Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Amazon.com Loss Leader ?

 
 
Arlen Specter's book "Passion for Truth: From Finding JFK's Single Bullet to Questioning Anita Hill to Impeaching Clinton" is available on Amazon.com
 
You can pick up a used copy.
Several of them are selling for a penny.
 
 
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0060198494/ref=olp_sort_p?ie=UTF8&shipPromoFilter=0&sort=price&me=&seller=&condition=used
 




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: Feynman Diagram

 

This is from a friend's father-in-law. 

 Here's the explanation of the diagram

 

 

 

Well, see, some physicists were out drinking one night and they got to playing darts and they got a little silly and they bet that the loser had to get the word "penguin" into their next paper, so the loser went home and did smoketh upon the grass of Maui and had an epiphany that certain Feynman diagrams looked like penguins and so did refer to those as such. And the name did sticketh and yay was used by all far and wide. Thus goeth science.

 

    



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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

The World's Most Influential Person Is...

from Time Magazine: 
 
In a stunning result, the winner of the third annual TIME 100 poll and new owner of the title World's Most Influential Person is moot.
 
 The 21-year-old college student and founder of the online community 4chan.org, whose real name is Christopher Poole, received 16,794,368 votes and an average influence rating of 90 (out of a possible 100) to handily beat the likes of Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Oprah Winfrey. To put the magnitude of the upset in perspective, it's worth noting that everyone moot beat out actually has a job.
 
Since moot launched 4chan.org in 2003, the site has given birth to Internet memes as diverse as Lolcats and Rickrolling. 4chan averages 13 million page views a day and 5.6 million visitors a month; by some estimates it is the second largest bulletin board in the world.
 
 

Monday, April 27, 2009

RE: "Oh, that's competely different. Never mind."


My friend Bob Frish has the following information on... umm... Lake Webster.

 



Subject: RE: "Oh, that's competely different. Never mind."
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:44:27 -0500
To: bob_bendesky@hotmail.com


Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

 

Loosely translated means: you fish on side of the lake, I'll fish on my side of the lake and no one will fish in the middle.

 

It's  a very odd bit of trivia that I learned almost 40 years ago from going to summer camp in Maine that was big into Native American (i.e.: Indian) lore. All the cabins had tribal names like Algonquin, Navaho, Iroquois, etc. that saying was actually written over the door way to the "Indian Lodge" where the camp directors would tell stories related to Indian culture – Nothing like a group of Christian and Jews to tell stories about Indian culture.

 

(NPR did a story about this last week too… apparently the town fathers found a "typo" in one of the signs directing people to the lake.)

 

Bob Frish

 

.

 

From: Bob Bendesky [mailto:bob_bendesky@hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 25, 2009 8:45 AM
Subject: "Oh, that's competely different. Never mind."

 

from World Wide Words newsletter:

 

 

Here in the UK, the longest name of  any place is the famous Welsh one, usually written as Lanfair PG:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. There are many longer, including one in New Zealand with 92 letters.

 

This week it was admitted officially that yet another long place name, of a lake near Worcester, Massachusetts, has been spelled wrongly on signs as Chargoggagoggmanchaoggagoggchaubunaguhgamaugg for some years.

 

It should be Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.


The locals call it Lake Webster.

 

 

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Saturday, April 25, 2009

"Oh, that's competely different. Never mind."

from World Wide Words newsletter:
 
 
Here in the UK, the longest name of  any place is the famous Welsh one, usually written as Lanfair PG:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
There are many longer, including one in New Zealand with 92 letters.
 
This week it was admitted officially that yet another long place name, of a lake near Worcester, Massachusetts, has been spelled wrongly on signs as Chargoggagoggmanchaoggagoggchaubunaguhgamaugg for some years.
 
It should be Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

The locals call it Lake Webster.

 
 

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

: Ban Comic Sans!


from a friend:
 



 

Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will

 
Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it.
 
Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer.
 
The font, a casual script designed to look like comic-book lettering, is the bane of graphic designers, other aesthetes and Internet geeks. It is a punch line: "Comic Sans walks into a bar, bartender says, 'We don't serve your type.'"  On social-messaging site Twitter, complaints about the font pop up every minute or two.  An online comic strip shows a gang kicking and swearing at Mr. Connare.
 
The jolly typeface has spawned the Ban Comic Sans movement, nearly a decade old but stronger now than ever, thanks to the Web.  The mission: "to eradicate this font" and the "evil of typographical ignorance."
 
"If you love it, you don't know much about typography," Mr. Connare says.  But, he adds, "if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."


Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123992364819927171.html
 

 


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Monday, April 20, 2009

You missed it. We all missed it.

see attached xkcd cartoon
 
 


 




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Friday, April 17, 2009

Every 16 years, DUCK !

science news you can use:
 

The expected frequency of collisions of small meteorites with cars and aircraft
 
A. Poveda, M. a. Herrera1, J. L. García, Alejandro Hernández-Alcántara and K. Curioca
 
 Instituto de Astronomía, UNAM, Ciudad Universitaria, México, D.F. 04510, Mexico
 

http://tinyurl.com/c8t7dg

 
 
 
 
 


 




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Thursday, April 16, 2009

Ah, the secret ingredient is "essence of chicken"

  
Here's a scientific paper with an oddball title:

 
Effect of Brand's glucosamine with essence of chicken on collagen-induced arthritis in rats.
  Life Sci. 2003
  Tsi D, Khow A, Iino T, Kiso Y, Ono H.

 
 
 
look, i have a blog!
oh, stop yawning...

 


 




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The Case of Specifications of the New York Bagel

by Daniel M. Berry
Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

 
 

New York Bagels

 

How many readers have ever really had one?

 

A New York bagel, such as what you get at Zabar's, H&H, or Rise & Shine, is not just a baked good with a hole in it, despite the widespread proliferation of places that make a bread with a hole and call it a bagel in order to profit from the current bagelmania.  A donut is another baked good with a hole in it, and we all know that a bagel and donut have little in common except the hole; indeed, a bagel and a donut have literally nothing in common.
 

A donut satisfies the physical dimensions given in the blueprint, but a donut is not a bagel. To distinguish a New York bagel from any other baked good with a hole, Detail 1A-A of the blueprint, [attached jpg], has specifications of the elasticity of the surface and the moisture content of the interior. The surface should withstand 45 pounds per square inch (≈3.17 kg per square cm), and the interior should have 20 to 25 percent moisture content. The surface elasticity and inner moisture content specifications together specify the chewiness of a New York bagel. A donut does not satisfy this chewiness specification. A piece of ordinary bread shaped into a ring of the right size also does not satisfy this chewiness specification.
 

1. Use high-gluten flour dough that has risen.

2. Make a ring with outer diameter 4 inches (≈ 10 cm) and inner diameter 1 inch (≈ 2.5 cm) and with a cross section of 1.5 inches (≈ 3.8 cm) in diameter.

3. Put the ring into boiling water for 30 seconds.6

4. Bake the ring on a corn-meal covered surface in a 400°F (≈ 200°C) oven until golden brown, usually for about 10 minutes.

(The step that is left out or changed by the making of most poor imitations is Step 3.)

 

 

Testing Properties of a Bagel

 

A test gives one way to determine whether a candidate system has the tested property. A standard test for New York bagelhood is that a proper genuine New York bagel can be used by a baby for teething for at least 10 minutes without disintegrating into a ball of mush.  A donut clearly fails this test. In fact, all baked goods with holes that fail to meet the surface yield and interior moisture content specification fail this test. All the so-called bagels, including the steamed ones, described below, made without boiling fail this test.

 

Another test is that chewing a genuine New York bagel burns almost as many calories as are ingested by eating the bagel, particularly if the bagel is taken from someone else's plate.

 

Still another test is that only a genuine New York bagel stands up to and does not get squished by the Bagel Biter™ bagel cutting guillotine. A steamed bagel gets crushed into a wad before the blade begins to cut

 

Still another test is that if you bite down on a sandwich made with a genuine New York bagel, the filling squishes out. With a steamed bagel, the sandwich filling does not squish out; thus, a steamed bagel makes a great bun.

Some of the companies that fail to make genuine New York bagels do so because they have decided to make different kind of bagels. These companies include the makers of Montréal bagels, a different kind of bagel with its own fans.

 

Others that fail to make genuine New York bagels do so because they have decided that the high-gluten flour and the boiling are unnecessary. These bakers do not get the proper surface yield or interior moisture content. They make bread with a hole. Many supermarket-made bagels are in this category.

 

 

full @ http://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume15/v15i1/v15i1.html#BagelResearch

 

 

 



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RE: "24": The Unaired 1994 Pilot


A friend of mine saw the "24" video and commented:

 

=====

 

This reminded me of an article in the Sunday Times, "If Only Literature Could Be A Cellphone-Free Zone." 

 

 

"Technology is rendering obsolete some classic narrative plot devices: missed connections, miscommunications, the inability to reach someone. Such gimmicks don't pass the smell test when even the most remote destinations have wireless coverage.

 

("Hello, it's Odysseus. Can someone look up the way to Ithaca?  Use the "no Sirens" route.")

 

 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/weekinreview/12richtel.html?ref=books

 

--John T. Durkin, Ph.D.

    



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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

FW: Urban Dictionary - Perfory was published

 
  

Hey NetFriends,

 

Recently, I was sent a link to a video which showed a woman getting a printout on a dot matrix printer, and she tears the page while trying to remove the strips of paper on the side of the sheet.

 

I mentioned to a friend that I had coined a word for that stuff on the side, and they encouraged me to send it to Urban Dictionary to get it added to their lengthy list of user-submitted words.

 

It was accepted, and has been published.

 

The word I coined is "Perfory":

 


> Perfory
>
> The strips of paper on each edge of dot-matrix printer paper. 
> It's perforated, and it's on the periphery.
>
> Hence, "perfory."
 

   

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Perfory
 
Please take a moment to go to the link above and click on the "thumbs up" symbol on the top right side of the page.  (Note: you can only vote once a day, but you can vote as many times as you want. hint hint.)
 
 
 =====

 

> Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 14:23:25 -0700
> From: noreply@urbandictionary.com
> To: bendesky@gmail.com
> Subject: Urban Dictionary - Perfory was published

>
> Thanks for your definition of Perfory!
>
> Editors reviewed your entry and have decided to publish it on urbandictionary.com.
>
> It should appear on this page in the next few days:
> http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Perfory
>
> Urban Dictionary
>
 


 

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Travels in China

Marc, my friend's son, is currently in China,
His blog, My Beijing Life, describes his experiences in Beijing.
 
Scorpions on a stick street food,
Currency worth $0.00146.
Beijing pollution myths and truths.
 
 
 
 Here's a sample:
 
Later I ventured out to Zhongguancun (中关村), a bargain-priced electronics mall for what I imagine was my first of many trips. I just needed to pick up a wifi router and a digital camera battery and since I had a few hours, I had fun haggling with people.

10x is a pretty standard mark up, especially for a white person, so I always opened with exactly one tenth of the starting price. People usually laughed at me, but since I only would go up in small intervals while they were coming down in much larger ones, I learned what the actual values were pretty quickly.

For example, the first price I was quoted for a Casio Exilm battery was 200元 [Yuan]. I responded with 20元. The came down to 100元, I stayed at 20, they came down to 80元, I started to walk away. They came down to 50元, I offered 30元. They came down to 40元 and I walked away. After going to about 10 different vendors, and having all of them stop dropping the price at 40 - I finally bought the battery for 35元. I felt a little silly afterwards, when I realized that I wasted 30 minutes arguing over 5元 ($0.73).
 

 

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

"24": The Unaired 1994 Pilot


 
  You don't have to be a fan of "24" to enjoy it.
    You just have to be a fan of modern technology.
 
 
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMLH_QyPTYM&feature=related

 


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pretty sure you've seen this, but just in case...

 

Ground Zero

 
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a nuclear bomb goes off in your city?
 
With Google's Maps framework and a bit of JavaScript, you can see the outcome.
 

 

Friday, April 10, 2009

They just don't make album covers like this anymore.

 
...it's a Good Thing.

 



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Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Lobster knife fight captions

 
ok here are a few of the really good captions some of my friends sent back:
 
 
Riff calls Bernardo a "shrimp" .. Bernardo says "abalone" and pulls a knife ... all this over some piece of pisces ..
 
 
"We've already done corn on the cob.  What if he attacks you with a pointy stick?"
 
 
"Hello.  My name is Inigo Montoya.  You killed my father.  Prepare to die."
 
 
"Isn't that just like a wop?  Brings a lobster to a knife fight."
 
 
"He pulls a knife, you pull a lobster. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the buffet table. THAT'S the Seafood Shanty way!"
 

1st RULE: You do not talk about Red Lobster.
2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about Red Lobster.
3rd RULE: If someone says "stop" or goes limp, taps out, the entree is over.
4th RULE: Only two lobsters to a fight.
5th RULE: One entree at a time.
6th RULE: No lemon, no butter.
7th RULE: Entrees will go on as long as they have to.
8th RULE: If this is your first night at Red Lobster, you HAVE to eat.
 

Lobster knife fight

Brian says the caption should be:

 "He pulls a knife, you pull a lobster. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the buffet table."

  http://pictureisunrelated.com/?s=lobster

 


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"No traffic problems reported on the Long Island Expressway..."

 

 

The start of Passover on Long Island, New York.  

 

 

 



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FW: Facebook, YouTube at Work Make Better Employees


Forward to your supervisor
(anonymously, of course...)
 




Facebook, YouTube at Work Make Better Employees: Study
 
MELBOURNE (Reuters) - Caught Twittering or on Facebook at work? It'll make you a better employee, according to an Australian study that shows surfing the Internet for fun during office hours increases productivity.
 
The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.
 
Study author Brent Coker, from the department of management and marketing, said "workplace Internet leisure browsing," or WILB, helped to sharpened workers' concentration.
 
"People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration," Coker said on the university's website (www.unimelb.edu.au/)
 
 
full article at
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2009/04/reuters_us_work_internet_tech_life
 
 
 It's OK to surf over there.
You're enhancing your productivity, right?
 
 

 


 




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Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Passover e-cards

 
 
 
 You know you're in good hands when you see their slogan
("When you care enough to hit Send"):
 
http://www.someecards.com/upload/passover/
 

 


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FW: You're gonna love this


From a friend:
 

 
 Actors reciting verbatim comments from fundamentalist online forums:

 http://www.buzzfeed.com/peggy/if-atheists-ruled-the-world
 
AND
 
on that same page, be sure to scroll down to the fake motivational poster
 
...and there's more where that came from, at http://loltheist.com/
 
 
 
 

 


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Monday, April 06, 2009

“Hard Day’s Night” Mystery chord solved using math

 
"Hard Day's Night" Mystery chord solved using math
 


Chaaaaaang!……
"It's been a hard day's night
And I've been working like a dog"

 


This first chord that starts A Hard Day's Night is one of the most recognizable and famous opening chords in rock & roll. It's played by George Harrison on his 12 string Rickenbacker.
 
The other reason that it's famous is because for 40 years nobody knew for sure what it was. Many guitar players have tried in vain to recreate the sound but have usually failed miserably.

Well, someone has figured it out definitively - not a musician, but a Dalhousie mathematician.
 
Four years ago, Jason Brown was inspired by reading news coverage about the song's 40th anniversary - so much so that he decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles' riddle. The process allowed him to break the sound into distinct frequencies using computer software to find out exactly which notes were on the record.

full @ http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2008/11/beatles-hard-days-night-mystery-chord-solved/

=====
 
a friend of mine, who is a composer, informs me: 

Actually, it turns out not to have been any mystery...
musicologists knew for years, but it didn't occur to the mathematician to, you know, check the existing literature.
 


 
 
 



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another "walks into a bar" joke

 
 
 
  Have you hear this joke?"Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar..."
   It's either really sweet, or really disturbing.
 
 
 


 




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Friday, April 03, 2009

Book Your Mars Flight today!

...and save over $3 trillion
http://www.expedia.com/daily/mars/flights-to-mars/

Thursday, April 02, 2009

"Oh, how thoughtful. You shouldn't have. Really."

from Today's Papers:


"Obama and the first lady met with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and gave her an iPod that contained photographs and video of her visit to the United States in 2007, as well as songs.

The Wall Street Journal notes the gift "continued a multimedia theme" for the Obama White House that gave Brown a set of DVDs during his Washington visit, a present that was widely panned by the British press"


=====
The next gift for a foreign leader?
An Applebee's gift card.

Now THAT'S what I call SCIENCE !

Do 320kbps mp3 files really sound better?


Do 320kbps mp3 files really sound better?
Take the test!


Wednesday, April 01, 2009

iTune's Free Download

Apple's iTune's is offering a free download of John Cage's 4'33" in honor of today.