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eftychia at 05:14am on 2004-03-17
eftychia at 05:14am on 2004-03-17-
What LiveJournal is doing about comment-spam (announcement in
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
lj_biz 2004-03-09) -
Sketching the History of Hypercomplex Numbers, a timeline
listing the relevant mathematical developments between 665
CE
and 1957
CE.
(Found in a comment
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tacit left in ame_chan's
journal.) Apparently coffee catching on in Europe was one
of the important steps. (Hmm ... just coincidence that both
coffee and al-gebra come from the same part of the world?) - New lens design mimics human eye, can adjust its focal length from one extreme of its range to the other in ten milliseconds, and has no mechanical moving parts. It's a fluid lens, shaped electrically.
- How To Tell If You're American: "Not long ago, one of those earnest-freshman puppydogs on the Net declared that there was 'no such thing as American culture.' Right. Fish have also been known to doubt the existence of water. The following is a first crack at an ostensive definition of 'American culture'-- things shared by the vast majority (let's say 90%) of native-born Americans. Many of these won't sound 'cultural' at all to Americans; they'll sound like just descriptions of the way things are. But each one of them would be contested in one or more non-American cultures." The page includes links to similar summaries for various other cultures, and a site that attempts to compare several cultures in table form.
- Where are we going?
Planet Ten!
When are we going there?
Real soon!
But we might have to rewrite that dialogue to say "Sedna" instead of "Planet Ten". (New planet discovered, ten billion km (uh, 10 Tm?) from Sol.) - Implicit Structure and the Dynamics of Blogspace (PDF) (There's an HTML abstract, but as expected it amounts to little more than a teaser.) This is the study that a couple of articles elsewhere have referred to, which points out that the most popular blogs are often not the ones with the most original information: "Whereas traditional ranking strategies rely primarily on explicit link structure, iRank successfully folds in implicit routes of transmission to find blogs that are at the source of information. Such, 'patient zero' blogs are not always the highly connected, but are nonetheless critical in spreading information." [Edit: added two related links in comment below.]
- amberfox reposted a metaquotes
entry quoting an
entry by elfgirl, in which we find out what happens
when someone endorses a check using an ancient Sumerian royal
title instead of his name. Short. Amazing. Funny.
- Fresh controversy has broken out over the cause of the Black Death (NewScientist.com) "For a century the blame has rested with the bubonic plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is carried by rats and fleas. But the most ambitious effort yet to find traces of Yersinia in the remains of Black Death victims has failed, and the researchers involved argue that a previous study that did report finding Yersinia was flawed." One group thinks the Black Death might actually have been a haemorrhagic virus similar to ebola.
- I haven't tried this yet, but it looks interesting: What The Font: "Ever wanted to have a font just like the one used by certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can, using the WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font and we'll show you the closest matches in our database!"
- A Wall Street Journal article explaining why we can't get rid of spam. It's because of people like Orlando Soto. "Spammers say they typically need just one buyer per 10,000 spam messages to break even. [...] If this particular solicitation was typical, spam experts say, the spammer probably sent it to about five million people with a commission of about 30%. If 500 buyers averaged spending what Mr. Soto spent on the vitamins, the spammer would bring in about $15,000 in revenue from the mailing." 8% of respondents to a survey admitted to buying products via spam.
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Where are these privately-run railroads? The majority shareholder of Amtrak is Uncle Sam. Not only that, but it gets an annual federal grant.
(And there's plenty of public power companies around the place...)
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Every railroad I know of other than Amtrak -- in the US it seems freight can hold its own and only passenger rail needs to be subsidized, though a railfan could provide a more trustworthy answer.
(Come to think of it, that right there might be a sign of American culture -- that we think of railroads for freight first, but sometimes have to be reminded that there are passenger trains outside the east coast.)
I didn't know about public power companies here before. Interesting! I've always lived in places where they're regulated monopolies (though Maryland is just starting its experiment with competition on the power market).
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(no subject)
Being a Canadian...
Pant pant pant wheeze... Ok, I feel better now. Whew! I didn't realize I still had so much buried hostility there.
That Sumerian thing was the funniest thing I've read all day, and probably will be the funniest thing I'll read all day, which means I've only just gotten up and it's all downhill from here. (Unless of course Nave gets online again...)
(no subject)
The Wired story (http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62537,00.html) about the HP paper, which is a less-math/more-why-we-care read than the original paper, and
Stephen VanDyke's How News Travels On The Internet (http://stephenvandyke.com/2004/03/08/how-news-travels-on-the-internet/), inspired by the above.