CallMeV

It pays here to do some research. If you can find out who volunteers regularly at the non-profit, find out about the place from them.

For instance, my local hospital runs a volunteer League of Friends who perform regular fundraising drives for equipment such as neonatal equipment, scanners and so on. The League has an iron-clad reputation, and listing on your cv that you have done volunteer work for them actually counts as a mark of honour when applying for local jobs.

No. Just decipher the thing for yourself and go find those geeks. If you spoil it for everybody else, they'll just declare the effort null and void (they did not solve the puzzle themselves) and immediately release a new puzzle, which means your efforts will come to naught.

It's an honour thing. Go for it.

Just saw the latest update:-

"As of January 03, 2011 @ 01:51PM PST "Battle station fully operational"

So it's back up again for now, it would appear.

Ingenious. This article served to clarify something I had wondered about for years.

The TV series "Numbers" referenced this prank twice in separate episodes - once, used as one of Charlie's graphic analogies - the display reading "CHARGE" had been hacked to read "RETREAT" - and once at the climax to a show where Peter MacNicol's astronomer character led a cabal of students on a quest to hack the Hollywood sign to read "CALTECH."

People have pulled much bigger hoaxes and pranks, sure; but since they took place outside of the hallowed halls of academia, they can't call them collegiate pranks.

My last point: This is the same Lyndon Hardy who wrote "Master of the Five Magics," "Secret of the Sixth Magic" and "Riddle of the Sven Realms," the "three science fiction novels" referred to in the article, correct? If so, I knew the author had come from Caltech - but I'd no idea he'd headed this ambitious project until today. You learn something new every day.

Kudos to the poster of this link. Thank you.

That, and Straylight. The world will have to acknowledge that it has reached The Future when the world's space agencies start talking seriously about L5 again.

On this 3x3 chess board, the black bishop can only ever move on a diagonal, which means it can only travel onto white squares: it can never land on a black square. Since the central square is white, the bishop has put the food in the middle. The white knight can only make knight moves - from its starting point, it can only move edge-corner, edge-corner, edge-corner, edge-corner before coming back to its starting point. The knight can never land in the middle square at all, so it will eventually starve. The knight can, however, move onto the black squares: in fact, it has to land on a black square every other move. The bishop's claim that he was "that close" to capturing the knight is also exaggerated - it can be shown how, barring an error, the pieces could move about that board forever in an endless loop.

Personal experience - The author, Stephen Baxter, at a signing at the old Andromeda SF bookshop in Birmingham, UK, looked pretty sad because, despite being surrounded by fans, nobody actually wanted to approach him.

The legendary Kenny "R2D2" Baker at a convention I attended looked dreadfully alone; nobody even wanted to go up and ask for his autograph.

At the same convention there was a massive guy dressed like a Klingon warrior. He actually looked a little uncertain until I came up and regaled him with a couple of Klingon words. Then we got into some curse warfare and he was in his element. Yes, I speak Klingon as well.

I can cite many such examples, usually of some TV or movie celeb attending a convention and looking so bored, sitting there on his own. Dirk Benedict. Erik Menyuk. Michael Dorn. Many others.

I believe I first encountered the description of this phenomenon in one of Leil Lowndes' books, "How To Talk To Anyone" IIRC.

And I encountered the phenomenon IRL a good few years back at a convention, where I had a really nice conversation with an actress who played a major role in a prominent SF series. Apparently, I was one of a few people who'd even just stopped to ask her how she was enjoying the show: everyone else was either staff, stewards or fanbois who only wanted her autograph, photo or both.

I got to sit with her and her retinue later that night in the hotel restaurant: a dinner date I'll never forget.

The Hot Girl effect is pretty real. And if you can get past that barrier of your own fears to approach the unapproachable, yet retain your humility as you do so, the rewards can often be awesome and memorable.

One of my mathematics teachers used to regard prime numbers with considerable irritation. She tried to explain to the class why there was no simple formula to determine which numbers were primes. In the end, she gave up and moved on to the next part of the syllabus, leaving the question unanswered. I almost felt sorry for asking her in the first place. Almost.

If this mathematics teacher had had access to the diagram of the Ulam spiral, however, I imagine that this alone could have provided the impetus for at least one student - me - to have made an academic career out of mathematics. As it is, she committed many other crimes against education, including her infamous catchphrase "Don't bother studying any kind of pointless mathematics that you'll never need to use at work." A catchphrase whose validity has been refuted many times over the years, not the least with the discovery of this diagram.

I am biting my tongue here to keep myself from making references to recent episodes of Doctor Who.

Thank you for this article. Just the thing to get my brain going after the indulgences of the weekend.

It also knocks me flat to contemplate the ideas this intriguing article generates. It does good to be staggered by something new once in a while: it keeps complacency at bay.

Agreed. I became hooked on these series. James Burke made the future seem so incredibly optimistic - "Just think of what we can do tomorrow!"

And now we are here, and it is the tomorrow of which he spoke, and yes, just look at what we are doing!

So what else can we do for our tomorrows?

I watched a TV documentary a few months back, which took a look inside the various tailors' establishments of Savile Row. Consider this: back then, these shops were the startups and entrepreneurs of their day, coming to the street with a few bolts of cloth and next to no money in their hands, spotting the needs of the customers and moving in to sell them a product specifically suited to their needs.

The age of many of these stores speaks volumes of their capacity to read the market over the decades. Anyone who's ever set up a business and wanted it to last could do well to look at these businesses' example.

Some things the Goddess keeps to herself. Others, she leaves for us mortals to find, like breadcrumbs leading to a shack full of fireworks - and you having to light a match to see where you are.

And yet others, Mankind makes for himself, and Goddess can only sit back, pour herself one, spark up a spliff and laugh at our inability to see the consequences.

They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for, had they? Still, without this day twenty years ago, we would not be doing this today.

So Merry Christmas to you all, and Many Happy Returns to the WWW!

May you all find the company you desire most, good food and liquid libation when you need it, indulgence without consequence, and the time to do everything you truly desire - whether snuggling with a loved one or trying to pin down that aggressively elusive bug in your code that keeps stopping up your compiler.

Actually, I ought to just start with "May you finally manage to pin down that bug in your code." Nothing comes close to the elation of victory.

Peace.

Just don't let your inertial mass get so great that the force of gravity from the Earth overwhelms the force exerted by your body's muscles.

Now this article is brilliant. I'm reposting the link to this article to a maths blog.

My old maths tutors in my old alma mater would also love to read the article, so I'll email them the link. If nothing else, it'll remind them that mathematics teaching does make a great difference.

Upvoted on spec. Funny how I knew what strip you referred to by its index alone. I've cited it myself often enough in the past.

I wonder if anyone here has studied the Trachtenberg Method of Speed Mathematics, or Vedic Mathematics. If anyone here has, I'd like to find out what they thought of the way those methods are taught.

That, like mastery of music, language and art, takes persistence, time, practice, learning, error and experience - make the most of your time to devote yourself to furthering what you know. The expertise you seek will come to you.

A magnificent explanation.

It's their cancelling shows that bothers me.

I went to uni, and got a decent Computer Studies BSc degree. It never stood me one damned bit of good, because before, during and after my studies, companies are still holding to the mantra "We need two years' experience in [name the technology]." I have seen employers asking blithely for "two years' experience" in technologies invented six months ago, so "experience" is not the issue.

I have come to the conclusion that, like desperate people in their forties still holding out for their One True Love and still staying single, employers are looking for someone who will come on like Neo from The Matrix, yet look, speak, think and get paid like Wally from the Dilbert strip.

I think the degree puts the "hard working, white collar, self-made man, bucked my own goat, got myself to where I am from nothing, Essex barrow boy, yadda yadda" interviewers off their stride. Some misplaced sense of snobbery, perhaps. I have seen them snap at me, yet treat a candidate with only a minor diploma with kid gloves.

And as for what I've done with myself since I got my degree ... applied for, literally, more than a thousand jobs, attended countless business breakfasts, attended VIP private viewings of art exhibits, appeared in front of and behind a TV camera, done a stint on a radio show as a presenter, given classes, studied languages, mathematics, poetry and art, seen my writings published in a number of different places, and taught my nephew stick fighting for his drama class.

Plus, I had the time somewhere to fit in some coding.

Unemployable? Lacking in initiative? Hardly.

Wish I could upvote this twice.

In the "I can't say what it is, but I can point to one" sense, hackers to me are the ones who show you lines of code they've written for some app, as if to say "This is the magic bit. Look what I've got this language to do!"

They're the bright-eyed people who show you how they managed to make a program do something that nobody else with access to the same program can do. They come from the same school as people who build Antikythera Mechanism emulators and Babbage Difference Engines out of Lego.

That's a hacker, to me: someone who can make something do cool things. If it makes them money as well, that's just the icing on a very big cake.

Too late. They already have. :)

Their next task will be to build the Babbage Difference Engine out of Lego.

When they started putting big guns on battleships, they came up with a new term: "gunboat diplomacy." When the Easter Uprising began in Ireland, the Royal Navy just sat their gunships in the bay and started shelling them from a safe distance.

So I guess they're hoping that they can bring back gunboat diplomacy in a form more suited to the 21st century. And if they're aiming for ranges of two to three hundred miles, I guess that theoretically means that no part of the UK would be entirely safe except maybe Birmingham, and that's mostly because nobody wants to go there even to blow it up.