News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
A 13-year old boy gave up his iPod for a week and used an old Sony Walkman instead. It took him 3 days to realize there was a flip side to the cassette tape. (I once owned the same Walkman model that he used.) His reactions are quite interesting and show how far we’ve come in the area of portable music. On another note, the Walkman was recently named as the top music invention in the last 50 years.
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)
July 20th is the 40-year anniversary of humankind’s first walk on the Moon. To help celebrate, here are Ten Things You Didn’t Know About the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. My favorite is #7: “When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle’s door because there was no outer handle.”
Link: http://www.popsci.com/…
(via Neatorama)
Windows 7 will be available on October 22nd, 2009. The retail versions (which account for less than 5% of total sales) will be slightly less expensive than the corresponding versions of Windows Vista. There will be at least six versions of Windows 7, but Microsoft is focusing on only three for retail purchases: Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. For those interested, here’s a feature comparison page.
Upgrading from Vista will be relatively painless, but Windows XP users will have to perform a clean install of XP before upgrading. This means you are responsible for saving your data beforehand and restoring it afterward. Clean installs are also necessary when converting between 32-bit and 64-bit versions (and vice versa), as well as when you downgrade from a better version of Vista to a lesser version of Windows 7.
Run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to determine if your system is compatible with Windows 7.
Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…
Link #2: http://www.maximumpc.com/…
(via digg)
Link #3: http://www.pcworld.com/…
(via The Consumerist)
If you have a Google login and forget your password, you can have the reset code sent to your cell phone as a text message. Of course, you have to configure it with your cell phone number beforehand.
Link: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
“When you finally stretch and kick back from the laptop keyboard, it takes you a minute or two to remember where the hell you are. There’s the usual moment of disorientation, a kind of existential dizziness as you re-enter the everyday time-stream in which most people spend their lives: Hours have slid by unnoticed, feeling like minutes (except for the ache in your neck and the gritty heat in your eyes). Sometimes you doubt that any time has passed: But when you look at your clock you realize it’s nearly ten at night. … [You] blink as you stumble out of the office, noticing for the first time that you’re really hungry.” —Charles Stross, Halting State, pp. 66–67
When I was studying psychology, one of my books gave a classic example of how a shade of gray appears lighter or darker based on the shade of surrounding colors. I had to fold the page over to convince myself that the gray blocks were indeed the same. The linked article is an example of this phenomenon using colors, and it’s pretty unbelievable at first glance. The blue and green spirals are actually the same color. Both cases are examples of the fact that our perceptions (how the brain interprets its inputs) can be radically different from reality.
Note: in the example with the shades of gray, I used an image editor to extract pieces of the two squares, and they are indeed the same exact color, even though one looks black and one looks white. I dragged a piece of the “black” square over to the shadowed area and it changed color before my eyes. Amazing.
The linked article has ten extreme locations in the United States. (Actually a couple of them are the exact opposite of “extreme,” but it’s still a neat list.)
Here’s an interesting concept. You know all the power that radio and TV stations use to broadcast signals over the airwaves—most of which just dissipates away? This prototype Nokia phone uses that energy to recharge its battery. The power isn’t very much and won’t necessarily keep the phone fully charged while being actively used, but it would at least make the battery last longer between “wired” recharges. Expect to see this technology go live sometime in the next 3-5 years.
Link: http://ca.tech.yahoo.com/…
(via digg)
Construction has started for Spaceport America. I believe we need to encourage commercial space travel as much as possible, or it will forever be the ultra high-priced monopoly of governments. It’s my hope that space travel will someday be as common as air travel is today.
Dealing with infinity is always an interesting proposition. For instance, if you have a line that extends to infinity in either direction, and you cut the line at an arbitrary location, then you have cut the line in half. And what is infinity divided by infinity? If I recall my college math classes correctly, it can be zero, infinity, or a real number, depending upon the relative size of the infinite values. And did you know there are different types of infinity? I never got very far into this, but mathematicians have defined at least two that I know of: countably infinite and uncountably infinite. And they’ve also proven that the set of real numbers between zero and one is uncountable.
The last paragraph is just a lead up to math in the Java programming language. Not only does it have a value that represents infinity, it has one that indicates the value is not a number (NaN), and it also allows for negative zero. (Here I thought the last I’d heard of negative zero was in ones’ complement arithmetic.) It gets weirder. For example, If two variables are equal to NaN, comparing them will return false. And -0.0 is equal to 0.0, except for a few operations where it has unexpected consequences. The linked article has all of the nuances, although it probably won’t mean much to non-programmers.
Thanks to Josh for this topic.
In Indonesia, an active volcano emits vapors with high sulfur content. The fumaroles are capped, causing the sulfur to condense into the familiar yellow rock. Once a laborer has collected enough raw sulfur (up to 200 pounds), he carries it in baskets for several kilometers—up the side of the crater and down to a weighing station. The daily pay for this is about $5.00.
Link: http://www.boston.com/…
(via The Presurfer)
Remember that election back in November 2008, the one where Barack Obama became President? Ancient history, right? Well there was also a very close senate race in Minnesota that was only resolved yesterday (June 30th). It was between incumbent Norm Coleman and Al Franken of Saturday Night Live fame. After a recount, ballot challenges, and multiple court appeals, the Minnesota Supreme Court has certified Franken as the winner, by 312 votes out of 2.8 million cast.
This is an important event for US politics, because it gives Senate Democrats the 60 votes needed to override a Republican filibuster. Thus, the Democrats no longer have to compromise with the Republicans and can pass whatever laws they desire.
I just find it amazing how several highly significant elections in the past decade have been decided by a few hundred votes out of millions.
Link #1: http://www.reuters.com/…
Link #2: http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/…
(via digg)
