MEaster
MEaster t1_iy7wkub wrote
Reply to comment by Thoth_the_5th_of_Tho in TIL that after the battle between the USS Constitution and HMS Guerriere, the captain of the Constitution, Isaac Hull, refused the sword of surrender from the captain of the Guerriere, James Richard Dacre, saying he could not accept it from a man who fought so gallantly by alcapwnage0007
Well, to be fair to Canadians, one of the goals the USA had going into the war was to take Canadian territory. I'd say stopping an attacker from taking your shit counts as a victory.
MEaster t1_is9k4zr wrote
Reply to comment by albasri in How do we know the exact color of things? by ItzzStrike
> These assumptions of our visual system can lead to fantastic illusions where constancy fails. Classic examples are when you see a sweater in a store under one illumination and then go outside and it's a completely different color. This is in fact the explanation for the dress illusion from a few years back -- depending on your assumption of the color of the light in the store (yellowish or whitish) the dress appears either blue and black or white and gold.
A while back I applied colour correction to that dress image. The centre image is the original, with the left and right sides being colour-corrected. The circles indicate where on the image I told Lightroom to consider neutral grey. If I recall correctly, the left side was the first point I selected, but the right hand side I had to hunt around a bit as Lightroom kept trying to go more like the left side rather than the white/gold look.
MEaster t1_jarrb8q wrote
Reply to comment by byllz in TIL "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps" is an example of an impossible task. The idiom dates at least to 1834, from the Workingman's Advocate: "It is conjectured that Mr. Murphee will now be enabled to hand himself over the Cumberland river or a barn yard fence by the straps of his boots. by meat-juice
For those wondering how this is solved, a simplified explanation is that when the processor leaves its reset state, it starts executing from a fixed address in memory, which is connected to a permanent storage instead of RAM, and which holds a small program that then loads more complex software off a disc.