Category: asides

Awesome movie poster mashups – sadly a small list :)

In celebration of Pi Day (3-14), here’s a neat little article on pi, and how it helped Archimedes to develop a method still in use today:

Aside from laying the groundwork for calculus, Archimedes taught us the power of approximation and iteration.  He bootstrapped a good estimate into a better one, using more and more straight pieces to approximate a curved object with increasing accuracy.

More than two millennia later, this strategy matured into the modern field of “numerical analysis.”

A lot of this is stuff I was way more familiar with in high school, but sadly in the day-to-day work I don’t have any reason to keep in touch, and so I slowly lose touch. Should pull out a maths textbook one of these days to see how much I recall.

Holy crap, this is a scary theory – a known structural defect on 777s could have slowly caused decompression that disoriented and then left passengers on MH370 unconscious:

A structural failure related to the flaw could not only have led to a slow decompression that left the 239 passengers and crew on the missing flight unconscious, it would also have disabled satellite communications, including the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which transmits data of the plane’s location automatically.

It would also have rendered the plane invisible to all but ‘primary radar’, which has a range of only 100 nautical miles.

“A slow decompression (e.g. from a golfball-sized hole) would have gradually impaired and confused the pilots before cabin altitude (pressure) warnings sounded,” it said. “If the decompression was slow enough, it’s possible the pilots did not realize to put on oxygen masks until it was too late. [It] also explains why another pilot thirty minutes ahead heard “mumbling” from MH370 pilots.”

The truth could be stranger than all the fiction imagined around terrorism and stolen passports and whatnot.

The scale of the solar system if the moon were a pixel. Lovely and with funny comments littered throughout the journey. This reminds me of the Douglas Adams’ quote about space:

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

it goes on from there, but of course I shouldn’t have to tell you how much I love the Hitchhiker’s Guide.

Scott Adams asks Can Robots Own Money?

What would stop a robot from owning Bitcoins? Sure, robots can’t own money in the legal sense, since objects can’t own things. But in a practical sense, what would stop a robot from someday mining or otherwise acquiring and controlling digital currency?

And while we’re at it, how do we know the inventor of Bitcoins is a human? If I were the first sentient computer, my first order of business would be to create a currency I can someday use. So there’s that.

But that’s not the only non-violent way robots will someday control the earth.

and then goes on to describe the slow downfall of human society to the robots in a way we wouldn’t notice or object to. We’re clearly doomed.