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Monday, January 30, 2012
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Monday, January 23, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Reason #6795 to love Durham - lard can be an impulse buy - at Old Havana
Reason #6795 to love Durham - lard can be an impulse buy - at Old Havana: Reason #6795 to love Durham - lard can be an impulse buy - at Old Havana
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Every time it snows in a big city
Every time it snows in a big city: 
Every time it snows in a big city everyone is having the exact same conversation
ViewBulls to Host 2012 Hospitality Team Job Fair
Bulls to Host 2012 Hospitality Team Job Fair: How would you like to get paid to spend your summer at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park? The Durham Bulls are hosting the 2012 Hospitality Team Job Fair on Saturday, January 28th from 9:00am until 12:00pm at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park and you could be a part of it!
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Happy 130th Birthday, A. A. Milne: “Happiness” and the Origin of Winnie-the-Pooh
Happy 130th Birthday, A. A. Milne: “Happiness” and the Origin of Winnie-the-Pooh:
On rainy days and the simplicity of happiness.
The third poem in the book is a short gem titled “Happiness” — a wonderful meditation on how little it takes to find happiness. (And, clearly, a giant missed opportunity for Apple.)
John had
Great Big
Waterproof
Boots on;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Hat;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Mackintosh–
And that
(Said John)
Is
That.
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Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
Time Lords Want to Ditch the Sun
Time Lords Want to Ditch the Sun:
The International Telecommunication Union will decide this week not only whether there’ll be an extra leap second in June, but whether it will be the last of its kind. The decision could mean that we no longer take any notice of the Sun when it comes to determining time.
As we’ve previously covered, the leap second is necessitated by the way we currently measure time — simply observing the Earth’s movement round the Sun and dividing by the relevant fractions — which is inherently flawed. That’s because the Earth is slowly moving away from the Sun, thus increasing its orbit time.
While the leap year deals with the fact that the time of the orbit doesn’t precisely divide into 365 days, the leap second deals with the disparity between the solar second and the time measured on atomic clocks, which take the time from vibrations in cesium and thus aren’t affected by the slowing orbit time. That’s important as such clocks are ultimately used to inform most computer systems.
Each June 30th and December 31st, depending on the disparity, officials will have decided whether to add an artificial leap second to the atomic clocks. As a result the solar and atomic clocks are never more than a second out. (Unfortunately the leap second does occasionally cause systems to freak out, for example if they’ve been programmed with a calendar that didn’t anticipate the change.)
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, which oversees atomic clocks, has concluded we’ll need a leap second in June, the first time in three and a half years. That should be formally approved this week by the ITU, which governs Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the “what the atomic clock says plus leap seconds” system used by computers.
That same conference could also see a final decision on a long-standing proposal: that the ITU officially ditch leap seconds, ignore solar time, and let Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) simply match the atomic clock for the foreseeable future. The main argument for the change seems to be that every time we have a leap second (or even every June or December we don’t), it’s just another opportunity for somebody to miss the switch or make one when it isn’t needed.
The plan is that if the idea is adopted, the ITC would still keep track of and publish the disparities between atomic and solar time, even though it would be for information purposes only.
The ITC has also noted that left unchecked the disparity will hit the one hour mark in about 550 years, and critics have argued that within a few millennia we’d be left with dark “noons” and light “midnights.” The unspoken ITC position seems to be that this is a problem our descendants can sort out.
Related posts:
- Time controllers have (leap) second thoughts
- Annus Hump Day
- Beautiful: Iceland’s Midnight Sun Timelapse [Video]
9-foot-tall LEGO model of Apollo 11
9-foot-tall LEGO model of Apollo 11: 
Ryan McNaught built this 19-foot-tall model of Apollo 11's Saturn V rocket out of 120,000 LEGOs. It ..(Read...)
Friday, January 13, 2012
Code Cleanup Culls LibreOffice Cruft
Code Cleanup Culls LibreOffice Cruft: mikejuk writes with an interesting look at what coders can get around to after a few years of creating a free office suite: dealing with many thousands of lines of deprecated code: "Thanks to the efforts of its volunteer taskforce, over half the unused code in LibreOffice has been removed over the past six months. It's good to see this clean-up operation but it does raise questions about the amount of dead code lurking out there in the wild. The scale of the dead code in LibreOffice is shocking, and it probably isn't because the code base is especially bad. Can you imagine this in any other engineering discipline? Oh yes, we built the bridge but there are a few hundred unnecessary iron girders that we forgot to remove... Oh yes, we implemented the new chip but that area over there is just a few thousand transistors we no longer use... and so on." Well, that last one doesn't sound too surprising at all. Exciting to think that LibreOffice (which has worked well for me over the past several years, including under the OpenOffice.org name) has quite so much room for improvement.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
TED: Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology - Drew Berry (2011)
TED: Drew Berry: Animations of unseeable biology - Drew Berry (2011): We have no ways to directly observe molecules and what they do -- Drew Berry wants to change that. At TEDxSydney he shows his scientifically accurate (and entertaining!) animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Lister on 1/10/2012 15:00
These days it seems tricky to make predictions more than a few years into the future, other than that we are legally guaranteed to have hoverboards in three years’ time. Try to guess a century in advance and you’re on to a tough task. But one writer in 1900 certainly gave it a shot
In a lengthy article in The Ladies’ Home Journal , writer John Elfreth Watkins Jr put together a series of predictions for the United States that he expected to come true before the start of 2001. They were apparently based upon comments from “the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning”, Watkins failing to predict the 20th century would at least see some strides towards greater female participation in science and academia.
Some of the predictions are, even if not perfect in detail, close to accurate:
Open fires and chimneys will be replaced by home heating and air conditioning systems, with hot or cold air at the turn of a “spigot” (faucet or tap.)
Stores will buy food ingredients in bulk and prepare ready-cooked meals at cheap prices which people can reheat at home. Customers will also be able to get meals delivered by automobile. (That said, Watkins also suggested food could be delivered to homes via pneumatic tubes, and that customers would send back the crockery and cutlery when they finished eating.)
Color photos will be sent around the world, with images shot in China appearing in US newspapers within an hour.
Home screens will allow people to watch events from around the world in their living room (though Watkins foresaw the sound being delivered down the telephone.)
Wireless telephone systems will allow a husband in the middle of the Atlantic to speak to a wife at home in Chicago, and phone users will be able to dial direct.
Electricity will be used to provide light and heat to speed up the food growing process.
“Rays of invisible light” will allow doctors to examine internal organs.
Some are in fact understatements:
“The average American will live fifty years instead of thirty-five.” This is a slightly tricky subject as there’s a big difference between current average age of death, and expected lifespan for people born today. One source puts life expectancy in 1900 at 47.3 years, and 76.8 in 2000.
“The average American will be taller by from one to two inches” thanks to better health, nutrition and sanitation. In fact the average had increased by three inches by 1970 alone.
Some are at least overambitious:
“There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America”. Not only was this overstated (the actual figure in 2000 was 281 million), but Watkins hadn’t put the figure down to increased life expectancy, child survival rates, or birth rates. Instead he believed Nicaragua and Mexico would both have joined the US, with other Central and South American countries following to escape European domination.
Coal will no longer be used for heating and cooking, with water-powered electricity generation doing the work.
Trains will travel between 120 and 150 miles per hour, getting from San Francisco to New York in 24 hours. (150mph is the peak on Amtrak’s fastest train, though averages are much lower and the trans-continental route takes three days.)
Car engines will weigh around one pound.
Watkins has a slight obsession with giant plants, suggesting strawberries as large as apples, cranberries as large as oranges, peas as large as beets, and roses the size of cabbage heads.
Oral drugs will be replaced with medicine being transmitted through the flesh via electric current.
And some are spectacularly wrong:
A move to phonetic spelling will mean C, X and Q are dropped from the alphabet, while Russian will be the second most popular language in the country.
“Mosquitoes, house-flies, and roaches will have been practically exterminated.”
There’ll be no traffic on city streets, with vehicles either underground or on elevated roadways. As a result, cities “will be free from all noises.”
School sports and public gymnasiums will mean it’s perfectly normal for adults to walk 10 miles at a time.
Every man and woman will be able to get a free university education.
Monday, January 09, 2012
Sunday, January 08, 2012
Lower Limit Found For Sudoku Puzzle Clues
Lower Limit Found For Sudoku Puzzle Clues: ananyo writes "An Irish mathematician has used a complex algorithm and millions of hours of supercomputing time to solve an important open problem in the mathematics of Sudoku, the game popularized in Japan that involves filling in a 9X9 grid of squares with the numbers 1–9 according to certain rules. Gary McGuire of University College Dublin shows in a proof posted online [PDF] that the minimum number of clues — or starting digits — needed to complete a puzzle is 17; puzzles with 16 or fewer clues do not have a unique solution. Most newspaper puzzles have around 25 clues, with the difficulty of the puzzle decreasing as more clues are given."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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