Category Archives: General

Catch-all category

General

Light and time

There’s lots of stuff in the popular press like “Hubble has let scientists make direct observation of the universe as it was 12 billion years ago.” (CNN). But that sort of construction doesn’t really make sense, does it, in light of relativity theory?

And when sources like CNN are making such scientifically suspect remarks in passing, what has the world come to?

[This has been #33 in the series “Things you didn’t know you don’t care about”.]

General

NOTCOT.ORG

Fun site to put in your feed list. It’s “a daily filtration of ideas+aesthetics+amusement” inĀ  “picturebook” form.

NOTCOT.ORG

General

withAttach is good

I hope they move a feature like this into Thunderbird’s default install. It would help prevent the prevalent failure-to-attach syndrome.

withAttach

General

Bad math again?

I wonder who’s really, really bad at math: me or George Gilder and the Wired editors:

“To handle the current load of 100 million queries a day, its collective input-output bandwidth must be in the neighborhood of 3 petabits per second.”

(From page 2 of a Wired story).

I’m willing to concede that there are things I don’t know about Google and/or Gilder’s calculation (not to mention his penchant for big numbers), but according to my calculation, that’s off by a factor of about 20 million. What a big number _that_ is! I’m impressed! I can’t think of any junk I could add to my calculation to get anywhere near that.

For your reference, since you care enough to read to the end of this article, my calculation was thus: I did a Google query and added the 5kB page to the two 5kB images (which are usually cached for me, but we’ll assume they never are) plus 1kB up for the request, to get 16kB per query.

16kB * 8b/B * 100e6/day / 24hr/day / 3600s/hr = 148Mb/s

3e15b/s / 148Mb/s = 20e6

General

“Good neighbors”

Nice little story, and a good counterpoint to the standard stereotypes of French people you hear ’round here.

I wonder how well that would work worldwide as a way to meet neighbors. My experience is that neighbors are more likely to come to you when they think you’re the cause of the problem…

General

Euphemism for bug

Listening to a NASA briefing, I heard a great phrase for ‘bug’: “a software feature that we hadn’t intended to utilize”. I’ll admit that the bug in question was not big, but I’d still call it a bug.

General

The joy of del.icio.us

By popular demand, and yeah, ‘popular demand’ can indeed mean ‘a single request’ if the population from which the request(s) came is only about three people anyway, I’ll add a bit more to my previous post about using del.icio.us as a browsing tool. And that bit is, that even if you don’t have an account or contribute links yourself, they offer different ways (more than I knew about, actually, until I just looked, because they’ve added some new tools) to see what’s hot with other users. All I do, usually, is use the recent additions (del.icio.us/recent). As you might notice from the link, I set the minimum number of linkers to 1 in order to get everything, because I personally find it most interesting to see what’s not popular (yet) but is still link-worthy.

It’s actually pretty amazing how often there’s something of interest to me in the recent links. I should mess around with their other discovery tools, but, ya know, randomness is good. That’s also why I visit LinkSwarm, although that’s more hit-or-miss (but also more ‘egdy’, so don’t let your mothers or employers see you lookin’ at it).

And, ya know, if my writing seems, as it may well be, especially disjointed or runny-onny, and jumps around a lot, it’s proabably because I’ve been watching Stella, which you should also, if it’s the sort of thing you should watch.

General

Infra Recorder

Because this was a bit harder to find that I figure it should be, I’ll help Infra Recorder shoot up the search-engine charts. It’s an open-source CD and DVD writing/burning solution for Windows. It’s a GUI that appears to be a front-end for the various CLI-oriented tools ported over from Unix-land (like cdrecord, cdda2wav, mkisofs, etc.)

I bought a laptop with a DVD-writer, but the burning software that came bundled is pretty abysmal. So of course I went off in search of an (why not?) open source solution. I didn’t find Infra Recorder (though I did find burnatonce, which ain’t too bad). But it found me on del.icio.us yesterday. I am getting a little freaked out about how del.icio.us can read my mind, but I guess I’ll live with that…

General

Bars of soap slipping?

I was going to lament the slow demise of the basic bar-of-soap cell phone design, but it’s not really as bad as I thought. Surveying three top wireless providers’ phone selection, I see that 10 of 59 are in this category. So I don’t have to worry yet that by the next time I want to get a new phone, I’ll be forced to live in flip-phone hell.

Actually, that survey showed me that there are still some cool things going on in phone design. This thing from Nokia will be really interesting two generations or so forward.

General

Iced Nutter Butters

Well, that came out about as well as I expected, which is to say, not great, but pretty good: I dipped some Nutter Butters in milk, then froze them.