Comment Re:BASIC (Score 1) 633
Yup. Basic in high school, Pascal in college, then LISP and assembly. Then I switched majors to Math
Comment Re:400 Kilocalories ? (Score 1) 148
Food label Calories, and the ones in the daily recommendations, are in fact kcals.
Comment Re:Shredsort (Score 1) 195
Exactly my thought. Well done.
Comment Re:Excuse me sir, this is a news site... (Score 1) 61
Thisaway and thataway? Better: deosil and widdershins.
Pumpkin Pie increases Male Sex Drive 173
Dr. Alan Hirsch, Director of Chicago's Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Center, says the key to a man's heart, and other parts, is pumpkin pie. Out of the 40 odors tested in Hirsch's study, a mixture of lavender and pumpkin pie got the biggest rise out of men ages 18 to 64. That particular fragrance was found to increase penile blood flow by an average of 40%. "Maybe the odors acted to reduce anxiety. By reducing anxiety, it acted to remove inhibitions," said Hirsch.
Comment Re:I've had this argument more times than I'd like (Score 1) 1260
... [T]he problem is that many people simply
That is exactly right. I'm kind of saddened that I had to go this deep in the comments to see this perspective, but this is why this argument exists. No "proof" will satisfy everyone because it's a tautology that relies on acknowledging the representation issue. Most people who have accepted the fact that limits exist would agree that the sum of 9 times 10^n for n=1 to infinity is one (because that in itself is shorthand for the limit of that sum from n=1 to N as N goes to infinity), but that is exactly the same as "proving" 0.99999 (repeating) is equal to one. No proof is necessary: they're just different representations of the same quantity.
Apple Just Says Yes To iPhone Smoking Game 192
ZosX sends along a puff piece from Wired's Brian X. Chen: "Apple on Monday approved Puff Puff Pass, a $2 game whose objective is to pass a cigarette or pipe around and puff it as many times as you can within a set duration. So much for taking the high road, Apple. The game allows you to choose between smoking a cigarette, a cigar, and a pipe. Then you select the number of people you'd like to light up with (up to five), the amount of time, and a place to smoke (outdoors or indoors). And you're ready to get right on puffing."
Man Sues Neighbor For Not Turning Off His Wi-Fi 428
Scyth3 writes "A man is suing his neighbor for not turning off his cell phone or wireless router. He claims it affects his 'electromagnetic allergies,' and has resorted to being homeless. So, why doesn't he check into a hotel? Because hotels typically have wireless internet for free. I wonder if a tinfoil hat would help his cause?"
Music By Natural Selection 164
maccallr writes "The DarwinTunes experiment needs you! Using an evolutionary algorithm and the ears of you the general public, we've been evolving a four bar loop that started out as pretty dismal primordial auditory soup and now after >27k ratings and 200 generations is sounding pretty good. Given that the only ingredients are sine waves, we're impressed. We got some coverage in the New Scientist CultureLab blog but now things have gone quiet and we'd really appreciate some Slashdotter idle time. We recently upped the maximum 'genome size' and we think that the music is already benefiting from the change."
ASCAP Seeks Licensing Fees For Guitar Hero Arcade 146
Self Bias Resistor writes "According to a post on the Arcade-Museum forums, ASCAP is demanding an annual $800 licensing fee from at least one operator of a Guitar Hero Arcade machine, citing ASCAP licensing regulations regarding jukeboxes. An ASCAP representative allegedly told the operator that she viewed the Guitar Hero machine as a jukebox of sorts. The operator told ASCAP to contact Raw Thrills, the company that sells the arcade units. The case is ongoing and GamePolitics is currently seeking clarification of the story from ASCAP."
The Finns Who Invented the Graphical Browser 148
waderoush writes "If you thought Mosaic was the first graphical Web browser, think again. In their first major interview, three of the four Finnish software engineers behind Erwise — a point-and-click graphical Web browser for the X Window system — describe the creation of their program in 1991-1992, a full year before Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (which, of course, evolved into Netscape). Kim Nyberg, Kari Sydänmaanlakka, and Teemu Rantanen, with their fellow Helsinki University of Technology student Kati Borgers (nee Suominen), gave Erwise features such as text searching and the ability to load multiple Web pages that wouldn't be seen in other browsers until much later. The three engineers, who today work for the architectural software firm Tekla, say they never commercialized the project because there was no financing — Finland was in a deep recession at the time and lacked a strong venture capital or angel investing market. Otherwise, the Web revolution might have begun a year earlier."
Comment Not a big deal (Score 5, Informative) 161
I work in this area, and this isn't really that big of a deal, regardless of the spin they put in the announcement.
This is about publishing a reference implementation of an already widely published model so that when party A does a particular calculation, related to a settlement amount for a particular trade, and party B does the same calculation, the values match.
Qualitatively, and to a large extent quantitatively, everybody on the street has been using the same model all along. The idea of publishing a reference implementation is meant to minimize conflicts in settling trades.
The accuracy of the valuation model here is not at the heart of any of the problems that AIG -- or any other firm, for that matter -- have experienced. That's more aligned with a simple lack of oversight on exposure.
Comment Re:zenburn for bbedit? (Score 1) 702
Pretty cool. My Emacs theme seems to be kind of in the middle of Zenbrun and Gruber Dark, but it's hardly complete. It's aimed at Perl and C++; I called it "stone washed".
Lisp comments don't seem to format well with CODE or PRE tags
(defun color-theme-stonewashed ()
"Color theme by Mark E. Ferguson, created 2001-02-01."
(interactive)
(color-theme-install
'(color-theme-stonewashed
((background-color . "black")
(background-mode . dark)
(border-color . "black")
(cursor-color . "white")
(cursor-type . bar)
(foreground-color . "grey95")
(mouse-color . "Grey90"))
((cperl-here-face . font-lock-string-face)
(cperl-invalid-face quote underline)
(cperl-pod-face . font-lock-comment-face)
(cperl-pod-head-face . font-lock-variable-name-face)
(list-matching-lines-face . bold))
(default ((t (nil))))
(bold ((t (:bold t))))
(bold-italic ((t (:italic t
(cperl-array-face ((t (:bold t
(cperl-hash-face ((t (:italic t
(cperl-nonoverridable-face ((t (:foreground "orchid1"))))
(font-lock-builtin-face ((t (:foreground "light pink"))))
(font-lock-comment-face ((t (:foreground "LightSteelBlue3"))))
(font-lock-constant-face ((t (:foreground "PaleGreen3"))))
(font-lock-function-name-face ((t (:foreground "orange"))))
(font-lock-keyword-face ((t (:foreground "SkyBlue2"))))
(font-lock-reference-face ((t (:foreground "cadet blue"))))
(font-lock-string-face ((t (:foreground "thistle"))))
(font-lock-type-face ((t (:foreground "salmon2"))))
(font-lock-variable-name-face ((t (:foreground "LightGoldenrod3"))))
(font-lock-warning-face ((t (:bold t
(highlight ((t (:background "darkolivegreen"))))
(italic ((t (:italic t))))
(modeline ((t (:background "black"
(region ((t (:background "grey40"))))
(secondary-selection ((t (:background "darkslateblue"))))
(underline ((t (:underline t)))))))
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