Get an external aerial. Check this blog out for instance: www.kiruba.com It describes a common solution in rural India where cell phone signals are fairly weak in some places. (you'll have to scroll down that page quite a bit - just search the page for "mobile phones").
The individual sauce recipes are stored in other text files with filename format sau.000, sau.001 etc, with an index file listing what number is what sauce (ordered both by number and by name of sauce). The lasagna recipes were combinatorially generated from the available sauces and bzipped. I currently don't use more than four sauces in my lasagna, and the total number of sauces I have is also fairly low. I may expand both in future if I need to, and re-generate the lasagna recipes.
In general, this is a pretty clean method to use when you have a wide choice of ingredients all undergoing the same process. Pasta sauces are suitable, as are pancake batters, bread doughs and omelette fillings.
I think what he meant was the time taken for the old mode of thinking to fade away and be replaced by the new thing, whatever that may be. That is largely true - some people simply refuse to change their belief / philosophy because "I've thought this all my life and now I'm too old to change". Eg: Arthur Eddington attacking the concept of white dwarfs and black holes steadfastly until his death, and slowing down the public support for the new ideas of stellar life. (Read the end of the second paragraph)
I'm inclined to believe that someone respectable loudly advocating an old hypothesis is particularly damaging to any change in the philosophy of that field.
On the other hand, I'm reminded of a quote: "Old people are slaves to tradition. Young people are slaves to change.".
3 litres per 100 km or thereabouts? OK, aviation fuel against petrol, but still
The current international price of aviation turbine fuel is about $450 per 1000 liters, which is probably lower than gasoline/petrol prices (comparing bulk prices of course) at whatever airport you are. This is partly because aviation fuel has longer alkanes and is more similar to kerosene, and partly because it doesn't need to be as hair-splittingly fractionated as gasoline.
The fuel efficiency of the A380 has been reported as "95 miles to the gallon per passenger", which should probably read "95 passenger-miles per gallon". (The mpg doesn't increase with more passengers). Assuming Imperial gallons here (BBC report), and assuming a complement of 555 passengers, the consumption comes to 16.34 liters of fuel per kilometer, or about 225,000 liters (180 tons assuming a density of 0.8 kg per liter) for a trip of 7500 nautical miles (13900 km). That number seems believable.
Now to estimate the price:
A380 fuel cost, for 225,000 liters: $101,250.
555 passengers need about 139 cars (assuming 4 per car). Assuming a fuel efficiency of 11 km/l (26 miles per US gallon), that is 175,645 liters of gasoline, which by US retail prices would come to approximately $88,000. European gas prices would probably make it higher than $100,000. I don't know about European *bulk* prices for gasoline.
Interesting numbers. How does the A380 compare to the 747, the 777 and the A340 in terms of fuel efficiency?
Bad statistics jokes
on
Newsy Numbers
·
· Score: 4, Funny
A statistician discovered that the probability of a bomb being on board a given aircraft was alarmingly high. But he realized that the probability of two bombs being on board the same aircraft was reassuringly low.
So these days, whenever he flies, he carries a bomb with him.
---- ____ ----
A university surveyed its graduate students, and found that the male students averaged 1.8 children each, while he female students averaged 1.4 children each. Therefore men have more kids than women.
Well, wouldn't such a person be violating the three revert rule often? Wouldn't he/she be subject to being banned temporarily or permanently (if it went on for long enough that is)?
I edit Wikipedia articles regularly, and its weak spot IMO is not vandalism - blatant or sneaky, vandalism is easier to rectify than content disagreements. Read the page history of "Clitoris" and "Male circumcision" for instance - edit wars of almost operatic tenor, but no vandalism. But Clitoris is in decent shape after the war.
On the other hand, reading the page history of a controversial topic *really* tells you what different camps and factions think of the subject. You just have to be a reasonable judge yourself.
But I don't see why it is "amazing in such a small moon". Aren't larger irregularities to be expected with smaller bodies? For instance, the Mariana-Everest difference is about 19 km, so Earth's crust can be described crudely as "R0 +/- 9.5 km". Olympus Mons on Mars is at 26 km above surrounding ground. Comets are not even spherical - the "peaks" are as big as the rest of the "planet". So why is Iapetus's ridge considered surprising? I'm more interested in the ridge being *only* as tall as Olympus Mons, which is on a planet 5 times the size of Iapetus.
Yeouch! Language wars on Orkut are quite the worst type of flamewar. It usually doesn't affect the communities I'm part of (mostly college-based), but many general interest communities aren't able to speak a common tongue even if they advocate one in the community rules. The trouble is usually when there's a serious discussion in language X, and someone gatecrashes with a message in language Y. All messages after that are in language Y, and nobody is able to read the whole discussion and make sense of it.
On a different note, it had been several weeks since I checked my Orkut account. I logged in today (this story on Slashdot reminded me) and found I could not do anything without the server returning internal error messages. If this keeps up, it may soon die of its own accord, language and Netcraft be damned.
Reasonably close. The purchasing power distribution is slightly more unequal than in the US, but much more equal than, say, in Brazil.
Indian customers are generally much more sensitive to price than US customers. Fuel is more expensive of course, and people tend to buy more 100cc motorcycles than 1100cc cars:-) Most stores (grocery, clothing, stationery, whaever) are owned by one person or one family. Large business chains are still the exception than the rule. Central heating is largely an alien concept - winter temperatures rarely go below 10 C (50 F), and if they do, they rarely stay that way for long.
This is an interesting point. I've sometimes thought that most of the social shear India is facing now is not because of unequal wealth distribution, but because of systematic unequal wealth distribution. The former maharajas, for instance, were point sources scattered uniformly through the country. The trend since about 1975 however is that some states (mostly the southern and western) have progressed a lot faster than other states (mostly the northern and eastern). This gap arose both in the raw economic output of the state and in the state-wise population growth rate. If you plot the annual income per person today, you're likely to see system-wide variation, not just point anomalies. In such a situation, it often becomes common to point at each other and say "They're responsible for slowing us down". The social strife of about 50 years ago was mostly cultural bias (worked all ways). It is now magnifed by economic bias too. I don't know how it will pan out over the next 20 years though.
In India still the internet and outsourcing are the possesion of a prized few who know english. There are many more analtycal minds tied up just for the lack of english knowledge.
Er, that is a somewhat misleading statement. There are *many* more people in India who speak English than those who use the internet regularly. The crunch point is penetration of cheap home computing and connectivity rather than the language barrier.
Your other point about analytical minds hampered by not knowing English is true. However, that problem is easier to solve by teaching them English than by translating software and OS to Indian languages. It's the only viable link language for southern India anyway.
Just a thought that occurred to me - what fraction of Indian Government officials dealing with disaster management have lived in a coastal area for at least a few years? If it turns out that most of the people in the NDM have never lived on the coast, that *may* be a weak spot to watch for when it comes to cyclones, tide surges and tsunamis.
Of course, I don't know whether living in a coastal area really gives one practical experience in dealing with extreme coastal weather.
On a different note, read the Indian Govt Situation Reports here. Here's the first, and here's the latest. Makes for some interesting reading (if you can tolerate the typos).
Yes. Those were Jim Laker's bowling figures against Australia in the 1956 Ashes at Old Trafford - he was the first bowler to scalp all 10 wickets in a test innings. (That feat has been repeated only once, by Anil Kumble against Pakistan in 1999).
BTW, if you don't play/watch cricket, that was some good deduction on your part. The four numbers represent a bowler's statistics: number of overs bowled, number of maiden overs, runs conceded, wickets taken. The superlative number here would be 19, the number of wickets he took in the match.
why not go ahead and get the master work on algorithms, Numerical Recipes, which is now available in C,C++, and Fortran versions. This, just like your suggestion, is hardcore programmers brainfood, not fluff.
I don't know if that was supposed to be funny. If you were serious, I'd like to strongly dissuade you from using NR in production code. Don't get me wrong - NR is an excellent teaching aid and it's excellent for getting the concept. It's a very good book to read in an advanced undergrad course on numerical techniques, but please don't use it in production code. For one thing, the C version is a bad hack of the Fortran version, which means that all subscripts run from 1 to N, instead of 0 to N-1, and all arrays are one element longer than they need to be, with the array[0] element not being used. For another, some chapters leave a lot to be desired. In my personal experience, the functions to solve partial differential equations were badly designed (they assume you have Dirichlet boundary conditions throughout, without allowance for Neumann or mixed).
You should read reviews like this one before you advocate NR.
Summary: NR discusses the algorithms well, and it's written in an eminently readable style. Its code however is not production grade, and should not be used if you have any better libraries.
I wouldn't go that far with the statement. I mean, we also have non-Asian-themed stupid memes (Zero Wing, Natalie Portman, *BSD is dead, and arguably the error-message jokes like No Carrier).
Does the/. crowd have something against Asia?
Speaking for myself, I'm from Asia. And no, I don't have anything against any country on the basis of geography or culture. I've been on Slashdot long enough (much longer than my UID suggests) to recognize a potential meme when I see one. My personal speculation is that the country-themed memes are no different from any other meme, and if they are stupid (which all memes become eventually), it's from overuse and not from cultural bias.
However the winner was Space Tomato Number One, part of the Chinese government's "space breeding" project, where radiation in space is used to create comic book mutations and giant space plants, including tomatoes weighing almost a kilogram....The Chinese news agency Xinhua stated that, "in China the radiation effect is always positive, leading to bigger and better vegetables that will revolutionise agriculture."
I fear we may have a new meme on our hands: In China, X is always positive.
Slashdot Mirror
'ere! What sort of signature is that? You're supposed to type "--~~~~".
Get an external aerial. Check this blog out for instance: www.kiruba.com It describes a common solution in rural India where cell phone signals are fairly weak in some places.
(you'll have to scroll down that page quite a bit - just search the page for "mobile phones").
Were you dictating? :-P
What? Is Google trying to circumvent DRM on audio CDs now?
What's the message that's hidden in your post? :-)
I hope for your sake that you retreaded an existing joke and didn't come up with that all by yourself!
I don't know about you, but I generate my lasagna recipes from sauce files. The output is something like this:
Layer6 Shredded mozzarella + shredded parmesan
Pasta6
Layer5 Tomato-mushroom sauce + sliced parmesan
Pasta5
Layer4 Peanut-coconut sauce
Pasta4
Layer3 Spinach + shredded parmesan
Pasta3
Layer2 Peanut-coconut sauce
Pasta2
Layer1 Tomato-mushroom sauce + sliced parmesan
Pasta1
Layer0 Cooking spray
The individual sauce recipes are stored in other text files with filename format sau.000, sau.001 etc, with an index file listing what number is what sauce (ordered both by number and by name of sauce). The lasagna recipes were combinatorially generated from the available sauces and bzipped. I currently don't use more than four sauces in my lasagna, and the total number of sauces I have is also fairly low. I may expand both in future if I need to, and re-generate the lasagna recipes.
In general, this is a pretty clean method to use when you have a wide choice of ingredients all undergoing the same process. Pasta sauces are suitable, as are pancake batters, bread doughs and omelette fillings.
I think what he meant was the time taken for the old mode of thinking to fade away and be replaced by the new thing, whatever that may be. That is largely true - some people simply refuse to change their belief / philosophy because "I've thought this all my life and now I'm too old to change". Eg: Arthur Eddington attacking the concept of white dwarfs and black holes steadfastly until his death, and slowing down the public support for the new ideas of stellar life. (Read the end of the second paragraph)
I'm inclined to believe that someone respectable loudly advocating an old hypothesis is particularly damaging to any change in the philosophy of that field.
On the other hand, I'm reminded of a quote: "Old people are slaves to tradition. Young people are slaves to change.".
In summary, men have fewer, more serious accidents and women have more less serious ones.
Interesting parallel. It is reported by some sources that women attempt suicide more often than men, but men are more successful in their suicide attempts.
3 litres per 100 km or thereabouts? OK, aviation fuel against petrol, but still
The current international price of aviation turbine fuel is about $450 per 1000 liters, which is probably lower than gasoline/petrol prices (comparing bulk prices of course) at whatever airport you are. This is partly because aviation fuel has longer alkanes and is more similar to kerosene, and partly because it doesn't need to be as hair-splittingly fractionated as gasoline.
The fuel efficiency of the A380 has been reported as "95 miles to the gallon per passenger", which should probably read "95 passenger-miles per gallon". (The mpg doesn't increase with more passengers). Assuming Imperial gallons here (BBC report), and assuming a complement of 555 passengers, the consumption comes to 16.34 liters of fuel per kilometer, or about 225,000 liters (180 tons assuming a density of 0.8 kg per liter) for a trip of 7500 nautical miles (13900 km). That number seems believable.
Now to estimate the price:
A380 fuel cost, for 225,000 liters: $101,250.
555 passengers need about 139 cars (assuming 4 per car). Assuming a fuel efficiency of 11 km/l (26 miles per US gallon), that is 175,645 liters of gasoline, which by US retail prices would come to approximately $88,000. European gas prices would probably make it higher than $100,000. I don't know about European *bulk* prices for gasoline.
Interesting numbers. How does the A380 compare to the 747, the 777 and the A340 in terms of fuel efficiency?
Remember this story?
A statistician discovered that the probability of a bomb being on board a given aircraft was alarmingly high. But he realized that the probability of two bombs being on board the same aircraft was reassuringly low.
So these days, whenever he flies, he carries a bomb with him.
---- ____ ----
A university surveyed its graduate students, and found that the male students averaged 1.8 children each, while he female students averaged 1.4 children each. Therefore men have more kids than women.
Well, wouldn't such a person be violating the three revert rule often? Wouldn't he/she be subject to being banned temporarily or permanently (if it went on for long enough that is)?
I edit Wikipedia articles regularly, and its weak spot IMO is not vandalism - blatant or sneaky, vandalism is easier to rectify than content disagreements. Read the page history of "Clitoris" and "Male circumcision" for instance - edit wars of almost operatic tenor, but no vandalism. But Clitoris is in decent shape after the war.
On the other hand, reading the page history of a controversial topic *really* tells you what different camps and factions think of the subject. You just have to be a reasonable judge yourself.
It's a ridge on the planet surface, not a ring.
But I don't see why it is "amazing in such a small moon". Aren't larger irregularities to be expected with smaller bodies? For instance, the Mariana-Everest difference is about 19 km, so Earth's crust can be described crudely as "R0 +/- 9.5 km". Olympus Mons on Mars is at 26 km above surrounding ground. Comets are not even spherical - the "peaks" are as big as the rest of the "planet". So why is Iapetus's ridge considered surprising? I'm more interested in the ridge being *only* as tall as Olympus Mons, which is on a planet 5 times the size of Iapetus.
Yeouch! Language wars on Orkut are quite the worst type of flamewar. It usually doesn't affect the communities I'm part of (mostly college-based), but many general interest communities aren't able to speak a common tongue even if they advocate one in the community rules. The trouble is usually when there's a serious discussion in language X, and someone gatecrashes with a message in language Y. All messages after that are in language Y, and nobody is able to read the whole discussion and make sense of it.
On a different note, it had been several weeks since I checked my Orkut account. I logged in today (this story on Slashdot reminded me) and found I could not do anything without the server returning internal error messages. If this keeps up, it may soon die of its own accord, language and Netcraft be damned.
Reasonably close. The purchasing power distribution is slightly more unequal than in the US, but much more equal than, say, in Brazil.
:-) Most stores (grocery, clothing, stationery, whaever) are owned by one person or one family. Large business chains are still the exception than the rule. Central heating is largely an alien concept - winter temperatures rarely go below 10 C (50 F), and if they do, they rarely stay that way for long.
Indian customers are generally much more sensitive to price than US customers. Fuel is more expensive of course, and people tend to buy more 100cc motorcycles than 1100cc cars
This is an interesting point. I've sometimes thought that most of the social shear India is facing now is not because of unequal wealth distribution, but because of systematic unequal wealth distribution. The former maharajas, for instance, were point sources scattered uniformly through the country. The trend since about 1975 however is that some states (mostly the southern and western) have progressed a lot faster than other states (mostly the northern and eastern). This gap arose both in the raw economic output of the state and in the state-wise population growth rate. If you plot the annual income per person today, you're likely to see system-wide variation, not just point anomalies. In such a situation, it often becomes common to point at each other and say "They're responsible for slowing us down". The social strife of about 50 years ago was mostly cultural bias (worked all ways). It is now magnifed by economic bias too. I don't know how it will pan out over the next 20 years though.
In India still the internet and outsourcing are the possesion of a prized few who know english. There are many more analtycal minds tied up just for the lack of english knowledge.
Er, that is a somewhat misleading statement. There are *many* more people in India who speak English than those who use the internet regularly. The crunch point is penetration of cheap home computing and connectivity rather than the language barrier.
Your other point about analytical minds hampered by not knowing English is true. However, that problem is easier to solve by teaching them English than by translating software and OS to Indian languages. It's the only viable link language for southern India anyway.
Just a thought that occurred to me - what fraction of Indian Government officials dealing with disaster management have lived in a coastal area for at least a few years? If it turns out that most of the people in the NDM have never lived on the coast, that *may* be a weak spot to watch for when it comes to cyclones, tide surges and tsunamis.
Of course, I don't know whether living in a coastal area really gives one practical experience in dealing with extreme coastal weather.
On a different note, read the Indian Govt Situation Reports here. Here's the first, and here's the latest. Makes for some interesting reading (if you can tolerate the typos).
A similar story has been reported on Slashdot earlier. That guy's website was affected, not his software.
Yes. Those were Jim Laker's bowling figures against Australia in the 1956 Ashes at Old Trafford - he was the first bowler to scalp all 10 wickets in a test innings. (That feat has been repeated only once, by Anil Kumble against Pakistan in 1999).
d epth/cricket/2001/ashes/legends/laker.stm (Scroll down to 1956 Old Trafford).
Link here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/hi/english/static/in_
BTW, if you don't play/watch cricket, that was some good deduction on your part. The four numbers represent a bowler's statistics: number of overs bowled, number of maiden overs, runs conceded, wickets taken. The superlative number here would be 19, the number of wickets he took in the match.
Recipe for vaporized latte:
1 cup evaporated milk...
why not go ahead and get the master work on algorithms, Numerical Recipes, which is now available in C,C++, and Fortran versions. This, just like your suggestion, is hardcore programmers brainfood, not fluff.
I don't know if that was supposed to be funny. If you were serious, I'd like to strongly dissuade you from using NR in production code. Don't get me wrong - NR is an excellent teaching aid and it's excellent for getting the concept. It's a very good book to read in an advanced undergrad course on numerical techniques, but please don't use it in production code. For one thing, the C version is a bad hack of the Fortran version, which means that all subscripts run from 1 to N, instead of 0 to N-1, and all arrays are one element longer than they need to be, with the array[0] element not being used. For another, some chapters leave a lot to be desired. In my personal experience, the functions to solve partial differential equations were badly designed (they assume you have Dirichlet boundary conditions throughout, without allowance for Neumann or mixed).
You should read reviews like this one before you advocate NR.
Summary: NR discusses the algorithms well, and it's written in an eminently readable style. Its code however is not production grade, and should not be used if you have any better libraries.
Why do all of the stupid memes involve Asia?
/. crowd have something against Asia?
I wouldn't go that far with the statement. I mean, we also have non-Asian-themed stupid memes (Zero Wing, Natalie Portman, *BSD is dead, and arguably the error-message jokes like No Carrier).
Does the
Speaking for myself, I'm from Asia. And no, I don't have anything against any country on the basis of geography or culture. I've been on Slashdot long enough (much longer than my UID suggests) to recognize a potential meme when I see one. My personal speculation is that the country-themed memes are no different from any other meme, and if they are stupid (which all memes become eventually), it's from overuse and not from cultural bias.
From the article:
However the winner was Space Tomato Number One, part of the Chinese government's "space breeding" project, where radiation in space is used to create comic book mutations and giant space plants, including tomatoes weighing almost a kilogram.
I fear we may have a new meme on our hands: In China, X is always positive.