I type on two computers:

- my ThinkPad laptop, which I carry with me around all of Europe and give courses with. I have a Storm CM Mech keyboard that I also lug around, in my suitcase, and always hook up to it. Not only does it draw attention, people also express amazement at how fast and precisely one can type with it. I don't care that it is a gaming keyboard. It is nearly impossible to destroy, can be taken apart because of the aluminium cover fixed with screws, and has Cherry MX red switches for fantastic tactile feedback.

- my Fujitsu Celsius workstation, for when I am at home. There is a Razer Black Widow with Cherry MX blue switches hooked up to it. I can type for an entire day and not grow tired of the loud clickety-click. Of course, that is something not to burden your colleagues with - but then again, the Celsius is in my private work room, at home ( I am independent ).

Going back to the rubber-dome keyboards most people use, when I occasionally must use someone else's computer, e.g. during a course to quickly correct something, feels horrible: mushy, imprecise. Yes, mechanical keyboards have a certain cost, here ( in Central Europe ) about € 70 for a Storm CM Mech to € 120 for a new Black Widow. So what - they'll last me for years, and years, and years. I can guarantee you: once you make the move to a mechanical keyboard, you'll never look back.

is a fake frist psot.

Your glass is half empty. Mine is half full.

...but the text under it:

NASA is quietly, but openly, talking about going to Mars. It means I will be over 60 years old when they finally do it. But I will be there to watch the launch, and will be cheering and crying when they land on Mars. My parents saw the first man walking on the moon, via TV, and barely understood what they say. We *will* understand what we'll see. We will.

offers an interesting look upon what generalizes, and what does not generalize, when you "zoom out" from a system built up of neighbouring spins, replacing groups of neighbouring spins by single-spin blocks. The interesting link with CS is the fact that the arxiv paper considers binary spins. Thinking this through, the paper might indeed offer some explanation for large-scale behaviour ( read: macroscopic ) as composed of small-scale ( read: microscopic ) interactions. Quite interesting, indeed.

You overlook one thing: bending of light by the super-intense gravity of the black hole. The "back" side of the accretion disk, i.e. the side turned away from us, emits light. The black hole's gravity will pull that light around the bh and bend it in all possible ways; see Kip Thorne's results found in simulating the Gargantua black hole for the move "Interstellar", he's actually working on a physics / astrophysics paper with his findings. Bending of the accretion disk's light, which the bh will throw forward to us, will produce a halo effect around the bh. What you'd expect to see would be an intensely black sphere, surrounded by a great glow. ( The glow, btw, would be there in nearly all frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio through infrared and visible light into the hardest X-ray reaches. )

I can not help but wonder at the question: "Will the produced image in any way resemble the black hole depiction in the 'Interstellar' movie ?"

Take the latest BlackBerry, the Passport, with Blackberry OS 10.3: the phone simply puts itself into "sleep" mode when you put it face down on a plane surface. No need to be loud about that, at Blackberry. How fucking desperate IS Microsoft ?

I developed for years, moved into software architecture / lead engineer roles, and then, some years ago, noticed that - although my experience increased and increased - I got "stuck" at a certain employment and salary level. I did not want to make the jump into management for the life of me, so I established myself as an independent software architect. msobkow, above, points out that willingness to travel is of paramount importance to stay in the business, and I absolutely second that. I have gigs all over Europe ( am writing this post right now from a Berlin hotel, on a Sunday evening, in order to be at my customer's tomorrow morning ) - and I never, ever enjoyed work as much as since I became independent. It even does not feel like work anymore: I have made my hobby out of my work, so to say. I simply advertise myself as the "programming and software architecture guy who deals with the hard problems the young guys are afraid of". It works. Yes, I stay informed of new developments in my field, learned a new language ( Julia ), am learning a new language right now ( K ). For sure, there is a future in non-managerial IT. You just need to set a sensible course, be flexisble enough to seize opportunities, and off you go. I plan to work way beyond 65, for sheer pleasure, and you'll have to pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands.

Power outages ? Here in central or western Europe ? Hardly ever. The electric power infrastructure in the USA is almost on the level of that in the Soviet Union just before the end of the cold war.

People taste great. I was once offered the forearm of a human being in Port Moresby. With curry sauce. Yum.

Mod parent up. +1 "Insightful". Where are my mod points when I need them...

A computer does not necessarily have to be Turing complete. There is no formally constrained definition of "machine performing computations" that also involves "Turing complete", being simultaneously universally valid. At least, none that I know of.

"AnaesthetizedOctupus". And the userID, of course, being a prime number.

I checked that in vol. 3 of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, my proudest material possession. You are right. Up to at least the 1850s, as supported by the extensive corpus of citations in the OED, "computer" meant "a person performing computations". The first solidly documented occurrence of the word as "machine performing computations" is from 1897; from 1915 on, the word is only found in this sense, i.e. the sense of "person performing computations" has then fully disappeared, in a period of only 18 years.

Interesting. You made me discover something I did not know. Thanks.