Misc

Red Rain and Aluminum Foil Hats

September 6, 2010 · Leave a Comment

There was a skeptic’s dream paper released this week on the red rain of India. The rain is theorized to be the spawn of debris of a comet. The study of the cells reveals they do not contain RNA or DNA, reproduce at 121C, and change color based on UV light. Prions do not contain a nucleic acid template, but are found on the Earth. These spores have not been verified by other labs yet, but the paper was also released recently (01SEP10). All of the conclusions point to an extraterrestial origin for the cells in the multicolored rain (variants of UV light changing the color of the cells).... [Read the full story]

Programming

Node Knockout

September 6, 2010 · Leave a Comment

How far can you or upto 4 people get in one weekend from just a concept on a piece of paper and node.js? That’s the question the Node Knockout web programming contest brings to the table. I believe this type of contest should be embraced by universities. It forms team building techniques (need an artist, lead developer, and other developers to handle pieces of the program and mash it all together), it forms relationships that will last long outside the university, and it can create some juicy resume materials. Node allows for instancing. What do I mean by this? If a web application using... [Read the full story]

Business

Google’s Instant Search

September 8, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Google Instant — Search as you type. That’s the headline from Google’s blog today. Just start typing, and it will dynamically begin displaying webpages related to what you’ve typed so far: Test it out at Google Google has enabled the option to turn this on or off. There are some interesting results on single letter auto generated results: w shows “walmart, weather, wells fargo, whitepages” ww shows “www.facebook.com, www.us.army.mil, www.yahoo.com www.youtube.com Google has proved (through A/B testing) that the faster an user’s experience is... [Read the full story]

Design

Apple’s Failure is Ping

September 6, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Apple has a track record for polishing almost all aspects of an application or piece of hardware before pushing it out, the question is where does the leap of faith known as Ping fall into their equation? What is Ping? It is a social networking service for music developed and released by Apple in September of 2010. Ping is supposed to allow you to track your favorite artists and and genres and keep up-to-date with their mishaps. Recommendations barely relate to your chosen genres except they were in the same decade. Ping is in infancy, and it shows! Try following any artist that is not pop,... [Read the full story]

Life

Your flat nationwide tax rate is 40%

September 6, 2010 · Leave a Comment

The small amount of taxes you pay at your grocery store, gas station, etc, + taxes at your job (SS/medicare) = almost half or 1/3rd of what you make. This is important when you’re searching for your post intern jobs. Do you even understand the value of yourself? If you’re consulting for $150 an hour, your employer is saying you earn $90/hr to spend. $30/hour sounds good, but once you realize $12 of that is going to the taxes in your life and you’ll have $18/hr left to spend… you’re in the average American cycle of $30-40k/yr to spend with your 4-6 year degree. Where... [Read the full story]

Programming

Node Knockout

September 6, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Programming

Node Knockout

Functional AI Chess Game in 1014 Bytes of Javascript

The chess figures are unicode. The computer beats me half of the time. The code is riddled with slight references to the author and the game of chess. My browser installation file is 75,000 times larger than this piece of code. It doesn’t report if you’ve won/lost. The AI is recursive and easy to game once you understand it. There is... [Read more of this review]

The Deadly Floating Point Value

Did your professor teach you about the precision of floats? How the precision is limited and gets truncated? Have you ever considered the reprocussions of your software? A missile in 1991 was caught by a system and should have been interrupted, but due to a precision error in a timing calculating the missile was ignored. Floating points in computer... [Read more of this review]

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