Stats help? I have a sequence of bytes "a[]" where I know the mean and standard deviation. Suppose I want to group a into "n" bands (not necessarily contiguous in the original "a"). What I want is a lookup table "b[256]" where, for each byte in a[], b[a] will yield a number 0..n-1 with approx equal probability across the whole of a. I think I used to know how to do this, but A-levels were a long time ago.

(written by me, ages ago) when once I stop and take account of these that God has granted me upon the earth, the loves, the friends, the work, that charm and please these things I count inestimable worth; when once I stop, I learn that I am rich beyond the dreams of emperors and kings and light is real, and real these riches which exceed the worth of all material things... when thus I stop, I cannot understand when few and feeble sunbeams cannot find their way into that drab and dreary land, the darkness of the middle of my mind. yet darkness cannot take away my joy, for night can only hide, and not destroy.

By the way: I'm part of a fledgeling housing co-op called Citrus Housing Co-operative Ltd (in Wales, Tai Sitrws). We are buying houses in Manchester and Swansea, and adapting them. All of us are queer or disabled, most both, and many of us have other kinds of oppression. We're fully mutual, so the adult tenants jointly own the houses. We are five adults, four teenagers (one fostered), one cat, and one dog. If you would like to lend us money at compound interest, let's talk: info@sitrws.org . Boosts appreciated in any case.

Okay, actually, I do want to know how people make a living from social media. I've been putting out original content several days a week for over ten years. I make $9 a month from Facebook, and nothing from anywhere else. How do they *do* it?

I wish people would talk more about how programmers get, essentially, groomed into thinking we're special. We get told we're geniuses, and high achievers, and compared to ninjas or rockstars or whatever. (That's their justification for asking you to sign away your right to overtime, and killing off any unionisation effort and any sort of solidarity with other workers.) But we're not rockstars. We talk as though we were a profession, but we're not. We have no regulatory body. We have a representative body that most programmers have never heard of. If we're high flyers then so are the electricians and the plumbers, but you never hear about that.

In "This be the Verse", when it says " Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself." Get out of what? I'd always assumed it meant life, but maybe it just means your birth family.

The hills are alive [oc]

Can anyone tell me whether the Sunday Times Magazine of October 6, 1985, contained an article called "The death of a son" by Dr John Diamond?

Many of you probably know I have a life-long constructed language called Nimyad. This week I have begun the long-overdue task of gathering all the documents together, from the last thirty years or so, and consolidating them all into the Book of Nimyad. As part of this, I was delighted to discover a conlang font (Fairfax HD, by Kreative) which contained the glyphs from the Amlin script in the private use area. I knew the names, but the glyphs themselves had been lost to me. Thus I have been able to reconstruct some sample text today. #conlang #nimyad