~The Catch-All Drawer~

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Tell me why..
Tell me why the stars do shine
Tell me why the ivy twines
Tell me why the sky’s so blue -

well, at least you can answer this last part by reading up about colors on this neat website that explains the 15 causes of color.

Tossed in by: PDQ
. . . Thursday, April 28, 2005 (1) comments

Friday, April 22, 2005

Math Flash: 1 pair = 2
There are 12" identical rear wheels on the transport chair I got for Mrs BB over the web some time back. A rear bearing is click-clacking so I called an 800 number to the place in CA to order a part. You had to get the wheel to get the bearing, so I ordered two wheels so they would look the same, and we would have a spare. So far so good.

Then I got an email that they couldn't ship my order as placed. Quite stupid, really:
"rear wheels for item # NOV-330 the delux lightweight transport chair not sold in paris, only one at a time." (sic)
So I confirmed with them that 2 would be fine, since they can not sell me a pair. I thought to myself (and my blog), "Same price, so why did they bother telling me this?" I felt like Jack Nicholson in that sandwich scene in whatever that movie was.
And what's with Paris, anyway?

Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Friday, April 22, 2005 (0) comments

Sunday, April 17, 2005

Gibberish Prank
I am all for practical jokes that don't involve physical pranks. The loaded cigar or the tack on the seat never was funny to me. However, hoaxes and intellectual tricks are like super puns. Like April Fools day on steroids.

This story is of the MIT students who were fed up with the bureaucratic mumbo jumbo in professional papers. (Don't you cringe even at the word "infrastructure"?) Anyhow, they wrote a computer program to generate fake papers with realistic gibberish. Here is a clip from their successful paper:

"the model for our heuristic consists of four independent components: simulated annealing, active networks, flexible modalities, and the study of reinforcement learning" and "We implemented our scatter/gather I/O server in Simula-67, augmented with opportunistically pipelined extensions."

They submitted it to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
AND IT WAS ACCEPTED FOR PRESENTATION!

Scientific Conference Falls for Gibberish Prank

Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Sunday, April 17, 2005 (0) comments

Friday, April 15, 2005

Online Bird Database
If you need to identify a bird, just go to the Percevia online database and enter the characteristics!

Tossed in by: PDQ
. . . Friday, April 15, 2005 (1) comments

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Unintended Consequenses
Ad Age reports (through Buzz Machine) that:

The national "do-not-call list", now 87 million numbers strong, has had an effect on the Telemarketers, but not what they had dreaded.

Why? it seems that due to the inability to call out and intrude into our lives made them convert a big chunk of the telemarketers into actual customer service people. Some call centers now don't intrude; they handle customer relations. And the result:

It looks like they've found the shift in sales tactics has resulted in sales results as good -- or even better than -- telemarketing.

Well, DUH. Well, double-duh. It's a surprise that bothering people at home is a bad way to market? And being nice to calling customers and solving their problems works better? Duh! Who wooda thunk it.

Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Wednesday, April 13, 2005 (0) comments

Friday, April 08, 2005

Moho beware!
I remember back in the 60's there was a hoopla about the "IGY" or International Geophysical Year" where the government had many earth bound aggressive science projects, sort of a counter to the space program, to explore the oceans, the earth's crust, etc. They were drilling in the Mariana trench, the deepest part of the Atlantic, to try to break through the crust to the mantle. I was into Geology at the time, cheering them on, and I remember they abandoned that project due to lack of funding. (ooohhhh nooo) I would have solved a lot of assumptions about the mantle's mineral composition, the continental drift, and significant scientific advances. I had wondered over the years what had happened with this. Had I learned to pronounce "Mohorovicic discontinuity" in vain?

News Flash! April 7 2005: Hole Drilled to Bottom of Earth's Crust, Breakthrough to Mantle Looms

Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Friday, April 08, 2005 (0) comments

Sunday, April 03, 2005

Free software: cassettes and vinyl ==> computers.
Here is a stable, free audio editor and recorder! Instead of using Cool Edit, possibly an overkill and quite expensive, there is an open source, free editor that I have tried, and it seems to work fine! Windows, Mac and Linux versions, too. Audacity 1.2.3

Download the main exe file and stick it in its own directory.
Then follow the link to download the "Lame" dll file necessary to export MP3s.
Put that dll file in the directory with Audacity, and that's it.

Tossed in by: R.G.B.
. . . Sunday, April 03, 2005 (0) comments

Tell me why..
Math Flash: 1 pair = 2
Gibberish Prank
Online Bird Database
Unintended Consequenses
Moho beware!
Free software: cassettes and vinyl ==> computers.