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Pi does not repeat. It is irrational, and this has been proven.

The nice thing about pi is that you can use it for conspiracy theories. For instance, did you know that in the digits of pi, George Bush's birthday, Osama bin Laden's birthday and 9/11/2001 can be found in succession?

Obviously because pi does not terminate, there will be a point at which this occurs. Similarly, you can find your birthday and the birthdays of your x closest friends in succession.

Calculating all the digits is neither necessary nor would it be helpful; here's a short proof of pi's irrationality, though.

I use LaTeX2e on a daily basis for a great variety of documents. While at it, I also had to interact at the professional level with people who seem to think that the one and only way to do rich text is with MS Word, so I had to see what could I do to preserve interoperability.

In the Free Software realm, the two best options seem to be latex2rtf and tex4ht.

The first one, latex2rtf, is the one I use. It works decently, does its job, and does it well. The only glitches I saw are that the resulting document has an user--defined page size and margins that are too big (i.e., 3.5--4.2cm), but both of these are easily surmountable. For your needs, the trouble with latex2rtf is that it only does LaTeX, AFAIK.

The second one, tex4ht, is said to be an excellent tool. It is aimed mainly to the production of hypertext documents for the Web, and it could be used as a (La)TeX -- HTML tool. But it can also generate XML/CSS, and OpenOffice.org .sxw documents, too. From there, converting to a Word format would be trivial.

For me, tex4ht looked interesting, and really worth checking out. Additionally, it is not bound to the LaTeX format; it can do plain TeX. However, and this is the sad part, its installation instructions for Unix systems are incredibly hard to understand, especially for those of us that do not use the C shell. And, it does not integrate well with the defacto TeX distribution for Unix, teTeX.

My take: if you can manage to get it going, perhaps tex4ht might be the way to go for you.

I use LaTeX2e on a daily basis for a great variety of documents. While at it, I also had to interact at the professional level with people who seem to think that the one and only way to do rich text is with MS Word, so I had to see what could I do to preserve interoperability.

In the Free Software realm, the two best options seem to be latex2rtf and tex4ht.

The first one, latex2rtf, is the one I use. It works decently, does its job, and does it well. The only glitches I saw are that the resulting document has an user--defined page size and margins that are too big (i.e., 3.5--4.2cm), but both of these are easily surmountable. For your needs, the trouble with latex2rtf is that it only does LaTeX, AFAIK.

The second one, tex4ht, is said to be an excellent tool. It is aimed mainly to the production of hypertext documents for the Web, and it could be used as a (La)TeX -- HTML tool. But it can also generate XML/CSS, and OpenOffice.org .sxw documents, too. From there, converting to a Word format would be trivial.

For me, tex4ht looked interesting, and really worth checking out. Additionally, it is not bound to the LaTeX format; it can do plain TeX. However, and this is the sad part, its installation instructions for Unix systems are incredibly hard to understand, especially for those of us that do not use the C shell. And, it does not integrate well with the defacto TeX distribution for Unix, teTeX.

My take: if you can manage to get it going, perhaps tex4ht might be the way to go for you.

Good post, and very interesting info about Darwin. Thanks. B)

Thought I'd point out something interesting in return. Actually, only consonants are written in Hebrew, something dustily remembered from my years in Hebrew school (which of course, like most typical NY Jews, ended the day I turned 13.) There are two ways of describing vowels in written Hebrew: the use of sub and superscript dots, dashes and "Ts" (kinda Tetris symbols) (a system which Torah scrolls do not use) and ...context.

There's a great web page that describes it better than I could:

http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~hr/bible/hebvow.html

But yes, how Torahs are made is amazing, from the preparation of the skin, to the ink, to the sewng together of the sections. And, it's a true master/apprentice skill, one of the few left. To combine that with modern high tech is way cool, no?

"I remember that the *"People of Han" (as they called themselves) who founded the original Chin Dynasty considered themselves the center of the universe. So naturally, they too considered themselves the center of all culture and refinement. I see modern communism as a more contemporary expression of this belief. It seems almost bred into their cultural psychology. A very deep meme that is very difficult to erase." So.....nothing like the modern-day USA then ?

No, you're absolutely right. American's do think that they're the center of the universe. I know because I am one. I'm a Jerseyite, I live very near Princeton which had beautiful minds and where Einstein's Unified Field Theory was first concocted. Plains, trains, automobiles, computers, networks all invented her in the good ol' rockin' US of friggin' A!

We are jingoisitic and think we are the center of the universe. But compare our piddling few hundred odd years to China's 7000 years or more!

But if you trace American culture, we basically go back to ye olde England to about the time of Cromwell or slightly before (history is not my forte). Until the late 1800s, most of American Society (around 70% I believe) was English/Irish in descent. After the turn of that century American Society was essentially re-made with an influx of new immigrants from the rest of Europe, including Germany, Poland, and Italy (for example). It was a time when our culture was "unravelling" (according to Strauss and Howe) in a period that was not unlike the what the past 20 years of American Society has been like. Scarily, eerily similar. No, no OJ's getting chased by police in White Ford Broncos down the 405, no Monica Lewinsky, no Punk Rock. But just like today, America was being thought anew to include all of the new cultures that were calling america home. It was also being shaken to it's foundations by spasmodic bursts of new technological developments like Movies, Telephones, the Automobile, and Flight. It was also a time when we first heard the beginnings of a dirty and dissident form of music known as...brace yourself...JAZZ!!!!!! *GASP*. I know hard to imagine, but Jazz was really regarded just that way by prominent members of our society instead of the rich subtle tapestry of powerful creative expression that it is.

So, what's been happening for the past 20 years? Well, computers have been around for a long while, but I really don't think the couch potatoes started buying them until they became of the internet at about the same time. We had dirty dissident punk and instrial, and indie rock and underground cinema. And the immigration is ENORMOUS and will definitely chage the way America thinks of itself. Latin American immigration is simply jaw-dropping. In the town I used to live in, almost everyone there is mono-lingual. And it ain't english! Whether your in a "latin neighborhood" or no, Spanish is on all the ATMs and an option for nearly all phone support calls. I think Spanish should be a high school requirement! Asian immigration is completely boundless as well. Up in Fort Lee NJ (right by the GW bridge) almost all of the street signs and business are in both Korean and English...or in just Korean. Including some street signs!

So a *DEFINITE* on my to-do list is to bone up on Spanish and to give Korean a serious go. While wer'e at it, why stop there? I'd also like to get to speaking

Further down the article mentions that 'island' may have been a false translation. If we take another piece of text from a long time ago, we can clearly point out how translating can be very difficult. Even using another tense (4th par.) can cause problems.

Um. Your numbers are a bit misleading, although that of course doesn't change the value of your story. USB 1.1, which I assume you were using since you're talking about "the past" and USB 2.0 is rather recent, has a max bandwidth of 12 megabits/second. That's 1.5 megabytes/second, of course. PCI, on the other hand, starts out as a 33 MHz bus that is 32 bits wide, for a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 133 megabytes/second. Thus, "raw PCI" is roughly 90 times faster than USB 1.1. Just wanted to point that out, since factual errors of this nature tend to annou the anal geek within. ;^)

Up to 150-180 MB/s striped, see

http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~cbi/XServeTeststellung .pdf

There is no 2 GB file limitation in any common Linux filesystem (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, or JFS). As long as you're using GLIBC 2.2, an application just needs to be compiled properly to support large files.

while Zugspitze is actually correct, the name of the other mountail should read Westliche Karwendelspitze.

Since I haven't seen it, here are several free programs useful for computational chemistry:

GAMESS Free Electronic Structure Package

ViewmolMany types of visualization

gOpenMolVisualization and property Calculation

RasMolVisualization

EgoMolecular Dynamics Program

TinkerMultifacited Package

X-PLORMolecular Dynamics Tailored for Biological Systems

Well, the Höchstleistungsrechner in Bayern, which is 5th on the top 500 list (and stands about 50m from where I'm typing this :) uses up 600kW. They had to reinforce the floor above it before they could install the cooling systems, before they could install the computer itself.

Not if you compare it with this machine (which is ranked 5th on the top 500 supercomputers list).

No Linux clustering project will ever reach the performance of such systems (though some of them might eventually run Linux), but the low-end high performance computing market (yes, I know it sounds oxymoronish) is bound to be taken by Linux.

And once more: Big Iron still has its place. It's not anymore as prevalent as it used to be, but standard PC architecture has design limits that prevent it from ever being usable for certain tasks (basically, anything that requires low-latency, high-bandwidth I/O). The supercomputing center next door just got a new Big Iron that's now the most powerful computer in Europe. It cost about $30,000,000. Look at the specs, especially the IO part. A Beowulf for the same money would be a huge, mostly useless pile of junk, when faced with the kind of problems this machine is designed to solve.

Good overview: http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/finances.ht ml, where CBB, Xfinans, etc are described.

At http://www.lrz-muenchen.de/~phm/banks hen.html the situation in Germany is described. Using my easily-customizable Perl software package TOAD one can generate money transfer instructions in a format called DTAUS that many German banks accept. My local Munich Sparkasse accepts DTAUS files either via T-Online or via diskettes. It talks about the "programmable bank account" also.

The QIF - Quicken Interchange Format - is described at http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/finan ceformats.html.

I have notes about IFX and OFX as upcoming standards for online transactions, but no references right now.

The unofficial"quicken page sounds useful.

-Neal

--Neal

Avoid NIH and help an extant (and very good) project.

Jason