sonnekki

Would it be silly to attempt to analyze an image of a natural fractal in order to approximate the equation which forms the fractals?

Has something like that been done before?

Acrylic neck and fretboard with a really thin truss rod? It would probably feel terrible, and the IR light might be distorted anyway.

I probably watched this 10 times in a row while giggling like an idiot. Made my day and sparked interest in pulse jets. So I found:

A pulse jet "organ": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zU4u7SSDKw A pulse jet / amateur jet engine forum: http://www.pulse-jets.com/

Great stuff!

Correct!

What matters is whatever they are blabbering about actually gets them out of office or paints a negative picture to enough people that it makes a difference.

If it is not effective, that's when things get interesting, I believe. It could mean a number of things; younger people are voting more, games are becoming more widely accepted as not a bad thing, for instance.

In the latter case, one could argue that the perpetrators are very much out of touch.

I am generally a pedestrian, and in my experience when I am running on a paved path and cyclists go around me, they sometimes say "on your left" which works pretty well, but bells are great.

edit: doh!

I had a great experience buying my first car, a new-used car, from Enterprise Car Sales, a branch of the car rental company. We were able to have a good conversation, and I found that they are a "different" kind of car dealer because they have fixed, no haggle prices for all of their cars.

They are, however, still a car dealer as customers are not able to buy the car online, but they are able to pay to ship the car to the nearest Enterprise dealer. Like every other dealer however, there is a surprising amount of paperwork.

It wasn't entirely painless, but it was the closest to a pleasant experience as I was comfortable with. I was not comfortable negotiating how much I lose with a normal dealer.

I wish I could buy a Tesla vehicle now, but I don't have the money to do so, and I don't want to be in debt for a long time.

This is amazing stuff. Thanks! I agree that arguing over leap seconds is trivial. We're at a good enough point now, assuming leap seconds are handled correctly, such that accounting for those seconds keeps us on track.

Well, we're still using the Gregorian Calendar, and according to Wikipedia, that was released in 1582 [1]. When designing a system as eternal as time, I believe that it should still be easily usable in 100, 600, or 10,000 years; on any planet, and in any galaxy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

> Noon should always be noon

In other words, given a point on Earth (or any planet) and it's angle relative to the sun it orbits, when that point aligns exactly with and faces the center of the sun, it is noon.

Consider this: The way everyone refers to time is "X Units before noon", much like the 24-hour clock (no am/pm), except 0 is noon. The key is that X must be flexible, it should have no maximum, and no minimum.

edit: clarification

Leap seconds are a work-around to make the 24-hour clock keep time correctly. The reason so many problems occurred was a combination of insufficient programming, but also the affect an inaccurate system.

I'm not sure what a correct system should be, but I know that it can't be based on the Earth, the sun, or any one galaxy. In order to have accurate time, it must be external to all of these things, like a meter stick is to an object.

The possible problem with this is that there will come a time when "3:00 pm" is in the middle of the night, the time to wake up for work will always "change".

edit: more thoughts

I'm currently using Google Docs Spreadsheets to keep track of my personal financial data. It is much more manual, but once the view over the data is set, all one needs to do is enter new credits and debits.

Here's how I have it set up: I have one sheet with 6 columns: Account, Transaction Date, Post Date, Credit, Debit, Description . When I have a new charge, I add a new row and fill it out accordingly. Every week, or at the end of the month when my statement comes in, I fill in the Post Date and check the charge. I then check if the statement is balanced with my data.

In another sheet for viewing the data, I use functions DSUM and DAVERAGE, to consolidate information, and I store Criteria Constraints within the same sheet, in a separate section.

All textual data is stored in a third sheet which is referenced in the two other sheets using the INDEX function. The INDEX functions reference custom Ranges so that the data sheets don't have to change.

Doing it this way is a bit of work up front, but once everything is hammered out, I believe it's a smooth system. It may not be the most secure, but it allows me to enter data from any computer, my phone or my tablet, so I really have no excuse to not keep track of my charges or not know exactly how much money I have.

I hope this helps you!

e: sp

This is entirely speculation on my part, but maybe this is some insight into how many spam accounts there are on Twitter.

I am fairly worried by the security policy at Twitter.

For example, I have a friend who had his Twitter account hacked. As an experiment, he deactivated the account, but did not change the password. Whoever had the password logged into the hacked account and reactivated it. When he received the email of the reactivation, there was no "If you did not initiate this, click here" option.

edit: formatting

This is a very interesting interpretation of that video. It has such a dystopian flavor. Yes, it solves problems for you, but at the expense of a full thought process.

What about changes that are required during off-hours when there there is a problem: Wait until works hours to implement in production? Is this not a consideration given the context?

"The goal of X is to teach us about the world, not stroke Ys' egos and tell us how clever our existing theories are."

This a million times. I want this on a shirt, with the millions of X's and Y's it satisfies. Thank you for posting.

That link is really cool! Thanks for posting, it will be going on my cube wall at work.

Thanks! Used cVSY9gFdxWhdEz7Z .

I'm not so sure that it's fast, just well organized. The extreme would be to release the product and restructure the entire system "overnight": the implementation took X years but the changes were made available quickly.

This looks more like the pieces just falling into place, though I agree, the scale is a bit staggaring.

I must be missing something. When I select the 'view post' on the invite email, the interface tells me that I need an invite. Quite a conundrum!

My non-techie friends are interested in it too, but they heard about it through xkcd. It's quite the positive review as I interpret it.

http://xkcd.com/918/

Sorry about the word weirdness, waking up.

The article states: Scientists have known since the mid-1930s that water wrinkles do not form if the nerves in a finger are severed

Would such a person not have good wet-grip because:

A) They don't have the ability to form wrinkles

B) They can't grip well because they can't feel their fingers

That's the point I was getting at.

I don't think it's silly, but I do think that it will be extremely difficult to test. People that have damaged nerve endings of the fingers probably are not good grippers, even if their fingers are wet. The control and the feedback is simply not there.

What makes you think we're not experiencing "decadence and the denial of life" now?

Suggested reading: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

I think it was the most honest way he could have described it. Every day that passes I experience more cases where being honest is not the right thing to say, in the corporate world, because of politics.

I have a problem with that.

He's making it clear that Firefox is not an enterprise solution. What's wrong with that?

This sparked a thought experiment in my mind.

Let's assume that we are in an age where the grand majority has an electric car which is charged from home. Let's also assume that the electrical consumption of all other electrical devices (appliances, electronics, lights etc) stays constant.

What extra load will electric cars add to the power grid?

Would the extra power plants required to meet this extra load add up to a relatively equal waste output as today's cars?

e: grammar, clarity

The commenter "seeker" asks the question: "Since when can the TSA cancel flights in airports that they neither own or manage? Last I checked, most of the large Texas airports were owned and managed by cities in which they reside."

Who does own these airports?

I think the TSA is bluffing implying that they can directly cancel flights, but they certainly have the power to deny anyone past security such that there are no passengers to fly.

That sounds like a terribly chaotic situation.

> it's "I don't know, but I'm happy to find out" or "I don't know, but I'd love to learn how."

Indeed! That superficial allure is the technical person's user-talk reaction in my opinion. It's that very reason why I don't talk to users that way because, to some extent, it's condescending: something which I try very hard not to be.

Maybe I'm an idealist, but I find being honest gets a lot more things done than sugar-coating everything. It's probably why I'm also not good at politics.

Agreeing here: I must admit that I used the display points as a crutch. My thought process was, "Hey, this has a lot of votes, it must mean that they have something (good|relevant|interesting) to say".

Now, I am forced to read a comment and ask "Do I agree with this? Does this deserve an upvote?" This is a great thing, and it may slow down my karma-giving, but in the long run, the data will be more accurate.

A good parallel to typing is playing classical piano, where the hands are lifted, and a straight line can be projected through the wrist to the elbow.

Resting the wrist or elbow on some sort of extension is what causes the strain. The trick is building the strength to hold up your hands and arms (maybe take up piano ;) ) without becoming tense in your shoulders and back. All of this follows from having a good posture.

Google already tried to buy Twitter to some extent.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/sources-google-in-late-stag...

It seems like Twitter is the last piece of the puzzle for them. However, I think Twitter needs more time to mature from a good product to a great product.