BTW, I fully appreciate the irony that I posted an off-topic rant about obscure technical details of interest to no-one but myself against a story titled 'No More Asperger's Syndrome'.

That sounds good, but the devil in the details is how you map the HSV space on to 12 bits.

Presumably they had this as 4+4+4, just as they ended up with for RGB. Now, 4 bits of hue would be pretty limiting, as you'd have just 16 distinct hues compared to the 96 hues that RGB had at maximum saturation and value.

A perceptually better alternative might be 6+3+3, but as HAM works on 4+4+4 this would take multiple pixels to set just H, S or V (and we were hoping to do this with one pixel).

Taking that 6+3+3 idea a step further, the bits could be interleaved so that one HAM pixel gets you to the ballpark, and the following one or two pixels refines it, e.g.:

H5 H4 S2 V2 | H3 H2 S1 V1 | H1 H0 S0 V0

or if that makes the hues too smudgy, maybe:

H5 H4 H3 H2 | H1 H0 S2 V2 | S1 S0 V1 V0

OK I'm living in the past.

I previously brainstormed some counterexamples here, of reasons why companies are affected by their own share price.

Another thing to add is that a company's share price can affect its inclusion or placement in stock indexes (e.g. S&P 500), which I'm sure would have some effect on brand value (it's free advertising). A low share price or market cap can even get you booted off the exchange.

There's always been a little shit in the chocolate.

Tangential, but the story of how E.T. featured Reece's Pieces instead of M&Ms is a good yarn: http://www.snopes.com/business/market/mandms.asp

I wonder what the Darwinian impact of motorcycles was on human gene stock in the 20th century...

Hedgehogs here in NZ are a lot cockier than they were 30 years ago. They used to roll up into a ball when frightened (e.g., caught in headlights), but now they'll likely run away instead.

I also see them less as roadkill. I expect this is explained partly by smaller populations, due to loss of habitat, roadkill, disease, etc, but also behavioural change seems to be a factor.

This isn't science, just my anecdotal observation. If anyone has citations, please share.

Yup, that's the use case that gives you gorilla arm - vertical screen in front of you.

I suspect the claim that touchscreens on notebook give you gorilla arm are either fabrications or a genuine misunderstanding.

I doubt there's a big fundamental difference between touching a notebook screen and using a tablet, at least in terms of where the screen is. A lot of people prop their tablets up in a similar position to a notebook screen anyway.

One concern I do have is that the notebook needs to absorb the torque of a firm prod near the top of the screen. Having to be gentle in order to avoid tipping the notebook would lead to extra muscle strain.

At first glance this means the hinge needs to be extra stiff (and/or lockable), and the notebook base needs to be extra heavy (and/or anchored). Aside from the touchscreen consideration, these are all bad design for a notebook. A foldout back support, like on a photo frame, might be better.

Powergen Italia could've done with a strategic hyphen insertion too.

Intelligently designed, and that it had better fucking behave itself or watch out!

s/Bugs Bunny/Eric Carle/

I started out serious, but posted ironic.

I honestly thought that 'free software' was both 'as in beer' (distribution charges aside) and 'as in speech'. That makes it a brand new sense of the word, not yet in any dictionary - 'free' as in 'free software'.

But then a quick fact check revealed that 'free software' is just 'as in speech', and not 'as in beer'.

Sigh... maybe there really is no such thing as 'free software'. As in 'lunch'.

The silly thing is that having a default value of NULL and having no default value (effectively defaulting the default value to NULL) commonly aren't the same thing.

It's just the sort of nasty little corner case that breeds bugs. Like when many years ago Sybase's bulk loader entered random data when inserting NULL into a column with a default of NULL, and ruined our week. With no default, it would've worked fine.

Not ambiguous really... you say 'free software', it's clear from context that by 'free' you mean 'free as in software'.

I'm shocked that humans aren't considered apes.