This must be the most unusual "musical" instrument I have known. Invented to entertain a "stressed out prince", it had cats arranged by the pitch of their voice. And keys that poked their tails when pressed.
This must be the most unusual "musical" instrument I have known. Invented to entertain a "stressed out prince", it had cats arranged by the pitch of their voice. And keys that poked their tails when pressed.
Gnope. Gnot doing it. Gnot today, Gnot tomorrow.
Kall me krazy, or just konfused, but I kan't konceive klicking to another desktop. Kount me out.
—47F0 on Slashdot, commenting on upcoming GNOME 2.14
(Gnot me. They say they've got a new allocator now, so I'm willing to check out. GNOME has grown increasingly sluggish in its 2.x releases; 2.10 crawls on my old PC.)
Some scientists filled a pool with gum and asked swimmers to give it a try! (The answer came as a surprise.)
This air-ship is still under development. "The craft would have a range of several thousand miles and, with an estimated top speed of 174 mph, could traverse the continental U.S. in about 18 hours. During the flight, passengers would peer at national landmarks just 8,000 feet below or, if they weren't captivated by the view, the cavernous interior would easily accommodate such amenities as luxury staterooms, restaurants, even a casino."
The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.
—William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
So after 30 minutes of preparation, full confidence and a brief prayer Pierre leapt off the massive buttress, holding a mute grab in first 50 feet and then continuing the 4 second freefall before hitting the snow. Jamie's bomb hole left him buried 6 feet under the snow for roughly a minute until he was dug out by nearby photographer, Adam Clark. He skied away making deep powder turns from the record breaking air with a mere bloody lip.
TIME has a cover story on Google this week—a very interesting albeit long article. Excerpt:
Unlike many competitors in Silicon Valley, Google tends to let engineers run the show. The company is almost allergic to marketing. (Name another $100 billion company that doesn't run TV ads.) Innovation tends to bubble up from those bright young minds. The challenge is keeping them all happy. The free food and laundry and the heavily subsidized massages and haircuts all help, but there also has to be enough creative work to go around. Google came up with a formula to help ensure this. Every employee is meant to divide his or her time in three parts: 70% devoted to Google's core businesses, search and advertising; 20% on pursuits related to the core; and 10% on far-out ideas. The San Francisco wi-fi initiative resulted from someone's 10% time; so did Google Talk, a free system for instant and voice messaging. If Google ever builds that space elevator, it will no doubt be during 10% time.
Another:
To keep innovating, Google has to outwit and outspend the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft for the best young brains. Even though few of Google's insta-millionaires have cashed in their stock options and quit since the 2004 IPO, Google is on a hiring binge, adding about 100 people a week. It applies quirky tests of talent. Google once put up a billboard on Route 101, the heavily trafficked artery that links the Valley to San Francisco, that said, in its entirety:
(first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e).com
No Google logo, no recruiting pitch. Just the equation. The curious who solved it (yep, it's 7427466391.com) typed the answer into their browsers and went to that Web page, which offered another, harder problem (don't ask) that finally led to an invitation to interview at Google. The company also has inserted the "Google Labs Aptitude Test" in geeky publications like Linux Journal. It poses 21 questions, ranging from absurdly complex mathematical equations to poetic queries like "What is the most beautiful math equation ever derived?"
TIME: In Search of the Real Google
I read Freakonomics (Steven Levitt/Stephen Dubner) over this weekend. It is a book hard to describe: think of an economist pondering over raw statistical data and bringing out insights that escape most people.
I particularly liked the chapter What Makes a Perfect Parent? The authors find that "obsessive parenting" does not alter your child's destiny as much as it is touted; they say some of its traits are more of marketing ploys (e.g., child seat).
Here is an excerpt that I think makes a lot of sense.
But this is not to say that parents don't matter. Plainly they matter a great deal. Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago—who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed. ... But it isn't so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it's who you are.
A new paper reveals that the reason a spider can stick to walls is something we studied in high-school physics: van der Waals force. They think they can use this knowledge to improve Post-It notes!
Andrew Martin, from the Institute of Technical Zoology and Bionics in Germany, said, "We found out that when all 600,000 tips are in contact with an underlying surface the spider can produce an adhesive force of 170 times its own weight. That's like Spiderman clinging to the flat surface of a window on a building by his fingertips and toes only, whilst rescuing 170 adults who are hanging on to his back!"
Julia Glass has an opinion piece in New York Times on greatness of fiction. Comparing memoir and fiction, she says, "The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape."
A good novel is an out-of-self experience. It lifts you off the ground so that you have the sensation of flying. It says, Look at the world around you; learn from the people in these pages, neither quite me nor quite you, how life is lived in so many different ways.
A memoir says, Look at me; learn from me how one life has been lived. That solipsistic focus has its place; it, too, can move and inspire, but only fiction can give us faith that we all have the imaginative capability to understand any number of stories not our own, especially the stories of people who never would or could write a memoir.
Further along, the author deplores the modern society that craves for realism and shudders at "witch museums".
Have we grown impatient with flights of fancy and with the sort of rumination that takes us deeper into ourselves? Psychotherapy takes too long; even yoga's getting stale. We're so thoroughly "plugged in" that it feels unnatural to be carried away on the private, illusory adventure of a novel. Americans want their diversions short, loud and filled with telegenic hardships. Perhaps there is a growing consensus, however sad, that the wayward realm of make-believe belongs only to our children, along with talking pigs who run the circus.
Indeed, some of my most favourite books are stories and novels. I know what Julie means when I read Kuvempu, Hesse or R K Narayan. Non-fiction is often limited by reality, but fiction is imagination on fire, a boundless ocean that takes on new shape, new meaning every time you read it.
Breathtaking!
Link
If there are 50 students in a class, what is the probability that two of them share the same birthday?
Quite low, we all tend to think. Mathematics, however, says that the probability is close to 90%. What's more, if you add 10 more students, the odds climb to 99%.
Old, but still relevant.
The Economist has an article on "Arab Human Development Report 2002", published by UNDP. The report laments lack of three "essentials":
I cannot imagine a sticky, sugary mess flooding my neighbourhood, and strangulating and killing people ...
In all, twenty-one lives were lost in the disaster—mostly to crushing and asphyxiation—and 150 injuries were reported. It is said that a lawyer for Purity arrived on the scene within hours and tried to pin the disaster on anarchist saboteurs, but despite this continued insistence, the company ultimately paid out about $1 million in settlements, equivalent to about $11 million today. The nearby harbor remained brown through the rest of the winter and spring, and it took over six months to clean the structures, automobiles, and cobblestone streets of the sticky mess.
Aerogel is reported to have a whopping 15 entries in the Guinness Book of World Records, including "best insulator" and "lightest solid".
Visit Aerogel page to read other astounding properties of this material.
PS: I have covered neodymium magnets earlier in my older blog.
As Dr Clive Wood, director of the Happiness, Personality and Health course at Cardiff University, says: "Nowadays acquisition is very important. People believe that if they win the lottery they will become hugely happier, and for a while they do, but human beings have a surprising capacity to return to where they started. The problem is that once you're wealthy you become habituated to being wealthy and you want to know what the next thing is. We're constantly striving, which stops us being happy."What about experiences?
Experiences, on the other hand, become more valuable to us as time goes on. Their charm does not wear off but increases as experience is central to our identity. ...Interesting.
This is bizarre. Sci-fi material, if it were not true!
And then there's the sting. Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third. The Israeli researchers found that they could also drop oxygen consumption in cockroaches by injecting paralyzing drugs or by removing the neurons that the wasps disable with their sting. But they can manage only a crude imitation; the manipulated cockroaches quickly dehydrated and were dead within six days. The wasp venom somehow puts the roaches into suspended animation while keeping them in good health, even as a wasp larva is devouring it from the inside.
Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.
—John Galsworthy
Tony Long seems to be speaking in my stead here. I too disapprove of Ayn Rand's "Objectivism" and the way it upholds selfishness as a virtue. Oh well ...
History shows us that very few smokestack barons, railroad kings, mining magnates, real-estate moguls or software gurus came by their wealth cleanly or honestly. Yes, many rose from humble backgrounds, some started their businesses in a garage, but people have a way of changing once they've tasted wealth. Those who scrambled to the top of the heap were almost always those willing to be the biggest bastards in a society of cutthroats. I suppose that does qualify, in some minds, as having "earned" your money, but how do you admire such an ethos? This is where Ayn Rand and her merry band of objectivists execute their major pratfall.
The point is, while you might believe that Apple or Microsoft or some other company produces things that make your life worth living, worshipping at the feet of their captains is misplaced. In the end, who cares whether Gates gives away millions or that Jobs does or doesn't? It's easy to have billions and give away millions, because you're not really sacrificing a thing. Besides, noblesse oblige is to be expected, not admired.
I'll save my admiration for the guy making minimum wage who still finds the time and a few bucks to help someone less fortunate than he is. Or the schoolmarm who teaches your children how to read. Or the doctor who provides affordable medical care to a needy community instead of setting up a lucrative practice in Beverly Hills. "Hero" is a word that's bandied about a little too casually these days, but there are still real heroes out there. Almost without exception, though, you've never heard of them.
Link: Worship Not These False Idols
If you miss your car at work, you can have it there too—for £2500! Link
