Late for breakfast. More later. Talk amongst yourselves…..
Wed. Mar. 14, 2018 – open post.
42 Comments and discussion on "Wed. Mar. 14, 2018 – open post."
Comments are closed.
Late for breakfast. More later. Talk amongst yourselves…..
Comments are closed.
Stephen Hawking died.
RIP
IIRC he was an atheist.
“Stephen Hawking died.
RIP
IIRC he was an atheist.”
As I understand, they all were. For example, Isaac Newton was not granted full professorship at Oxford as he would not join the Church of England.
What religion did Einstein practice? Copernicus? Galileo? Tycho Brahe?
Actually, not one of the cosmologists participated in religions as we know them:
https://www.amazon.com/History-Warfare-Science-Theology-Christendom/dp/0879758260
It’s Pi Day. Or is that Π day? Or π day? Doesn’t matter – it’s a good day for Σ π.
And remember Τ day in June. Have 2π.
Thanks for the reminder ! And, I love π !
3.141592654 is what I memorized in high school over forty years ago. I figure that when I cannot remember that tenth digit, I am toast and will hang up the keyboard. I knew crazy guys in college at TAMU who had hundreds of digits memorized.
http://www.piday.org/million/
“Stephen Hawking and me”
https://www.cringely.com/2018/03/14/stephen-hawking-and-me/
I must already be toast, or our education system has declined from when you graduated to when I did, because I memorized it as 3.1415925.
“May I have a large container of coffee” is what I remembered.
For a while, I used constants as passwords. Something like “Pi = 3.1415926”. It was a phase. I got around it.
Actually, I never dealt with the digits, I just lined up the π line on the slide rule (like on the one jc sent me).
Hopefully, this will be the first of many such cases.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/14/sec-charges-theranos-and-ceo-elizabeth-holmes-with-massive-frau/
3.141592654 is what I memorized in high school over forty years ago. I figure that when I cannot remember that tenth digit, I am toast and will hang up the keyboard. I knew crazy guys in college at TAMU who had hundreds of digits memorized.
I’m good until my last symbolic RPN calculator dies, but I think Python has a constant. “math.pi”?
Tcl will give you as many digits of precision as you want via the Tcllib math::bignum::pi call.
Ach, Pi. How many digits do I still know? I’m not as nuts as younger son, who is well over 100, but I am a bit obsessive about numbers. Let’s see: 3.14159265358979323842643383279502… ran out of steam…
Math contest coming up in 1-1/2 weeks. That’s fun, a bunch of math problems to solve. I usually don’t do all that well, because I’m prone to silly mistakes. Get all the hard stuff right, and then add two numbers wrong, that kind of thing.
And on a completely different topic: politicians, a pox on the lot of them. Switzerland (meaning the politicians) want to bid for the 2026 Winter Olympics. The population is massively opposed, around 2:1. Thankfully, Switzerland has the possibility of a popular referendum, and it’s currently looking like the politicians are going to organize this ahead of time, rather than waiting until it is forced on them. So we can vote the stupid idea down and be done with it, until they try again in 12 or 16 years.
Why any country would want the Olympics, is beyond me, but a country of 8 million? The costs would be insane.
Human factors studies say the average person remembers 10 digit sequences so you can do better.
.mg
@brad Why any country would want the Olympics, is beyond me, but a country of 8 million? The costs would be insane.
Someone will make money. Isn’t it obvious who?
Then there is this one: “..The number e is a mathematical constant, approximately equal to 2.71828…..”
“Someone will make money. Isn’t it obvious who?”
Yes, the politicians will receive mucho dinero in terms campaign donations, free travel expenses, etc., without end.
“HDD vs SSD: What Does the Future for Storage Hold? — Part 2”
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hdd-vs-ssd-in-data-centers/
“Western Digital claims that its competing microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) could enable drive capacity to increase up to 40TB by the year 2025.”
Prepper fail ??
Is it a bad sign when you go into your food storage area and find the mice have gotten into a box of energy bars, eaten the wrappers but left the bar itself ?
Note to self: Get more energy bars – different brand / flavors ! and an metal ammo can to store them in.
Lynn wrote:
” I knew crazy guys in college at TAMU who had hundreds of digits memorized.”
I used to know 80. I had a photocopy of (IIRC) the first 10,000 digits but I never bothered to learn beyond the first 80. Now I can only remember the first 11.
Getting old is hell. ™
“Western Digital claims that its competing microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR) could enable drive capacity to increase up to 40TB by the year 2025.”
I just ordered a hybrid for my new-ish (mid-2012) MacBook Pro. Apple mandates APFS for SSD drives under High Sierra, and the file system is a bit too new for my comfort.
Spinning metal for at least another few years. Ironically, the decade-old Dell E6400 I run as a “No Windows None Of The Time” Linux laptop has an SSD.
Prepper fail ??
Is it a bad sign when you go into your food storage area and find the mice have gotten into a box of energy bars, eaten the wrappers but left the bar itself ?
Note to self: Get more energy bars – different brand / flavors ! and an metal ammo can to store them in.
You and @nick need to get together …
BTW, is this storage area inside your home ? Is it mouse and rat protected or is it your garage ?
One more, then I leave for a while:
New Mexico suing solar energy for theft, fraud and all below:
https://www.pe.com/2018/03/13/new-mexico-attorney-sues-vivint-solar-for-fraud-racketeering/
How non-AlGorish is that NM AG?
Ok, back from this morning’s entertainment…Meow Wolf. You’ll have to Google it. Cool, weird, interesting, crowded.
I learned pi as 3.14159 and that’s enough for me. It’s 22/7 isn’t it ? Something to do with circles???
A bit warmer here today, but still dry. Gorgeous actually.
Lots of hiking yesterday, but not feeling too bad today. Interesting differences between these cliff dwellers and the Mesa Verde guys. National Monument was clean and litter free. Busy. Lots of folks on spring break.
Also, seeing lots of ” van life ” people.
N
@Greg, just sold a nice hp rpn vintage calculator on eBay. They bring good money and the estate and yards sale people price them at $3 to $5 which leaves a lot of room for profit. Old hp calculators in general sell well. People get nostalgia and collect them. I always buy them when I see them.
N
You and @nick need to get together …
BTW, is this storage area inside your home ? Is it mouse and rat protected or is it your garage ?
Crawl space under the house, when we put an addition on we poured a concrete floor in the crawl space. Access it from main crawl space under house. Used to be mouse / rat protected, but the cat wandered off one day and never came back. He was pretty old and we figured he was owl bait.
@Greg, just sold a nice hp rpn vintage calculator on eBay. They bring good money and the estate and yards sale people price them at $3 to $5 which leaves a lot of room for profit. Old hp calculators in general sell well. People get nostalgia and collect them. I always buy them when I see them.
Any classic “Saturn” (mid-80s to early-90s) HP calculator will fetch decent money used, with the HP 15C among the most desirable. HP 42s is also a high dollar item because it was cleared for so many exams, including various PE tests.
My calculator collection:
– Swiss Micros DM42L (HP 42s workalike)
– Swiss Micros DM11L (mini HP 11c clone)
– HP 50G <– daily driver (may have to rethink that since HP dropped production)
– HP 48GX
– HP 15C (buggy Limited Edition from about 8 years ago)
– TI 66 (33 years!)
Yes, I have a problem.
The only HP that I don’t have anymore is a 28S that up and died on me about 10 years ago.
Ok, back from this morning’s entertainment…Meow Wolf. You’ll have to Google it. Cool, weird, interesting, crowded.
Wow, looks like somebody read Cory Doctorow’s book “Makers” and decided to implement the interactive technology museums.
https://www.amazon.com/Makers-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765312816/
Also, seeing lots of ” van life ” people.
Do they appear to be permanent or temporary vanners ?
https://www.amazon.com/Van-Life-Your-Home-Road/dp/0316556440/
I would not mind touring the USA 3 or 4 months out of the year. But I want a Greyhound based coach. Only $600K or so. And, I will keep my house. Sadly, this is only a dream. Our 30 year severely disabled daughter requires daily care.
Some were clearly homeless vagabonds. A couple looked well equipped. More than I expected to see, but I guess I hadn’t thought it through. They do frequent national parks, state areas, etc. It’s not really camping when you don’t have a home to return to.
Meow wolf was really cool. Kind of like an escape room on steroids. They are branching out, so some at least like the filthy lucre and are willing to make money off their art…..
The only HP that I don’t have anymore is a 28S
I have owned many HP calculators. HP-45, HP-33, HP-25, HP-16C, drooled over an HP-65, HP-27S that I bought in 1988 and is still working 30 years later, and a HP-38G.
HP-27S is the only one that I have left. Sold the other calculators over time, gave a couple away to math teachers, but kept the 27S. I was fairly fluent in RPN but still like the 27S and the use of parenthesis. Formulas can be input and solved but there is no programming. Used LR-44 batteries that are easy to find. I also have the leather case for the HP-27S.
It was sometime in 1972 that the local Burroughs engineer showed up to service the impact printer as a couple of the hammers had bad timing causing crooked print lines. He showed me the HP-35 that he had just acquired. I was in awe but could not afford the $295.00 required for the calculator.
Later on I got a bonus check from the USAF for a suggestion that I input into the system and was approved. Several hundred dollar award which was nice. I used that money to purchase the HP-45. Came in a hard plastic case which held the calculator, charger and instruction book. Was not married at the time so did not need to get approval from anyone from the opposite gender.
Alas, my early to mid 1980’s vintage HP41CV just gave up the ghost a month ago. I loved RPN; don’t judge me for it.
Alas, my early to mid 1980’s vintage HP41CV just gave up the ghost a month ago. I loved RPN; don’t judge me for it.
Definitely take a look at the Swiss Micros lineup if you can’t live without RPN.
Back in the day, someone at HP either forgot to copyright the firmware in the calculators or figured that they would have an exclusive on the Saturn CPU. The clever folks at Swiss Micros figured this out.
In Vantucky (Vancouver, WA) we lived around the corner from the building that used to be the fab for the Saturn. It briefly became an HQ for Nautilus before reverting back to HP. These days, with the Vancouver campus sold off for water rights to SEH, HP has all of its operations (printer design) on the second floor.
It is easy to blame Amazon, but Bain, KKR, and the other VCs involved should be tarred and feathered for putting the knife to Toys R Us.
Most of the stores in the chain are still decent, but the company has too much debt to stay in business.
http://amp.miamiherald.com/news/business/article205205379.html
Exactly. Spend billions for stuff that will only be used once unless you manage to host the Olympics a second time before tearing it all down.
The Olympics are a huge money loser for the host country. Almost every committee goes broke leaving dozens of vendors to follow them into bankruptcy.
Add the security risk and you would have to be insane or in line for buckets of graft to want to host one.
@Nick: Exactly. The people who profit from the Olympics are the Olympic committee, plus whichever politicians decide to be corrupt that day. I suppose a few people are still naive enough to not know how bad the corruption is, but you really have to close your eyes hard to ignore it.
On a related note, and having a son who’s into the eSports scene: The Olympics have decided to allow some eSports games as a trial, but no “violent” ones that involve killing cartoon characters, like Overwatch or League of Legends. The Olympics are all about peace after all. Boxing? Wrestling? Judo? Apparently all non-violent…
Good! And add charges of commercial fraud and anything else that can be shoehorned in.
Alas, journalistic fraud isn’t actually a crime, else all of the “journalists” who wrote tongue-job profiles Holmes as the face of what a female entrepreneur can achieve when the men get out of her way would be in trouble.
Theranos and it’s technology sounded really impressive when the articles first showed up. Then it sounded too good to be true, then things started not adding up. But the hype from the unbiased science and business press kept up and dissenting or skeptical voices were clearly misogynistic.
Theranos and it’s technology sounded really impressive when the articles first showed up. Then it sounded too good to be true, then things started not adding up. But the hype from the unbiased science and business press kept up and dissenting or skeptical voices were clearly misogynistic.
Theranos isn’t the biggest fish, but she was the easiest to land … for now.
The “Lean In” whale still swims the Seven Seas.
I suspect that Theranos was just a massive fraud. But what if it was a brilliant idea that just didn’t pan out? Or worse, what if it was a brilliant idea which would have worked if given another year or two?
The fraud was in making claims that were patently false in an effort to get people to invest. They didn’t really have the product in use by the government.
Tesla and SpaceX make claims against the future – “I’m GOING to build a truck” and “I’m going to Mars!”.
WRT Toys weRe Us:
Adapt, evolve, or die.
BTW, the Toys weRe Us stores I know of are very poorly located. These days any business that thinks that they alone can attract all the business they need to survive is living in a dream fog.
Myopic/blind management. I bet they are getting some great golden parachutes though.
But what if it was a brilliant idea that just didn’t pan out? Or worse, what if it was a brilliant idea which would have worked if given another year or two?
Hard to say, Theranos never gave any real details on how they were going to do what they claimed. I think they painted themselves into a corner by claiming “100s of tests with a single drop of blood” which is probably beyond current technology**. They should have started off with a more realistic claim “many tests with less blood”, proved it, and then began to mature the technology.
If it is just a big fraud then E. Holmes is getting off lightly: fine of ~1 year salary and giving up her stock in a soon to be worthless company.
**A major part of what I do for a living is developing analytical tests, so I know what I am talking about.
I stopped going to ToysRUs with the kids when they became ClothesRUs. The stores slowly became about 1/2 clothes. Give me toys, or give me…
I wouldn’t take a kid there, but they were a one stop shop for baby stuff when we needed to outfit the house. I think we used them as a showroom and then bought online anyway.
I think that’s the model for most of the trad retailers. Showrooms, with occasional sales in person, and free pickup of online orders.
n