WR...S

Usually OOP requires more memory and processing cycles than a well-written functional program, though. Though there's probably truth to labor hours and cognitive load - it may even be, if it evolved through OOP techniques, especially if religion's gotten mixed up, that the actual calculations are buried under centuries of abstraction.

I can't help but think that the idea of morphs requiring OOP shows a certain lack of respect for Turing equivalence... the only way I can make it make sense is that the Uryuoms we've met are also hamstrung by a religiously-tinted mathematics background, just on the other side of a schism.

Evan Williams, aka my writing partner.

...wh... how the za did I miss this?! ...zarrit, I was joking before, but now I actually am off to AO3!

I'm not sure "not everything evolves" is exactly the right response to that.

Of course, now that the adult magazine anyone but Dan and the BBC would have named has gone to emphasizing the articles to the exclusion of "other interests"...

... Welp, if anyone needs me, I'll be on AO3.

Clearly the most controversial thing about this strip will be Dan's inability to handle capsaicin on his/her/their chicken.

I feel the teeniest bit guilty about this, but, er... I couldn't help but pick out this sentence from last Friday's NP commentary... I kind of have to wonder... should we be taking note of this? I mean, it wouldn't exactly be the shock of the century if Dan Shive asked to be referred to as "they"... And I suppose, due to the title of this thread, would anyone else rather be referred to in a way their infobox might not reflect? (By all means call me "she," "he," "they," or "it," for the record.)

Apparently there are, since Dan himself decided at one point that doing the comic in greyscale wasn't actually helping.

Well, that just eliminates the whole point, then.

I can't help but think that the person who asked this question has the initials "D.S."

Hmm. Is it just me, or does the TF sequence look very DA/FA to anyone else? Especially the "shocked, shocked, suddenly loving it!" progression. Heh. Note that Amanda doesn't challenge Lisa's shippiness. I wonder what we'll see when Rhoda comes out...

So I guess this is semi-confirmation that Noriko is indeed a wizard... and that the proper term for a female wizard is "wizard."

Brought to you by the letters A, V, G, and N.

Considering that Dan has said there will be shrinking (eventually), that Grace "saw" Rhoda shrink herself, that the symbol looks bidirectional... I'd say it's basically certain that she can shrink people. But still, it feels like it's been right around the corner longer than I've been reading.

It's weird... fourteen years of shrinking being a non-canon tradition, and it still hasn't happened in canon yet.

I was cautiously optimistic until I saw the first trailer. It... pretty much looked like a Scary Movie entry. Honestly, I don't watch a lot of new movies, so I wasn't planning on seeing it anyway, but unless it gets Fury Road-level reviews, I'm not going near it. That said, it's hard to think that misogyny isn't a factor in the level of ire it's received, although misogyny alone couldn't do it; it's sort of a perfect storm of nostalgia, misogyny, and, like the new CoD entry, just plain looking like crap.

Tri... tri... trilogy?! ...how? Why? Just, on every level, what?! If you're going to make a series, at least make it a tetralogy, sheesh. Plus, the canonical film adaptation has already been made. (Hmm...combined with the trilogy, maybe two wrongs make a right.)

A comic at the end of Slumber Party seems to be missing. After Robin and Jason are turned into girls, Robin worries that Anne's not going to turn them back; Jason dismisses the idea and shows off a dress he'd bought after the Jean Grey incident. It's the first time the name "Robyn" is used, so... yeah. I checked the one shots, the fillers, even the next chapter, but it doesn't seem to be on the new site at all.

It's true that if everyone on Earth decided suddenly that pi were exactly 3.14159265359 we'd be climbing into a handbasket as small errors accrued, but individually, immediately, even that designer you mention is working within a margin of error, since someone will have to build what's being designed. That was really mostly meant to stress just how small a contradiction is still a contradiction. As for the definition of pi - maybe. I probably should have gone with e instead, due to pi's roots in Euclidean geometry, and Euclidean geometry's roots in our own perception. So let's say for the sake of argument that pi is indeed defined as the lowest positive real number for which Euler's identity holds - its place in Euclidean geometry, once Euclidean geometry is defined, follows without contingency, and that utter lack of contingency was the point.

Yes - in fact that was kind of my point - but if you read the post the post I was responding to was responding to, I was talking about humans at that point. I tried that. For some reason it kept quoting a completely different part of the post.

(Holy za, are quotes a pain on this new system.) It's true that IC manufacture requires extraordinary precision, but that the tolerance at any step, let alone any step involving pi, is less than 0.0000000000007% is something of which I'd need more substantial evidence to be convinced of than "because Einstein and quantum." You can come up with geometries where the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle isn't equal to pi, but that doesn't mean that pi is different, only that the circle is different. The difference in the circle will have other consequences precisely because pi is still the same. (And, in fact, you can't have that ratio be a constant other than pi, because non-Euclidean geometries are still locally Euclidean, meaning that as the circle gets smaller the ratio approaches pi.)

I remember that from (among other places) XKCD, but I've always found it an understatement. When you really look at it, when you dig deep down, even the most complicated results follow as readily, as necessarily, from first principles as the fact that the square root of 2 is irrational. Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is truly contingent on nothing not implicit in the pons asinorum. I would say that math is not only the basis for science, but thought itself, but even this is an understatement. Consider the number 3.14159265359. You probably look at that and think, "oh, that's pi," but it isn't - it's a rational number very close to pi. If in the real world you plugged in that number wherever you needed pi, you'd just about never run into problems, even in very specialized fields. Sure, there are a few cases where the phases of something-or-other would be noticeably off, but those would be few and far between. However, consider - truly consider, with all the implications - a world where this number were equal to pi. I'll skip to the end - you can't. Once you attempt to pick it apart, you'll find that two is three is ten thousand, because the formulae used to find pi are no more arbitrary than 2 + 2 = 4. In that way math not only precedes thought, it precedes that which precedes thought. It precedes our universe, the multiverse, the gods, existence itself, possibility itself, because none of that is meaningful without it. In that way it even precedes meaning. "There is always math" is an insult, because of the temporality in the words "is" and "always." Math precedes time. In short, whoever told you there would be no math lied.

Something just occurred to me - is there some sort of mystical connection between vampires/vampire hunters and lesbians? (...insert Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter reference here.) Only: Nanase was impressed into the Paris vampire hunt partially because she was a lesbian. Andrea, who's been going around killing vampires in Moperville, is married to another wo-... er, female. Diane, who has the blood of a vampire hunter, just happens to have a lesbian best friend.