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Sunday, May 29, 2016

Combine Pharmacokinetics and Bowling

Shape the Zeitgeist



I like to jump head first into subjects that I have no understanding of at all.
Here's a site that meets the criteria. A site that discusses the book:

"Agronomic Representation of Muddles in Linguistic Theory"
by Peter Cannings

The august journal Speculative Grammarian has a long, rich, and varied history, weaving an intricate and subtle tapestry from disparate strands of linguistics, philology, history, politics, science, technology, botany, pharmacokinetics, computer science, the mathematics of humor, basket weaving, archery, glass blowing, roller coaster design, and bowling, among numerous other, less obvious fields.

SpecGram, as it is known to devotees and sworn enemies alike, has for centuries sought to bring together the greatest yet least understood minds of the time, embedding itself firmly in the cultural and psychological matrix of the global society while simultaneously illuminating, reflecting, and shaping the universal Zeitgeist.

The Speculative Grammarian


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Monday, May 23, 2016

More Pi, please

Pick a piece


Is your Social Security number just part of Pi? How about your phone number?

"In 1996, Arthur Bebak of Netsurfer Digest jokingly suggested the idea. I put the site online, linked from the now-defunct Useless Web Pages Pages. The original suggestion was to find your birthday in Pi, but things got out of hand. The original pi searcher featured 1.25 million digits. It was upgraded in 1998 to 50 million, in 2001 to 100 million, and in 2005, to 200 million digits to keep up with the times. The Pi Searcher has proven both exceptionally useless (see the comments) and occasionally useful to math & early science classes.

The Pi Searcher lets you search for any string of digits (up to 120 of them) in the first 200 million digits of Pi. You can also show any substring of Pi"


Today's date:
The string 09062010 occurs at position 100,612,215 counting from the first digit after the decimal point.

The string and surrounding digits:

69799506351530413700 09062010 38508990326697425579

Dave Anderson at:
Angio.net:
PiQuery


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Monday, May 16, 2016

In Search of Stupidity

By Merrill R. Chapman


In Search of Stupidity: Over Twenty Years of High Tech Marketing Disasters


About the Author
Rick Chapman has worked for them all; from Ashton-Tate to Ziff-Davis.

Also see:
InSearchofStupidity.com

Book Description
"... how did Microsoft get that monopoly?

According to Rick Chapman, the answer is simpler: Microsoft was the only company on the list that never made a fatal, stupid mistake. Whether this was by dint of superior brainpower or just dumb luck, the biggest mistake Microsoft made was the dancing paperclip. And how bad was that, really? We ridiculed them, shut it off, and went back to using Word, Excel, Outlook, and Internet Explorer every minute of every day. But for every other software company that once had market leadership and saw it go down the drain, you can point to one or two giant blunders that steered the boat into an iceberg.

Micropro fiddled around rewriting the printer architecture instead of upgrading their flagship product, WordStar. Lotus wasted a year and a half shoehorning 123 to run on 640kb machines; by the time they were done Excel was shipping and 640kb machines were a dim memory. Digital Research wildly overcharged for CP/M-86 and lost a chance to be the de-facto standard for PC operating systems. VisiCorp sued themselves out of existence. Ashton-Tate never missed an opportunity to piss off dBase developers, poisoning the fragile ecology that is so vital to a platform vendor's success."


Quote: the following quote was added just for the neat statistic.
"In 1993, Microsoft Excel 5.0 took up about $36.00 worth of hard drive space. In 2000, Microsoft Excel 2000 takes up about $1.03 in hard drive space. All adjusted for inflation."



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Sunday, May 01, 2016

Military Clipart

Thousands of items


If you find the need for Armed Forces photos and art, here is the place to look.
Regardless of your opinion about their present mission, the military does present a spectacular visage.


"06/17/06 - An F/A-18E Super Hornet aircraft sits at the ready as storm clouds pass overhead aboard the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) in the Philippine Sea June 17, 2006.
(U.S. Navy photo by Photographer's Mate 2nd Class Aaron Burden)

All of these files are in the public domain unless otherwise indicated. However, we request you credit the photographer/videographer as indicated or simply "Department of Defense."


Hood.Army.mil- Clipart


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