June 2012
41 posts
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Radcliffe Enjoyed Irritating Paparazzi
Daniel Radcliffe enjoyed annoying the paparazzi during his recent stint on the London stage - for six months he deliberately wore the same clothes when leaving the theatre so photographs would be worthless. The 17-year-old was greeted by photographers each night outside the Gielgud Theatre during his stint in controversial West End play Equus, where the teenage actor disrobed onstage every night....
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“Once you understand how central Reddit is to BuzzFeed, it’s like spotting the...”
– 21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity: How BuzzFeed makes viral hits in four easy steps. - Slate Magazine
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A toothpaste factory had a problem: they sometimes shipped empty boxes, without the tube inside. This was due to the way the production line was set up, and people with experience in designing production lines will tell you how difficult it is to have everything happen with timings so precise that every single unit coming out of it is perfect 100% of the time.
Small variations in the environment...
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“While a student at Cambridge, Paul Dirac attended a mathematical congress that...”
– Fish Scales | Futility Closet
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“If you were the President of the United States, I bet you’d get pretty hungry...”
– (via sonofmog)
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jsomers:
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
(Maurice Wilkes, 1949)
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West and his colleagues began by giving four hundred and eighty-two undergraduates a questionnaire featuring a variety of classic bias problems.
Here’s a example: In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Your first response is probably to take a shortcut, and to divide the final answer by half. That leads you to twenty-four days. But that’s wrong. The correct solution is forty-seven days.
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More regarding burrito speeds
~From now on, this is an officially recognized unit of speed, like a light year. 1000 m/s = 1 burritometer.
~burritometer doesn't sound like a unit of speed to me. I propose calling 1000m/s "burritospeed", and a "burritoyear" would be the distance travelled by a burrito at burritospeed in one year.
Example: the distance from the Earth to the Sun is 5 burritoyears.
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Reddit explains the speed at which a burrito...
Q: How fast do you have to throw a burrito so it catches on fire?
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A: Ooh...me gusta. I'm gonna guess a burrito has a similar flashpoint (i.e. the temperature at which it ignites) to wood, which would put it around 300 degrees Celsius (~570 Kelvin). There's a lot of water in food, so I'll assume they have similar heat capacities (~4 J/g K). As such, a 0.5 kg burrito would need to gain 500 kJ of heat energy to ignite. The energy lost due to friction for a burrito will be about the same magnitude as that for a baseball. I'm assuming all the energy lost to friction goes into heating the burrito. (Numerical Assumptions: Drag coefficient ~ 0.3, Area ~ 9 square inches, air density 1.2 kg/m2, burrito catchs on fire in 1 second.) This will be about (0.0003 kg s/m) x (velocity)3. This gives about 1000 m/s.
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“De Rust is a small village at the gateway to the Klein Karoo. De Rust is located at the foot of the Swartberg Mountain range between Oudtshoorn and Beaufort West. De Rust is also known for the meandering Meiringspoort pass. Meiringspoort is a gateway that connects the Klein Karoo (little Karoo) and the (great)Karoo through a gorge with a 25 km road crossing the same river 25 times in...
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Said Watson to Holmes, “Is it wise –
Such false whiskers when hunting for spies?”
Said the sleuth, “I’m afraid
You’re as dense as Lestrade:
I’m disguised as myself in disguise.” – R.J.P. Hewison, Punch, Nov. 21, 1951
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List of Edible Flowers →
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“A side mirror that eliminates the dangerous “blind spot” for drivers...”
– Math professor’s side mirror that eliminates ‘blind spot’ receives US patent
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Dresden Codak's X-MEN REBOOT
dresdencodak:
The Premise - I wanted to make an X-Men reboot that plays to the strength of the concepts, namely growing up as a teenager, dealing with those who are different and how to deal with those who hate you. The primary change in my setting is that the mutations have a clear sci-fi foundation rather than just being random superpowers. Mutants being “the next stage in human evolution”...
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“Finally, there appears to be reasonable and robust data suggesting that...”
– All Hail the Generalist - Vikram Mansharamani - Harvard Business Review
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jsomers:
Exercise design, a la PE and TECS:
Arrange exercises so that they build naturally on each other.
Don’t give solutions anywhere.
Give some test that the student can use to unambiguously verify their solution.
Makes sense.
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“Larson says he was once at a queuing theory conference where the hotel checkout...”
– Queueing theory: What people hate most about waiting in line. - Slate Magazine
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