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Transportation

Critics Say It's Time To Close La Guardia Airport 203

Posted by timothy from the it-would-make-a-cool-mall dept.
HughPickens.com writes: George Haikalis writes in the NYT that last week, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey put off, yet again, deciding between two proposals for a nearly $4 billion project to rehabilitate the dilapidated Central Terminal Building at La Guardia Airport. But piling billions of taxpayer dollars into upgrading La Guardia, which has been likened to an experience "in a third world country," won't solve its fundamental problems. "It can't easily expand," says Haikalis. "Its two runways and four terminals are surrounded on three sides by water, making landing difficult and hazardous. Parking is a nightmare."

There are precedents for replacing airports close to the center city with modern, more outlying airports. Hong Kong and Denver are two examples; Berlin will soon follow suit. With the consolidation of the major United States airlines and the sluggishness in the global economy, the much larger Kennedy and Newark airports could accommodate La Guardia's passenger load, by adding more frequent service and using larger aircraft, if the F.A.A. were to lift the caps on the number of flights allowed there. Kennedy, with its two sets of parallel runways, could handle many more flights, particularly as new air-traffic control technology is introduced in the next few years. The money budgeted for the La Guardia upgrades would be better used to create a long-proposed one-ride express-rail link between Manhattan and J.F.K., by reviving a long-disused, 3.5-mile stretch of track in central Queens and completing the modernization of the terminals at Kennedy. "By avoiding the costly replacement of outmoded terminals at La Guardia and by creating a new express rail link and upgrading terminals at Kennedy, the increased economic activity could more than make up for the lost jobs," concludes Haikalis. "New York's importance to America's economy demands a first world vision to shutter this third world airport."

Comment Re:Stupid sudoku solver? (Score 1) 230

by cellocgw (#49623011) Attached to: Singapore's Prime Minister Shares His C++ Sudoku Solver Code

hmmm.... solving fizzbuzz....
( code is in the R language BTW)

fbfun1 <- function(xfoo) {
xfoo<-1:xfoo
fbfoo <- 1+(!as.logical(mod(xfoo,3)))*(as.logical(mod(xfoo,5))) + 2*(as.logical(mod(xfoo,3)))*(!as.logical(mod(xfoo,5)))+3*(!as.logical(mod(xfoo,3)))*(!as.logical(mod(xfoo,5)))
 
fbbar <- unlist(lapply(fbfoo, function(x) switch(x,0,'fizz','buzz','fizzbuzz')))
return(fbbar)
}
 
fbfun3 <- function(xfoo) {
xfoo<-1:xfoo
fbfoo <- 1+(!as.logical(mod(xfoo,3)))*(as.logical(mod(xfoo,5))) + 2*(as.logical(mod(xfoo,3)))*(!as.logical(mod(xfoo,5)))+3*(!as.logical(mod(xfoo,3)))*(!as.logical(mod(xfoo,5)))
fbtab<-cbind(1:4,c('','fizz','buzz','fizzbuzz'))
fbbar <- fbtab[fbfoo,2]
return(fbbar)
}
 
fbfun4 <- function(xfoo) {
fiz<- rep(c('','','fizz'),length.out=xfoo)
buz<-rep(c('','','','','buzz'),length.out=xfoo)
fbbar <- unlist(lapply(1:xfoo, function(j)paste(fiz[j],buz[j]) ) )
return(fbbar)
}
 
# or completely sleazy:
fbfun5 <- function(xfoo) {
fiz<- rep(c('','','fizz','','buzz','fizz','','','fizz','buzz','','fizz','','','fizzbuzz'),length.out=xfoo)
return(fiz)
}

Comment so far so good (Score 1) 179

by cellocgw (#49613661) Attached to: Why Scientists Love 'Lord of the Rings'

An awful lot of scientists (at least us old guys) like Asimov & Heinlein and various other scifi authors who gave us all sorts of words which have graduated to general useage. (not to mention, say "Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor" and "reverse the polarity")

OTOH, I shudder to think that maybe in 50 years someone will write "all scientists love GoT and name things after the characters."
Transportation

The Engineer's Lament -- Prioritizing Car Safety Issues 247

Posted by Soulskill from the backseat-engineering dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Malcolm Gladwell has an article in The New Yorker about how automotive engineers handle issues of safety. There have been tons of car-related recalls lately, and even before that, we'd often hear about how some piece of engineering on a car was leading to a bunch of deaths. Sometimes it was a mistake, and sometimes it was an intentional design. But we hear about these issues through the lens of sensationalized media and public outrage — the engineers working on these problems understand better that it's how you drive that gets you into trouble far more than what you drive.

For example, the Ford Pinto became infamous for catching fire in crashes back in the 1970s. Gladwell says, "That's a rare event—it happens once in every hundred crashes. In 1975-76, 1.9 per cent of all cars on the road were Pintos, and Pintos were involved in 1.9 per cent of all fatal fires. Let's try again. About fifteen per cent of fatal fires resulted from rear collisions. If we look just at that subset of the subset, Schwartz shows, we finally see a pattern. Pintos were involved in 4.1 per cent of all rear-collision fire fatalities—which is to say that they may have been as safe as or safer than other cars in most respects but less safe in this one. ... You and I would feel safer in a car that met the 301 standard. But the engineer, whose aim is to maximize safety within a series of material constraints, cannot be distracted by how you and I feel."
Japan

Transforming Robot Gets Stuck In Fukushima Nuclear Reactor 99

Posted by samzenpus from the bend-me-shape-me dept.
An anonymous reader writes with more bad news for the people still dealing with the Fukushima nuclear accident. "The ability to change shape hasn't saved a robot probe from getting stuck inside a crippled Japanese nuclear reactor. Tokyo Electric Power will likely leave the probe inside the reactor housing at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex north of Tokyo after it stopped moving. On Friday, the utility sent a robot for the first time into the primary containment vessel (PCV) of reactor No. 1 at the plant, which was heavily damaged by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan. 'The robot got stuck at a point two-thirds of its way inside the PCV and we are investigating the cause,' a Tokyo Electric spokesman said via email. The machine became stuck on Friday after traveling to 14 of 18 planned checkpoints."
Games

A Data-Driven Exploration of the Evolution of Chess 109

Posted by samzenpus from the what-does-the-horse-do-again? dept.
HughPickens.com writes Randy Olsen has a interesting article where he explores a data set of over 650,000 chess tournament games ranging back to the 15th century and looks at how chess has changed over time. His findings include:

Chess games are getting longer. Chess games have been getting steadily longer since 1970, increasing from 75 ply (37 moves) per game in 1970 to a whopping 85 ply (42 moves) per game in 2014. "This trend could possibly be telling us that defensive play is becoming more common in chess nowaday," writes Olsen. "Even the world's current best chess player, Magnus Carlsen, was forced to adopt a more defensive play style (instead of his traditional aggressive style) to compete with the world's elite."

The first-move advantage has always existed. White consistently wins 56% and Black only 44% of the games every year between 1850 and 2014 and the first-move advantage becomes more pronounced the more skilled the chess players are. "Despite 150+ years of revolutions and refinement of chess, the first-move advantage has effectively remained untouched. The only way around it is to make sure that competitors play an even number of games as White and Black."

Draws are much more common nowadays. Only 1 in 10 games ended in a draw in 1850, whereas 1 in 3 games ended in a draw in 2013. "Since the early 20th century, chess experts have feared that the over-analysis of chess will lead "draw death," where experts will become so skilled at chess that it will be impossible to decisively win a game any more." Interestingly chess prodigy and world champion Jose Raul Capablanca said in the 1920's that he believed chess would be exhausted in the near future and that games between masters would always end in draws. Capablanca proposed a more complex variant of chess to help prevent "draw death," but it never really seemed to catch on.
Encryption

Generate Memorizable Passphrases That Even the NSA Can't Guess 267

Posted by timothy from the exercise-for-the-reader dept.
HughPickens.com writes Micah Lee writes at The Intercept that coming up with a good passphrase by just thinking of one is incredibly hard, and if your adversary really is capable of one trillion guesses per second, you'll probably do a bad job of it. It turns out humans are a species of patterns, and they are incapable of doing anything in a truly random fashion. But there is a method for generating passphrases that are both impossible for even the most powerful attackers to guess, yet very possible for humans to memorize. First, grab a copy of the Diceware word list, which contains 7,776 English words — 37 pages for those of you printing at home. You'll notice that next to each word is a five-digit number, with each digit being between 1 and 6. Now grab some six-sided dice (yes, actual real physical dice), and roll them several times, writing down the numbers that you get. You'll need a total of five dice rolls to come up with each word in your passphrase. Using Diceware, you end up with passphrases that look like "cap liz donna demon self", "bang vivo thread duct knob train", and "brig alert rope welsh foss rang orb". If you want a stronger passphrase you can use more words; if a weaker passphrase is ok for your purpose you can use less words. If you choose two words for your passphrase, there are 60,466,176 different potential passphrases. A five-word passphrase would be cracked in just under six months and a six-word passphrase would take 3,505 years, on average, at a trillion guesses a second.

After you've generated your passphrase, the next step is to commit it to memory.You should write your new passphrase down on a piece of paper and carry it with you for as long as you need. Each time you need to type it, try typing it from memory first, but look at the paper if you need to. Assuming you type it a couple times a day, it shouldn't take more than two or three days before you no longer need the paper, at which point you should destroy it. "Simple, random passphrases, in other words, are just as good at protecting the next whistleblowing spy as they are at securing your laptop," concludes Lee. "It's a shame that we live in a world where ordinary citizens need that level of protection, but as long as we do, the Diceware system makes it possible to get CIA-level protection without going through black ops training."

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