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Interesting.. According to Bing it's 2.9433732 x 10^9 Parsecs. I wonder what the cause for the variance is.

Here's a quick rundown of various sites that I would use for reference.
Google: 1 light years = 0.30659458 Parsecs
Bing: 1 Light year = 0.30660137 Parsecs
Wikipedia: 1 parsec = 3.26156 light years
                      1 light year = .306601 parsecs
Wolfram Alpha: 1 light year = .306601393805 parsecs

Since Bing uses Wolfram Alpha, I figured they'd match up, but I checked anyway. Interestingly not even those two match after 8 digits.

try explaining the difference between 2^n and n^3 to the general population.

Easy. Let n be some positive whole number (1, 2, 3, etc.).

n^3 is n × n × n.

2^n is 2 × 2 × ... × 2 × 2, where the "..." means we have a total of n twos. This is generally much, much larger.

As an example, consider this graph.

All that graph means is that Cuba has a relatively low population given it's agricultural production.

If you were to include theoretically possible agricultural production, instead of actual, the US would be a lot better off than cuba :

wolframalpha to the rescue

In terms of sustainability, using the only metric that really matters (amount of sunlight over land per capita), the US is 3 times more sustainable than Cuba, which is about as sustainable as Europe (ie. Cuba and Europe need to kill at least half their population if they're to survive on their own, while the US could increase it's population by another 50% before problems start occuring).

The additional snag is that 2.1 hectares per person is only a viable number assuming industrial agriculture. Traditional agriculture, or "bio" products, or "sustainable farming" need between 10 times and 100 times that. Assuming 10 times, that means that Europe and Cuba need to kill (or starve) just slightly over 95% of their populations and the US would need to kill (or starve) a little under 85% of the US population.

So "sustainable agriculture" ? That ship has sailed, and is long gone over the horizon. I wonder how "greenies" think about this. Is it acceptable to kill 90% of all humans alive so that the remainder could be slightly healther (live 5 years longer) ? If one is to believe actions, clearly greenies believe this. Of course, in reality, I doubt they've even thought about it.

On the other hand, Japan has survived now for about 60 years with less than 0.1 ha/capita, and is now approaching 0.04 ha/capita. Whatever the catches in that, it's possible.

And there's always the technological option. The best plants are less than 2% efficient in collecting energy. Storing that energy is about 8% efficient (energy in ATP -> energy in starch). Eating those plants directly is less than 0.2% efficient. Eating plants gives human bodies about 2 millionth of the original solar power that went into producing what they ate. If we were to find a way to convert sunlight directly into sugar (or starch, or ... I'm in favor of starch, that would, after all, mean free beer) with an efficiency of 10%, 0.2 ha/capita should be easily attainable. If we can get 50% efficient at that, we could feed over 90000 trillion people.

In addition, a sunlight -> oil process would only need to be 0.0001% efficient to match current oil output. If you could make that 10%, we could send every human alive today to the moon on holiday for a weekend every month.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=time+dilation+at+17km%2Fs&a=*FS-_**RelativisticTimeDilationFormula.t-.*RelativisticTimeDilationFormula.to--&f2=33+years&x=0&y=0&f=RelativisticTimeDilationFormula.to_33+years

Apparently V'ger is now from the future by about 1.7 seconds.

can't these people do simple math? ... 106 / 236 = 0.660194175

hehehe. I guess we'll have to call that one a typo, eh? ;)

But, even if you meant 136/206 = 0.66019475, you've still fallen into the same trap as they did: you've rounded. You're abusing the equal sign. To be exact, we should say:

136/206 = 0.6601941747572815533980582524271844 (repeating) [pedantic or on-topic? I can't tell...]

And although we might call it "simple mathematics" that 1/3 = 0.3333... this leads to the true, but perhaps counter-intuitive result that 1=0.9999....

The average person will say that the first result is "truly equal" while the second result is "about equal". When pressed, they will backpedal and say that I guess 1/3 is "about equal" to 0.3333.... [ yes, I often bring this up in bars to hear friends' thoughts]. I guess, I'd have to put this out there to you all. How do we prove that 1/3=0.333...? We can show that the series 3/10 + 3/100 + 3/1000 + .... converges to 1/3, but I'd no longer call that "simple" [i.e. must define "limit", prove convergence, etc.]. Any thoughts on a better way to convince friends of the "exactness" of this equality?

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EGLL
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EIDW
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+ENGM
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EKCH

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EGLL
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EIDW
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+ENGM
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EKCH

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EGLL
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EIDW
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+ENGM
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EKCH

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EGLL
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EIDW
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+ENGM
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=BIKF+to+EKCH

I'm not an economist, but according to Wolfram Alpha the GDP per capita for China is 3290 USD. Figuring 15 hours a day * $.065 per hour* 6 days a week * 52 weeks in a year = $3042 a year, so about 92% of the GDP per capita. Like any big country, I'm sure the cost of living varies quite a bit from region to region (for example a Big Mac in China costs about $1.83, meaning it takes about 3 hours to have enough to buy one) and working 15 hours a day definitely sucks, but at least on the surface the pay doesn't seem that bad. Anyone with more knowledge of economics have an opinion on the matter?

Your math fails.

300 + 4 * 500 = 600 000

33K is closer and at the rate its going down, is selling 1000 units a day of a product with this kind of hype really that good? Mobile phones and computers are sold over many millions a day.

Oh, this wolfram alpha is nice: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=MSFT+AAPL+employee It doesn't seem to get "user base" or similar though.

You must've not been check the stock markets lately, these days AAPL is almost as big as MSFT and gaining fast.

(via)

Yes.

Most pulsars are around 3000 light-years away. Since the speed of light changes over time those pulsars emitted light when it was traveling at a different speed than it is today. So the timing between the pulses will drift.

(At times like this, Slashdot needs a +1 Crackpot moderation.)

Problem is, $750 (minimum) for one movie or song is reasonable. 750x1000 songs (or $750,000) is not reasonable. Can you think of a better idea? I'd love to hear it, personally.

Here's a good formula for a fine structure for copyright infringement without monetary gain:

$750 * (1 + ln(x)^2)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Plot%5B750+*+(1+%2B+Log%5Bx%5D^2%29%2C+{x%2C+1%2C+100}]

Making one copy is $750, making 10 copies is about $4700, and making 100 copies is about $16,000. The per-copy fine goes down as the volume goes up.

Geeks are unique in that respect, what applies to geeks doesn't apply to 99.9999999999999999999% of the school students of any age.

So, you're saying that there are on the order of 6.79 * 10^-12 geeks in the world?

Give geeks some credit. They aren't as rare as you think.

Am I the only one that's going to invoke rule 110 here?

Here's the graph. Health Care expenditures, as a percentage of US GDP, have increased pretty significantly over the last 40 years. Keep in mind that health care costs are PART of GDP (so when WellPoint raises insurance rates, it actually shows up as an increase in GDP, which helps illustrate why GDP might not be the best indicator of our national economic health). That means that the expenditures in the health care sector have been growing much faster than those in most other sectors of the economy - if they were all growing equally, the portion of the GDP associated with health care would stay flat.

I have my own opinions about how to solve this mess, but I'm not in congress and I have trouble making my fish agree with me, let alone other people. So I won't talk about those, just about the facts of the situation.

No, but economic growth as measured by GDP nets higher tax receipts. The point is that for any given deficit, the faster GDP grows, the smaller it becomes in real terms.

So your claim is that GDP is a good proxy for tax revenue, therefore GDP is a good indicator of how bad the federal debt is.

While my claim is that we should use the actual figures of actual tax revenue, instead of a proxy of them.

Why would you insist on using a proxy for tax revenue when actual tax revenue data is available?

If things aren't getting worse, than why isn't this graph flat? Thats a fucking hockey stick right there.

Yeah and if someone is interested what the math error is, he assumed year income of $1.8 billion as being monthly.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1.8+billion+%2F+46+million+%2F+12

= $3.2 a month.

.

In the short term, stocks *do* move around following some sort of normal distribution (Not really normal, but fatten the tails a bit and you're good). Take a look the daily returns histogram at http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=IBM .

" Some traders like to use bollinger bands, which place standard deviation lines above and below a moving average. That always seemed silly to me, since it is well known that stock prices are not even close to following a gaussian distribution."

Even if the distribution isn't normal, standard deviations are still useful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev's_inequality is the simplest theorem, but there are more complicated ones like the Petunin inequality that give better bounds. The basic rule is as long as your distribution isn't too weird, the 2-3 75-99 rule works pretty well...

"Furthermore, the whole idea seems to lose sight of the fact that these aren't numbers coming out of the ether, they are being produced by a large number of people, each behaving in different, but somewhat predictable ways. That makes for a very complex system sure, but not a random one."

Eh, pseudo-random number generators are produced by a large number of circuits, behaving in different but almost perfectly predictable ways. That complex systems sometimes act indistinguishably from random ones is a neat result of ergodic theory...

Hey there partner, have I got a function for you!

1e1 = 1*10^1 = 10
1e10 = 1*10^10 = 10000000000
1e100 = 1*10^100 = a Googol = 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000

1e1 = 1*10^1 = 10
1e10 = 1*10^10 = 10000000000
1e100 = 1*10^100 = a Googol = 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000

1e1 = 1*10^1 = 10
1e10 = 1*10^10 = 10000000000
1e100 = 1*10^100 = a Googol = 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000

Wolfram Alpha is not a Linux calculator per se, but it's a calculator you can use while on Linux! :)

Purchase Power Parity from CIA Factbook-

"This is the measure most economists prefer when looking at per-capita welfare and when comparing living conditions or use of resources across countries."

Germany was much more socialist in early nineties. And the standard of living was also quite higher than now

Nominal GDP per person contradicts your statement. As does real GDP per person. For good measure here is a study done in 2003:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/p634gl14222451n1/

An excerpt:

"During the past ten years, quality of life improved in the former German Democratic
Republic (GDR), but such came with some self-inflicted problems."

Those problems are explained:

"Germany's structural problems today are a reflection of unsound fiscal and monetary policies of the 1990s."

So, not only are Germans better of by every measure I can find, the socialist fiscal and monetary policies of the 1990's are to blame for any structural problems today.

And the standard of living was also quite higher than now

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Thats easy:

Escape velocity of uranus: 21290 m/s

Escape velocity of earth: 11180 m/s

Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus. Thats a lot better than I expected. Maybe its because of the low density and the fact that you start out in the fluffy atmosphere. Escape velocity from a singularity with the mass of Uranus or Earth is of course infinite.

About four times as hard. KE=1/2 m v^2

Thats easy:

Escape velocity of uranus: 21290 m/s

Escape velocity of earth: 11180 m/s

Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus. Thats a lot better than I expected. Maybe its because of the low density and the fact that you start out in the fluffy atmosphere. Escape velocity from a singularity with the mass of Uranus or Earth is of course infinite.

About four times as hard. KE=1/2 m v^2

Thats easy:

Escape velocity of uranus: 21290 m/s

Escape velocity of earth: 11180 m/s

Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus. Thats a lot better than I expected. Maybe its because of the low density and the fact that you start out in the fluffy atmosphere. Escape velocity from a singularity with the mass of Uranus or Earth is of course infinite.

Thats easy:

Escape velocity of uranus: 21290 m/s

Escape velocity of earth: 11180 m/s

Interestingly it is actually only about twice as hard to get away from Uranus. Thats a lot better than I expected. Maybe its because of the low density and the fact that you start out in the fluffy atmosphere. Escape velocity from a singularity with the mass of Uranus or Earth is of course infinite.

For anybody else who wondered: 1 m^3 of median density steel weighs 7820 kg according to Wolfram Alpha.

The guy's starting at over 36km. Air pressure is about one 200th that of surface pressure. Given that the acceleration needed to counter drag increases with velocity^2 (if you're going twice as fast, twice as many air particles hit you at twice the relative velocity), that means that terminal velocity is 14 times as high as usual. Terminal velocity at the surface for a mostly vertical human with gear (I estimated 0.30m^2) is 200 m/s, so up there the terminal velocity is over 2800 m/s, or about 9.5 times the speed of sound at that elevation.

The guy's starting at over 36km. Air pressure is about one 200th that of surface pressure. Given that the acceleration needed to counter drag increases with velocity^2 (if you're going twice as fast, twice as many air particles hit you at twice the relative velocity), that means that terminal velocity is 14 times as high as usual. Terminal velocity at the surface for a mostly vertical human with gear (I estimated 0.30m^2) is 200 m/s, so up there the terminal velocity is over 2800 m/s, or about 9.5 times the speed of sound at that elevation.

Well...., it depends on how thinly we spread 8.438 petabytes.

Fun fact - Wolfram Alpha can serve as your 'self-checkout line' for things like this.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+cubic+micrometer

Here's a bit of scale - a cubic micrometer is about the same size as a calibration bead for microscopy. A red blood cell is about 8 micrometers across. http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/ Or, there's this video showing the "powers of ten" (also its title...): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY

Also, chemists work at these dimensions, too! (So do biologists. And others.) :*P Don't snub the other disciplines!!! Or I'll weep. And not gently, nor to a guitar.

Thats 20 times the expected lifetime.

At 9150m, a plane such as this which is 180kg + say 80kg human (260kg) holds about 23.34 Mega Joules of gravitational potential energy. Can 45kg batteries hold this much energy to push it up that high? (Not even considering the power required)

Small correction:
China is not the biggest single market in the world.
The US is still the biggest market in the world.

The Chinese market is the biggest emerging market, but isn't close to the US market, per capita, or otherwise.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=compare+gdp+of+us+vs+china

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=compare+per+capita+gdp+of+us+vs+per+capita+gdp+of+china

Small correction:
China is not the biggest single market in the world.
The US is still the biggest market in the world.

The Chinese market is the biggest emerging market, but isn't close to the US market, per capita, or otherwise.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=compare+gdp+of+us+vs+china

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=compare+per+capita+gdp+of+us+vs+per+capita+gdp+of+china

Its got the number of the beast in it. Quick, ring Robert Heinlein.

Pretty sure femto refers to the radius in light years. At least, that's how I would defend it, if I had to.

Yep, 50 feet = 1.611*10^-15 lightyears = 1.611 femtolightyears!

Annual revenue of Microsoft = 40 billion per year, of which about 1/4 is profit

Fine = 900 million

A few days is about half an order of magnitude low but it's still the equivalent of a speeding ticket for the average person.

I mean, c'mon, are we supposed to also be celebrating the 190th birthday of perl's localtime()?

go watch the fireworks from my rooftop, naked.

I had similar plans but then our 38 degree C day turned into really serious thunder and lightening so I decided to give the naked roof standing a miss. The roof is steel and quite well grounded.

'fraid not. The 32-bit time_t is signed (I'm assuming so you can expression times less than the epoch, but that's just a guess). As such, it actually overflows in 2038.

Apparently, at least some implementations define time_t as a signed integer.

Especially when the 32-bit time_t overflows. The good news is that most 64-bit OSes already uses a 64-bit time_t, but there still is the issue of truncation to 32-bit.

Shouldn't the 32 bit time_t expire in 2106?

I don't think our unemployed workers have the capacity to make up for what China is producing for us now. With the current (highly abnormal) 10% unemployment rate, we have about 15 million unemployed people. Paying them minimum wage gives $150 million an hour, multiply that by 2000 hours/year gives $225 billion per year. So if all the unemployed workers were somehow marshalled to the job, we'll still have 30% less than the $338 billion annual imports from China. And that's just labor cost. To match demand, we'll have to cannibalize our other industries.

There are other benefits to having trade with China. It discourages conflict and encourages better political relations. It allows Chinese workers to lead a better life and ultimately those efforts will pay back to the rest of the world.

I think patriotism and a bit of extra unemployment is a pretty small cost to pay for all this.

As I am not a citizen of China I have no concern for China's domestic or foreign policy, let alone economic policy. China produces a lot for the US. I'm not sure if you understand that once the demand is gone, the supply will increase and the cost will decrease. China needs the US more than the US needs China from that perspective.

If a people do not collectively have the will to demand better human rights for themselves, they do not deserve them. I know that sounds extremely callous, but I honestly believe that if you don't demand better human rights for yourself that you shouldn't have them to begin with.

My rights were paid for with the blood of patriots and tyrants. I fully appreciate that fact, and I find people that don't appreciate that are a disgrace.

I don't think our unemployed workers have the capacity to make up for what China is producing for us now. With the current (highly abnormal) 10% unemployment rate, we have about 15 million unemployed people. Paying them minimum wage gives $150 million an hour, multiply that by 2000 hours/year gives $225 billion per year. So if all the unemployed workers were somehow marshalled to the job, we'll still have 30% less than the $338 billion annual imports from China. And that's just labor cost. To match demand, we'll have to cannibalize our other industries.

There are other benefits to having trade with China. It discourages conflict and encourages better political relations. It allows Chinese workers to lead a better life and ultimately those efforts will pay back to the rest of the world.

I think patriotism and a bit of extra unemployment is a pretty small cost to pay for all this.