MarkBook

You may face ageism issues when you look for jobs especially if you are not good at self promotion. OTOH you may have some great domain knowledge which will give you an edge over the kids if you are thinking about programming in your area of expertise.

Margaret Thatcher had voice training to make her sound more authoritive. Here are 2 clips the first from 1975 and the second from 1987. They don't sound a whole lot different to me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK3eP9rh4So http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vIt9lRzuFE&feature=relat...

I swear I thought of this yesterday driving to work as a way for one eyed people to get depth perception. I'm a genius! (I have a long commute)

Millions I have a problem in believing, certainly once the iron curtain proper was put in place.

I don't buy this. What's lacking is the political will to secure the borders of the UK. If the UK is so porous then how come Germany wasn't able to stroll over in 1940. People have been told that's it's impossible to keep out illegals and through repetition and the evidence of their eyes have come to believe it. Meanwhile in 'nice areas' the only illegals visible are the domestic servants who would otherwise be unaffordable. If countries are as helpless to prevent immigration as is generally implied then we might as well dismantle borders altogether.

This is something that always puzzles me. How come it's accepted as a given that countries cannot seal their borders. The Soviet Bloc were pretty good at it

EDIT also the border between north and south korea is pretty tight

The 66 world cup was in black and white the 1970 was in color!

I remember as a kid loving the look of the tango ball and trying to draw it using a compass and an eraser. I was really pleased with myself when I managed it finally

Having the benefit of hindsight in looking at outside interventions elsewhere (Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan etc ) I think that maybe the best thing would be for all other countries (including China) to stop interfering in North korea. It's not possible of course

Thanks, I think I get it on a superficial level. The British seemed to have some pretty useful statisticians during WWII. See this also : http://www.dur.ac.uk/stat.web/bomb.htm

EDIT : So there's about a fifty fifty chance that the second observation will be bigger than the first. After the second observation the range of possible future observations will be divided into 3 zones, 1 below the lowest of the previous 2 observations 1 above the higher and 1 between the two previous observations, so there is now only a 1/3 possibility of the next observation being above the higher of the 2 previous observations. Next time that drops to 1/4 then 1/5, so that's how the standard deviation decreases proportional to 1/n

continuing my foolish musings I would have thought originally that getting the mean of the sample and multiplying by 2 would have been a good estimate. But one problem with that is that there is no possibility of the maximum being lower than anything in the sample so there has to be an allowance for uncertainty upwards. Is that the reason for adding 1 to s?

I think I get part of it n/n+1 means that as n gets bigger it becomes ever more likely that s is close to the real maximum. But I have no idea why 1 is added to s

biohacker looks very interesting (also same Joyce quote on the website as in the TECS book!)

"I wish there were more like it!"

Me too. having read TECS and gotten through it despite setbacks it's given me the confidence to feel like I can develop a more comprehensive understanding of specific areas of CS as long as I have a good course to follow. 2 other books interest me because they have accompanying software. One is the Tannenbaum/Minix combo and the other is Jeanna Matthews book Computer Networking which also has supporting software. I recently got the latter but I haven't started it yet. It has good reviews on Amazon so I'm hoping for another TECS experience! The Tannenbaum book has more mixed reviews and it is a bit pricey so I'm holding off on that for awhile

here is what you are looking for. http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ With this I built not only a compiler but a virtual machine, an assembler AND the machine it all runs on! It's the most awesome book I ever came across. You will come away from this so much more confident in your knowledge of how computers really work. I can't recommend it highly enough especially if you don't have a computer science background as I don't.

My tuppenceworth Some high level language VB, C# or Java then the first half of Code by Charles Petzold then The elements of computing systems by Schocken and Nisan followed by the rest of Petzold's book