wow.
Month: March 2009
The 10000 Year Explosion
Where the usual geographical analysis treats the distribution of genes as an effect of history, in their view, the genes themselves are a cause: 2 variants in the same gene do not necessarily have the same effect, and the relative selective advantages and disadvantages of them will influence the movements of genes through populations over both space and time.
WolframAlpha
mr. wolfram is usually full of hyperbole, but i await his most recent creation with excitement.
2009-05-05: 5m lines of Mathematica code make up WolframAlpha.
the easiest way to create WolframAlpha without Mathematica would have been to write Mathematica first, then use it.
Open Source Production
essentially, the book that i aspired my thesis to be.
Quantum physics and reality
they probed reality without disturbing it. Not disturbing it is the quantum-mechanical equivalent of not really looking. So they were able to show that the universe does indeed exist when it is not being observed.
10e18 Optical Clocks
now so accurate that they have to be placed at a known height relative to the earth’s geoid, in order to accommodate the influence of gravity on time.
The Cult of Done Manifesto
re: procrastination
Procrastination
merely thinking about the task in more concrete, specific terms makes it feel like it should be completed sooner and thus reducing procrastination.
2019-03-25: Emotion regulation
Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem
x11vnc
libvncserver does not do 24bpp correctly with the Tight encoding. Sigh. Linux sucks.
Kepler mission
Launched today. Will search an area of 3000 light years in our neighbor arm, the sagittarius arm, for earth-like planets. Expected haul, 500.
2010-07-26: After finding more planets in the first year of the Kepler mission than all previous efforts combined: “earth-sized planets are common in the galaxy”
2011-02-01: Transit requires the right inclination for detection, and is quite unlikely, which means there should be 10k as many planets out there than they found. about 12M.
2013-11-23: Using a solar sail approach. Clever
NASA outlines ingenious plan to resurrect the Kepler planet hunter. “K2” mission would use its solar panels as a pointing device.
2015-12-15: Really awesome visualization about all the solar systems yet discovered.
2021-10-27: The final haul was 2662.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 