Comment Re:That was a great article.. (Score 1) 304
You think so?
FTA: Statistics says that if you take enough samples of data, regardless of the distributon, it will average out into a Normal distribution.
News to me.
You think so?
FTA: Statistics says that if you take enough samples of data, regardless of the distributon, it will average out into a Normal distribution.
News to me.
Road signs are still mph, horse races are still miles and furlongs and beer is sold by the pint so I think we're happily confused on matters of units this side of the pond.
Only in the UK, as far as I'm aware. The rest of Europe has far fewer imperial relics in everyday life (maybe because they were never part of the British Empire in the first place). But even on the continent you'll buy your Subways by the inch, and you could buy "5-1/4 Zoll" and "3-1/2 Zoll" floppy disks. Our yard sticks tend to be a bit longer and marked in both inches and cm. Almost every (physical) thermometer I've seen has Celsius and Fahrenheit scales. The pound as a weight unit is still informally used in parts of Germany, but it's getting rarer now.
I feel for the people in the US who understand how much more practical the metric system is, but I also know how hard it can be to convince a majority in a democratic country to do the right thing. Maybe you need a dictator? Europe can help with that, too.
Very interesting, but I'm having a hard time making sense of the numbers - not an expert. All the figures stated are relative, and not always relative to each other. What I would like to know: what percentage of the combined global warming potential (or CO2 equivalent) of all greenhouse gases can be attributed to livestock? Not in % of methane, % of CO2, % compared to transit pollution, etc.
I did try to find that information in the source you linked, but failed. I also downloaded the "full report" from 2006, which is inexplicably cut off just after the executive summary. For example: it's interesting that N2O is 296 times as potent a greenhous gas as CO2, but what if its percentage of overall emissions was just 0.01%? (That number came out of my derriere, but since the actual report is unavailable, who knows)
I'm not a policy maker, but I like to know what I'm talking about. The related news items are all quoting each other, or the executive summary from the FOA report. They're not making this easy for me.
CJ
Now, watch this: The rate of firearm-related deaths per capita [is 10.23 in the US and 0.25 in the UK]
Do you see the difference?
Indeed I do. You pulled out that old canard that people shot dead are more dead* than people beaten to death with cricket bats, wrenches, or tire irons, or stabbed to death.
No, he pulled out that old canard that people shot dead are more dead when they are killed multiple times.
Per capita means per person (literally per head). Any number over 1 would be very impressive (barring Zaphod Beeblebrox taking two shots to the heads).
Mod this man up.
From the space.com article, here's what Uwingu's CEO had to say...
"They basically said we're conducting a scam, and nothing could be further from the truth," [...] "They basically put us out of business, and they've ruined our reputation."
"To claim what they claimed — that we're somehow misrepresenting that these were IAU names — has just about put us out of business," Stern told SPACE.com. "It's unbelievable."
"They've spent 18 years with no forward movement — ask planet hunter extraordinaire [and Uwingu adviser] Geoff Marcy," Stern said. "Then somebody else comes along and does something harmless, fun and engaging, and now they're slandering us."
Oh cry me a river...
CJ
Good intentions being the pavement to the road to hell, ever heard that one? Guess it would be adapted as the US foreign policy motto.
Come on, that's harsh.
Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing
-- Winston Churchill
CJ
The key is split (look up PKI key splitting) into 5 parts. My girlfriend, father, buddy at work, and two of my friends each have a part. [...] Four of those parts together are required to unlock.
Better make sure you're not travelling in a car (or airplane, etc) with two or more of your keybearers...
Why not give all of them the complete key and trust them? Thats what I do (minus the gf).
I know nothing about your friends or family, so YMMV.
CJ
Plutonium is a strange metal. [...] an experienced machinist or blacksmith would have trouble making a simple screwdriver or chisel out of and have to make a perfect, hollow, evacuated sphere out of it [...]
Please don't mention plutonium, half spheres and screwdrivers in the same sentence.
I've had nightmares about this.
You know what?
Fuck fuzzy time.
This is one of my pet annoyances in most "web 2.0" products. All those forums giving the time of a message as "a year ago" are driving me mad. Some of them at least have the actual date and time in the title attribute, but that doesn't help much on a mobile device. Let the software be exact, and leave the fuzziness to me, please.
CJ
FWIW, this is exactly what we do to cue a blind choir member.
It's not a geeky solution, and it involves people touching each other, but it's very reliable.
I can't imagine any sighted choir member refusing to do this.
The linked page on businessweek.com contains no less than 13 trackers:
ChartBeat
Disqus
DoubleClick
Dynamic Logic
Facebook Connect
ForeSee
Google Adsense
Google Analytics
Krux Digital
New Relic
ScoreCard Research Beacon
Taboola
Twitter Button
Oh and a son named Max as well.
And MaxDB is a former MySQL AB product (together with SAP AG).
The domain maxdb.org is now owned by Oracle. maxsql.org is still up for grabs
A monster of the highest order.
Maybe,
Force needed to accelerate 2.2lbs of cookies = 1 Fig-newton to 1 meter per second
