Sunday, January 23, 2011

How I met Harry Houdini in a gully

- What's the difference between storage and stowage?
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/storage+or+stowage




- Why left turns should be illegal:
http://www.autoblog.com/2011/01/14/should-left-turns-be-illegal/




- Unsung actors who passed away in 2010. Of this list, Harold Gould and Steven Landesburg jump out at me.  Gould was the constant professional and Landesburg always had a subtle layer of silliness behind everything he said:
http://rightwingnews.com/2011/01/some-of-the-unsung-working-actors-that-died-in-2010%E2%80%A6/




- Best time to buy certain things in 2011:
http://lifehacker.com/5736625/the-best-times-to-buy-anything-in-2011




- Want to be a super-hero?  Harry Houdini came about as close as anyone.  Emulate him:
http://artofmanliness.com/2010/12/20/lessons-in-manliness-from-harry-houdini/




- People with names at the end of the alphabet are more likely to be impulsive buyers than those at the front.  Makes perfect sense if you think about it:
http://io9.com/5737510/people-at-the-end-of-the-alphabet-are-more-impulsive-buyers-than-those-at-the-front




- Want to see a second sun in the sky?  The star Betelguese will soon (astronomically speaking) go super-nova, causing a massive burst of starlight which will last for several weeks.  Should be completely harmless to us:
http://io9.com/5738542/earth-may-soon-have-a-second-sun




- Which sports are most popular in the U.S?  I should carry this list in my wallet.  Incredibly useful list when debating with someone at a sports bar:
http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/football-remains-1-us-sport-15798/harris-favorite-sport-jan-2011jpg/




- What do the numbers on your credit card really mean?  The numbers are not random:
http://www.mint.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/CrackingCreditCode11.jpg




- What is a gully?  I was exploring Welchman's gully last week:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gully
http://www.welchmanhallgullybarbados.com/

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Watson travels the states without a floppy disk

- Tomorrow (January 14th) a computer built by IBM will match wits against Jeopardy's two greatest champions.  The contest will be shown on television in February.  Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess over 12 years ago, so you might be thinking to yourself, "why is this a big deal?  The computer will crush them."  The computer may very well win, but programming a computer to handle voice input and natural language processing in such a fashion that it can play an effective game of Jeopardy really is a big deal!  More about the match:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101214/ap_en_tv/us_tv_man_vs_machine




- When you type the name of a state into a Google search, what is the first thing you see at the top of the search results?




- Hunter S. Thompson's description of derby week at the Kentucky Derby.  I may have provided a link to this article years ago.  It's worth another read:
http://proxy.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?id=1192515




- Top fifty programming quotes of all-time:
http://www.junauza.com/2010/12/top-50-programming-quotes-of-all-time.html




- Twenty things I learned about browsers and the web:
http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home




- Why is the hard-drive of a personal computer designated with the letter C:?  Why not A or B?  To people of a certain age, this is a silly question.  Similar to asking who is Johnny Carson, or asking someone if they have ever seen a phonebook.  To young people however, this is a legitimate question:
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/what-are-the-windows-a-and-b-drives-used-for-20110112/