Unfortunately for you, not only are people notoriously (in linguistically savvy circles) bad at properly making and recognizing all of the vowel distinctions, you're also just wrong- affect and effect share a valid schwa initial pronunciation, and compliment and complement share their pronunciation.

The phenomenon you have fallen prey to is hyperarticulation, also responsible for the 'off-ten' pronunciation of 'often'. (Compare to soften, for example.)

Pronunciation is a bad place on which to perch your well-trained pride.

I think you misinterpreted my post. I have zero "pride" in place here. I was simply responding to the parent post that some of these may not be homophones (at least according to my definition).

For the record, the OP's strong reaction to people getting the words wrong is not something that bugs me. I commonly mistype words like weather/whether and there/their.

You could set up a karma threshold to vote, or perhaps allot an increasing number of votes per day based on karma. It doesn't depart greatly from the present karma thresholds and would limit the drowning of commenter votes by reader votes.

To add to what has been said, the article notes that the Europeans responded well to infectious diseases- they quarantined and evacuated. This limited the spread and the overall lethality of any diseases on the Europeans.

But also the filthiness of Europeans protected them. Their filthiness had been developed over millenia as the population became more dense, giving lots of time for the population to evolve immunities (and for the diseases to become more potent).

This arms race meant that the diseases were tough, the Euros were tough, but those races who had been spared the arms-race of filthiness were sitting ducks to the Euro super diseases.

Though you really said it all, anyone who feels like reading a long article that says the same things:

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science

If you found this interesting, you might prefer Yudkowsky's reasoned http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified transhumanism and http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/fun-theory

Difference tables don't operate on a "pattern"- they simply take the difference of the two terms above.

No, but the point is that using a difference table to find the "next term" in a sequence is rather stupid if the difference table doesn't terminate until you run out of terms.... the implication of that is that you have a sequence which cannot actually be fully described via that difference table.

It's the difference between a stapler and a staple remover.

There's already a mechanical implementation:

http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Mechanical_logic#Flip...

I can't tell if those are diagrams of what the circuit should look like, or actual in-game implementations.

Exactly.

One of the best things about dwarf fortress is that playing it using that initially-confusing interface rather than shiny graphics is like doing math using symbols and equations rather than paragraphs and paragraphs of words.

Except the diagrams I saw didn't look like the other in-game circuits I saw. So, I'm still unsure if those are diagrams or in-game implementations. If you know, please tell me.

They're in-game inspired diagrams. The key is in the paragraph above the start of the 'Unclocked Logic' section.

     A
  →o * o→M O
   o * o
     B

The mechanical power goes in the first →, and the [M O] part is the output. A and B are the AND inputs. Gearboxes actually look like *, but o is also being used for gearboxes, albeit gearboxes that are just there to drain power.

The colored gif image at the top of the page is an in game implementation. The black and white characters are diagrams, but are quite accurate to what the game would show.

Those are not in-game implimentations. They might be diagrams of the linkages necessary to impliment it, though, but I can't understand them.

I get the impression that only some of the basic logic gates have been implemented yet, and that the rest is still theoretical.

In the comments he admits that public APIs should be defensive, but internal APIs should be 'known good' via testing.

Twitter has allowed for a focused elucidation of a tiny concept. It bridges the gap between the line-by-line nitpick of an article and the 'so-short-it'd-be-flippant-elsewhere' single line nitpick.

It helps that this is a small twitterstorm with a bunch of seasoned professionals, but the following seems like a slightly more asynchronous IRC convo: http://orbit.vect.org/misc/gamedesign.html