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They use the method described in Bentley & McIlroy's paper, which uses a "median of medians" for large arrays, a simple median of first/last/middle for mid-sized arrays and the mid-point for small arrays. See page 1255 here. No idea how effective that is. They also short-circuit to insertion sort when N 7 for a given sort window.

I listened to parts of it. It's about the level you'd expect from a small liberal arts college like Skidmore, about comparable to how we played in the USNA Midshipman Orchestra (which is to say, a big spectrum of ability since we took what we could get as musical ability there was definitely not a focus in terms of recruitment).

On the other hand, if you had a recording of students from, say, Curtis or Longy then you'd be hard pressed to tell that from the recording of an average professional orchestra. I'm pretty sure if musopen wanted to, given the nature of the project, institutions like those could be talked into helping for a reasonable donation.

I own his books and recommend them but it seems Tufte is difficult to deal with in person. He charged credit cards for pre-orders before shipping his not-yet-published book and then called someone who politely objected to that a "whiny sanctimonious asshole."

See Flip Philips' blog entry about the scandal here

I can look past that "scandal" if he is going to use that same don't-mess-with-me attitude with our President.
Don't get me wrong - shame on him for being a jerk because someone called him out when he was being stupid.

I own his books and recommend them but it seems Tufte is difficult to deal with in person. He charged credit cards for pre-orders before shipping his not-yet-published book and then called someone who politely objected to that a "whiny sanctimonious asshole."

See Flip Philips' blog entry about the scandal here

I have no idea what the author was meaning by this - but have you not been out of the house recently perhaps? The average 3 story billboard for 'insert company here' seems to be getting closer and closer to this description with every new ad campaign. Models keep getting younger and younger and the ads get sleezier and sleezier.

Most of the time it is almost impossible to tell what is being sold by 'x' ad in the first place - jean companies with ads that have no jeans in them at all (perhaps in a pile on the floor) among other things.

There was an interesting blog about this subject recently:

http://www.skidmore.edu/salmagundi/148-149/Sleeper .htm

Why would email be any different to the NSA?

Let me ramble please. Essentially, the idea is a company releases a number of "competing brands" in order to increase the number of brands in the market, thereby offering consumers alternatives to brands the company already owns. Good examples of this are Soap (Lever Bros vs. Colgate-Palmolive) and, to a lesser extent, Soft drinks (Coca-Cola vs PspsiCo -- there's some similarity between the drinks and automobiles, the drink companies create new brands to compete with themselves and their aquisitions, which the automobile companies generally don't).

Automobiles are slightly different beast however, because most of the car companies that fall under a parent's umbrella were simply aquired and not created as a new brand to compete with themselves (a notable and unique exception to this rule being Saturn).

It works better for GM to buy Pontiac, Buick, Chevrolet, Cadillac and Saab because it not only adds a new brand for them (which does does happen, but isn't the the company's true motive), it also removes a market competetor, and moves someone else's innovations into the company. Over time, the aquired companies get integrated as divisions (which is why at first we saw Dodge, Plymoth and Chrysler all their own flavour of Neon, but recently only Dodge makes them).

Eventually, once whatever the aquisition offers the company aside from the brand, has been absorbed, the aquisition gets renamed and later closed or simply closed.

It could have come from the meteor, but I think that volcanic activity might be more likely. I'm not sure though, I'm straining to remember my college geology courses, but the important thing to put this in context is Bowen's Reaction Series (explanations from U. Florida, U. Oregon, Skidmore, Florida State U., Google). Basically, this model describes (quoting from the U. Oregon page):

Bowen determined that specific minerals form at specific temperatures as a magma cools. At the higher temperatures associated with

mafic and intermediate magmas, the general progression can be separated into two branches. The continuous branch describes the evolution of the plagioclase feldspars as they evolve from being calcium-rich to more sodium rich. The discontinuous branch describes the formation of the mafic minerals olivine, pyroxene, amphibole, and biotite mica. The weird thing that Bowen found concerned the discontinuous branch. At a certain temperature a magma might produce olivine, but if that same magma was allowed to cool further, the olivine would "react" with the residual magma, and change to the next mineral on the series (in this case pyroxene). Continue cooling and the pyroxene would convert to amphibole, and then to biotite. Mighty strange stuff, but if you consider that most silicate minerals are made from slightly different proportions of the same 8 elements, all we're really doing here is adjusting the internal crystalline lattice to achieve stability at different temperatures. Really no big deal.

At lower temperatures, the branches merge and we obtain the minerals common to the felsic rocks -- orthoclase feldspar, muscovite mica, and quartz (the banana slug of the mineral world).

So basically, the assumption begins by pointing out that the Earth's crust mainly has eight elements present. By mass, they are oxygen (46.6%), silicon (27.7%), aluminum (8.1%), iron (5.0%), calcium (3.6%), sodium (2.8%), potassium (2.6%), and magnesium (2.1%). I suspect, but am not positive, that the proportions of elements in this cocktail will be similar for most of the solar system's rocky planets, so Mars should more or less obey the same rules.

Those of you that remember your high school chemistry will notice that, of these top eight elements, all but oxygen are metals or metalloids, so they all will want to bond with a non-metal -- and hey presto, there's plenty of oxygen to go around. As a result, nearly all of the minerals in the Earth's crust are composed of oxygen bonded to one or more metals. But which? This is where Bowen's reaction series comes in.

Given a roughly uniform cocktail of the top eight elements present in a magma flow, you have a range of different minerals that can form as the magma cools & solidifies. If the magma was very hot, it will solidify into olivine, which has a complex crystalline structure. If the magma was cooler, it would solidify into some simpler mineral, down to quartz for the lowest temperature magmas.

Moreover, Bowen's reaction series also sheds light on how materials will break down over the course of millenia of weathering -- basically, they'll tend to keep breaking down into simpler & simpler minerals, until eventually you just have quartz. A

= 9J =

Could we all start submitting stories with links to sites that have absolutely nothing to do with them, seeing as how the eds just seem to make sure the link points to something containing the right keywords? We could have our own April Fools whenever we wanted!

I'm more excited about the licensed games using Doom 3's engine than Doom 3. Also, as Warbucket pointed out, to get the "full" Doom 3 experience (legally), you're going to have to drop about a hundred bucks US. (Trust me, those links actually go to the right place.)

Anyone attend HRUMC X yesterday? Just curious.