Points scored in overtime are not real points

I should know better than to write about college football, a sport that I pay little attention to. But it's a particularly egregious example of an irritating phenomenon. On November 24, 2018, in American college football, Texas A&M and LSU were tied 31–31 at the end of regulation, and Texas A&M won in overtime. But …

The new record largest known prime number

A few days ago, the discovery of a new record largest known prime number (282,589,933−1) was announced, making my post on "finding" record prime numbers somewhat obsolete. I could update it, but that would be silly. Instead, I'll discuss these record primes. It happens every couple of years: A new record large prime number is …

Win32 I/O character encoding part 3

This is the third, and possibly final, post in my series on Microsoft Windows console mode character encodings. It describes how to use Unicode reasonably cleanly, without the "chcp 65001" hack discussed in Part 2. See Part 1 for a list of the posts in this series. Again, the idea is that you are writing …