Page 24 of 28
Genesis According to George Gamow
I’ve been reading Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh, an excellent history of all cosmology. The book starts with the very beginning of astronomical exploration, such as Eratosthenes who was the first to estimate the Earth’s diameter. I’m nearing the end of the book (the mid 1900’s, shortly after the Big Bang theory was created) and ran across this, George Gamow’s version of the bible’s Genesis:
In the beginning God created Radiation and Ylem. And the Ylem was without shape or number, and the nucleons were rushing madly upon the face of the deep.
And God said: “Let there be mass two.” And there was mass two. And God saw deuterium, and it was good.
And God said: “Let there be mass three.” And there was mass three. And God saw tritium, and it was good.
And God continued to call numbers until He came to the transuranium elements. But when He looked back on his work, He saw that it was not good. In the excitement of counting, He had missed calling for mass five, and so, naturally, no heavier elements could have been formed.
God was very disappointed by that slip and wanted to contract the universe again and start everything from the beginning. But that would be much too simple. Instead, being Almighty, God decided to make heavy elements in the most impossible way.
And so God said: “Let there be Hoyle.” And there was Hoyle. And God saw Hoyle and told him to make heavy elements in any way he pleased.
And so Hoyle decided to make heavy elements in stars, and to spread them around by means of supernova explosions. But in doing so, Hoyle had to follow the blueprint of abundances which God prepared earlier when He had planned to make the elements from Ylem.
Thus, with the help of God, Hoyle made all heavy elements in stars, but it was so complicated that neither Hoyle, nor God, nor anybody else can now figure out exactly how it was done.
What happened here?
So, what causes weather radar to do this?
vBulletin login with WWW::Mechanize
This is just part of a script that I wrote to…do something. The pertinent part here is using WWW::Mechanize to login to a vBulletin web forum. I figure Googlebot will guide someone trying to figure out how to use WWW::Mechanize this way.
use WWW::Mechanize;
my $username = "foo";
my $password = "bar";
my $forum = "http://www.foo.com/forum/";
my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new (
autocheck => 1,
agent => 'Perl WWW::Mechanize',
);
$mech->get( $forum );
$mech->submit_form(
form_number => 1,
fields => {
vb_login_username => $username,
vb_login_password => $password
}
);
$mech->follow_link(
text => "Click here if your browser does not automatically redirect you."
);
Marvell Gigabit ethernet adapter
I bought a Shuttle SB86i a few months ago, which is an Intel based small form factor system (reviewed by Silent PC Review) which came with an on-board gigabit ethernet adapter. This piece is referred to by lspci as a “Marvell Technology Groupl Ltd. 88E8053 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)” and by dmesg as a “Yukon Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Adapter”. Either way, the chipset is made by SysKonnect and the driver in the kernel tree (sk98lin) just plain doesn’t work. A quick search (via Google, what else?) turned up this post which referenced SysKonnect’s driver page. Fromt the driver page (I chose the ‘SK-9E21D 10/100/1000Base-T Adapter’ under 'PCI Express Desktop Adapter’) I was able to get their very simple package to build the kernel module on my Ubuntu system, all you need are the compiled kernel sources for the kernel you’re running. If you don’t know anything about your kernel and you’re running Ubuntu (Dapper Drake, probably others), run this command as root to get and compile the kernel sources:
~# KERNEL_VERSION=`uname -r|grep -o "2\.[4|6]\.[1|2|][0-9]"` &&\
apt-get install linux-source-$KERNEL_VERSION &&\
cd /usr/src && /bin/tar jxf linux-source-$KERNEL_VERSION.tar.bz2 &&\
ln -s linux-source-$KERNEL_VERSION linux &&\
cd linux-source-$KERNEL_VERSION &&\
cp /boot/config-$KERNEL_VERSION-* .config &&\
make oldconfig && make
…and then install the driver from SysKonnect. If you don’t know what the above comman does, pick it apart and figure it out! That’s what Linux is all about. (cool regex, eh?)
Loss Prevention and You
I just read some interesting stories about those “exit bag checks” that many stores have implemented in the past few years, namely, Best Buy. Unsurprisingly showing your receipt to the goon at the door and letting him inspect your purchase is entirely optional, from a legal standpoint. The store’s only powers to detain you are if they suspect you of shoplifting which requires that they:
- Have seen someone approach, take, and conceal the merchandise
- Observe the shoplifter continuously
- Verify that they fail to pay for it
- Apprehend the shoplifter outside the store.
The guy at the door can’t possibly do all of this; he’s stationed by the door and, assumedly, doesn’t leave his post. After reading these stories, I’m inclined to test these systems every chance I get; it’ll be an interesting day the first time I’m accosted as a shoplifter.
To-do lists and goals
My social psychology teach counseled his students in the great benefit that goals can have on mood, self-esteem and self-efficacy, the latter being much more important in light of recent studies. Accomplishing goals, however small, has a great positive effect upon one’s feelings of self worth (self-esteem), motivation and ability to achieve (self-efficacy). In this light, he implored everyone to create to-do lists every day, outlining everything you plan to do.
Really, you want to include as much as possible, within reason. Something like “get out of bed” probably doesn’t belong on a list, but “go to the gym” is a good goal. If you see breakfast as standard fare, it doesn’t need to be on the list, but if you’re one to normally skip the day’s prime meal and want to change, it ought ot be on your list. As silly as some goals seem, even eating breakfast, achieving a goal has great positive psychological effects, as mentioned above. Be warned however, that failing to achieve a goal has inverse effects. In that light, creating goals that aren’t trivial but at the same time aren’t too much of a stretch is the best thing to do.
Furthermore, having a list of huge goals that are very long in the making should be somewhere else; putting “build kit car” on your daily list won’t do anything good but keep that un-achieved objective present in memory. If you are building a kit car, perhaps you want to get the bottom end assembled this weekend or install a couple of control arms today.
Intel
Intel’s latest big chip, the Pentium Extreme Edition 965, costs just over a thousand dollars and yet it still looses out to the AMD’s not-quite-top-of-their-line Athlon 64 X2 4800+ which can be had for around $650 (the Athlon 64 FX-60 is their range-topper). The biggest discrepencies are seen in gaming benchmarks, which is particularly sad because gamers are the biggest market for such hugely expensive chips.
In short, Intel’s NetBurst architecture still sucks; for their sake, I hope Core is as fast as they purport. Until then, as the state has been for the past few years, buy AMD.
iTunes Library Statistics
I wrote a little program to print some statistics about your iTunes library while watching the Malaysian GP today. It doesn’t really do the whole XML thing, and only prints a couple of things that iTunes itself won’t tell you, but It’s a start of something that could be good. Right now it will tell you which artists and genres you have the most songs of, the average length of songs in your library and their average size.
Update: Now produces output based upon how many times tracks have been played, which was really the point of this whole thing.
Number of tracks: 2964 Total size: 24181 MB Avg. length: 6:41 Avg. size: 8 MB File types: 2954 files, 10 URLs Most popular genres, by number of tracks: Trance: 420 Ska: 337 Techno: 326 Dance: 300 Rock: 260 Most popular artists, by number of tracks: blink-182: 116 Griffin Technology: 102 Paul Oakenfold: 82 DJ Miko & Mini Me: 81 Anabolic Frolic: 79 Most popular genres, by playcount: Ska: 2210 Dance: 1755 Trance: 1331 Techno: 1078 Rock: 987 Most popular artists, by playcount: blink-182: 621 DJ Miko & Mini Me: 438 Goldfinger: 380 Paul Oakenfold: 362 Big D and the Kids Table: 347
Self-efficacy
So, I’m pretty high in self-efficacy; I am very confident in my own abilities and my aptitude for learning new skills and information. I look at things like WRC or Formula 1 and think, “With some practice, I could definitely do that,” which is my assesment of most things I come across. Overconfident isn’t a far off descriptor for me at times. Occasionally, though, something comes along that totally shatters my belief in my own skills and simply leaves me in awe of someone’s knowledge or talents, such as this video of a guy performing a choreographed juggling routing with 5 balls. Seeing this video left me speechless and I have immense respect for that guy. When you break it down, those are all moves that, with some practice, most people could be taught to do. Stringing them together into a 5 minute routine choreographed to music without a single dropped ball is entirely another story. Wow.
Edit: So apparently the guy is Jason Garfield, a professional juggler. Given that juggling is his occupation, it’s a lot more understandable; I’m still amazed at his skill.
Congratulations!
Must we be congratulated for the simplest of tasks performed on the internet? I just left feedbeack at eBay and was applauded for doing so. If memory serves, most web stores praise you for making a purchase. If you’re going to congratulate me, at least send a medal along with the thanks.