama.


Is it transcribed anywhere?


> Windows Vista came out and everyone hated it.

People had difficultly opening the plastic case it came in. I did. Ms added a red pull tab to indicate an affordance, then later changed the case to a simple clam shell for Windows 7.


You're off a generation. The boomer's kids have kids.


The boomers have great grand kids, so off by two generations.


That's average or mean. Median is the middle value.

From the article:

> It can lead to some discussion about statistics and why you might prefer a median to a mean in most cases.

My best example for median vs mean is property prices, where very expensive properties will skew the mean (average value) upwards but the median (middle value) will remain about the same.


The overflow thing would be about computing the median of some sub-range of a sorted array. It is an often-quizzed thing that comes up as an edge case in binary search of a large array, but could apply to anything where you need to select the middle element of a sub-range of an array and the sum of the start/end indices could overflow.

I think the lore is that it was a bug in Java?'s binary search lib decades ago?


Indeed: https://research.google/blog/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-n...

P.S. I can’t believe this happened over 20 years ago, I must be old.


> That's average or mean. Median is the middle value.

The median of an even number of values is typically defined to be the mean of the two middle-most values.


There's also an interesting relationship to variance when you only have mean and median


So who's on first?


Monty Python’s Matching Tie and Handkerchief Executive Version.


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