If you are reading this blog, you should probably read:
http://www.privacyrights.org/ar/employees-rights.htm
In other news, anybody that uses ceramic cups instead of foam cups is (basically) killing baby seals (maybe these people should just move to Canada where the yearly quota for clubbing baby seals is in the hundreds of thousdands).
Stephen :: Dec.20.2007 :: Interesting :: 2 Comments »
Posted by Marissa Mayer, Director of Consumer Web ProductsIf you do a Google search on the word [failure] or the phrase [miserable failure], the top result is currently the White House’s official biographical page for President Bush. We’ve received some complaints recently from users who assume that this reflects a political bias on our part. I’d like to explain how these results come up in order to allay these concerns.
Google’s search results are generated by computer programs that rank web pages in large part by examining the number and relative popularity of the sites that link to them. By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up. Pranks like this may be distracting to some, but they don’t affect the overall quality of our search service, whose objectivity, as always, remains the core of our mission.
Stephen :: Jun.04.2007 :: Computer Related, Interesting, Websites :: No Comments »
You’ve heard this point before, but despite the price of gas being at record levels, adjusted for inflation, it’s still not the most expensive we’ve ever paid for dead-dino juice in the U.S. The Auto Prophet, one of the original auto-related bloggers that’s still keepin’ it real, found this informative chart (see larger version here) from InflationData.com that illustrates this fact in a straightforward way. The black line is the actual average price of gasoline in the U.S. since 1918, while the red line represents the price of gas since 1918 adjusted for inflation.
The most we’ve paid for gas was when we first started buying a lot of it back in 1918 when the chart begins. That year Americans paid an average of around a quarter per gallon, or just under $3.50/gallon in 2007 dollars. Last week’s record average price of $3.28/gallon still falls below those early levels.
The chart is particularly interesting because it shows a general downward trend in the cost of gas when it’s adjusted for inflation. There are spikes in the red line from the oil embargo in the ’70s and the recent increases since the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina hit, but if you watch the red line we should expect the price to go back down. Unfortunately, the actual price of gas will probably continue to rise as it has since 1918, as well. Just as long as it doesn’t catch up to the inflation curve, the sting won’t hurt so much.
[Source: The Auto Prophet]
From Autoblog
Stephen :: Jun.03.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »
A quick snippet of the derivation of Einstein’s Mass-energy equivalence equation. This is always good for some good late night reading.
….
In the particle’s rest frame, the momentum is (mc,0) and so for the force four-vector to be orthogonal, its time component must be zero in the rest frame as well, so F = (0,F). Applying a Lorentz transformation to an arbitrary frame, we find
Thus the time component of the relativistic version of Newton’s second law is
Recalling the definition of work done by the applied force as
and since the change in energy is given by the work done, we have
and so finally we see that, up to an additive constant,
from Wikipedia
Stephen :: Apr.27.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »
Stephen :: Apr.22.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »
From a private point of view, only one:
In comparing identical twins, Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while fathers’ happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter [TC: remember the result that fathers with sons are less likely to leave?]. The first child’s sex doesn’t matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.
Interestingly, second and third children don’t add to parents’ happiness at all. In fact, these additional children seem to make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child-though still happier than women with no children.
"If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child," concludes Kohler, adding that people probably have additional children either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too.
Here is the longer story. See this paper. Here is the researcher’s home page.
I am hardly an expert in this area, but I find the logic appealing. One kid is quite able to fill your time and thoughts. I call this the "parent as empty vessel" model. The argument for more than one kid, in this view, would rest on risk-aversion and the chance that one kid might die or not work out so well.
Note the contrast between Kohler with Bryan Caplan’s theory that you should have more kids now than you want, so you may enjoy them when you are old. At that point in time, no single kid "fills the empty vessel" and so more of them are needed.
I believe that men enjoy children more than women do, as they are less stressed by worry. Whether men want children more is a different question [this last sentence has been altered from a previous version.]
The pointer is from the still totally awesome www.politicaltheory.info.
From Marginal Revolution
Stephen :: Apr.22.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »
Apple Insider got an "inside" look at Apple’s NAB setup. They reported that Apple’s server included 3/4 Petabytes of storage space, 3 miles of fiber optic cable, 4 M2 Gb networks, 90 Xserves and 40 Xserve RAIDs. Pardon me while I change my pants.
An interesting point was brought up on MacSlash:
There are systems on the list of the Top 500 Supercomputers with fewer and/or slower processors and slower network connections. Who knows? With a little reconfiguration and optimization for the LINPACK benchmark, maybe, just maybe… Just a little something for you to ruminate on while you marvel at the report’s pretty pictures.
Hit the jump for more pictures of Apple’s ubersetup.
Just how important is the professional video market to Apple? You tell me. - Mark Wilson
From Gizmodo
Stephen :: Apr.20.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »
This isn’t a bad idea. Now I have yet another gmail alias that I’ll probably never use!
Reader Dan writes:
Having heard my wife give out her email address to yet another soccer coach at the start of the season, it hit me. What if you used your phone number as a handout email address?
Instead of spelling some haphazard email address, she could tell them: ""It is our phone number — 5551234@gmail.com" and be done with it.
If you give this a try, you’ll find that some email apps, like Gmail, won’t allow you to include your entire phone number (area code and all) without adding a letter to the mix, but with Gmail, as long as you have fewer than 8 numbers, you’re okay. While you wouldn’t want to use this address for everything, it seems like a potentially perfect solution for situations like Dan described - you can hand out two pieces of contact info for the price of one. - Adam Pash
From Lifehacker
Stephen :: Apr.15.2007 :: Computer Related, Interesting :: No Comments »
You gotta love anything disposable, and now the research to back up what I always knew - anything that avoids doing the dishes has to be a good idea
Here’s a life-cycle energy analysis on reusable vs. disposable cups -another data set to look at would be from washing a cup in the sink (I have a dishwasher and never wash cups in it) but that said, a lot of people use a dishwasher for everything. There are other factors like soap production, transportation costs, etc too, but then it would be really confusing.It’s interesting to note that a ceramic cup takes 1,000 uses to break even with foam cups. so, about 3 years if you use a cup every day - that’s not so bad — perhaps someone could make a line of coffee cups that say "use me for 3 years to recoup the energy costs" it would make the cup more important and more heirloom-like. People would try and save the cup for as many years as possible to be efficient. Maybe bight green cups with the date of creation on the bottom.
Someone tell treehugger.
This classic life-cycle energy analysis was performed by University of Victoria professor of chemistry Martin B. Hocking. Hocking compared three types of reusable drinking cups (ceramic, glass and reusable plastic) to two types of disposable cups (paper and polystyrene foam).
The energy of manufacture of reusable cups is vastly larger than the energy of manufacture of disposable cups (Table 1). In order for a reusable cup to be an improvement over a disposable one on an energy basis, you have to use it multiple times, in order to "cash in" on the energy investment you made in the cup. If a cup lasts only ten uses, then each use gets "charged’ for one-tenth of the manufacturing energy. If it lasts for a hundred uses, then each use gets charged for only one-hundredth of the manufacturing energy.
But in order to reuse a cup, it has to be washed. The efficiency of the dishwasher, and the efficiency of the energy system that powers it, determine how much energy is required for each wash.
Institute for Lifecycle Environmental Assessment, thanks Saul Link.
From MAKE Magazine
Stephen :: Apr.13.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »
How true…
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away."
- Philip K. Dick
From The Quotations Page
Stephen :: Apr.10.2007 :: Interesting :: No Comments »
Verse:
John 3:16; Jn 3:16; John 3
Keyword:
Salvation, Jesus, Gospel
With Operators:
AND, OR, NOT, “ â€
