Dapper fills a perfect niche. People forget that before RSS there was screenscraping. And that after RSS there is still screenscraping. Most of Google News is scraped and does not come from RSS. Amazingly, because nobody really puts any useful metadata in RSS, you still need to screenscrape to produce useful aggregation services. Other than enterprise companies such as WebMethods which had a scraping tool as part of a web services builder, or the innovative Junglee that was snapped up by Amazon before the last .com boom got underway, nobody has built an online screen scraping tool, despite the fact that its actually a massive gaping hole in fundamental services of the web. At Moreover.com, RSS was largely useless to us, because you can’t build a news search engine without full text, and the bigger news sources don’t want to output full text RSS, without prior negotiation. So, like Google…
Want to work out compound interest rates in your head? Use the Rule of 72 ln 2 is 69.3% – which is approximately equal to 70 which is close to 72 – which has many factors making it easy to do mental division. So to work out compound interests rates’ doubling times divide 72 by the Interest rate. At 6% $100 becomes $200 in 72/6 = 12 years
Is Fox News Anti-Semitic? Martin Luther, one of the founders of the Christian branch (protestantism) that dominates neo-conservatism was a rabid anti-semite. But it wasn’t always that way, in fact Luther was fluent in Hebrew and a renowned scholar of Hebrew text. Luther’s anti-semititic volte face came when he realized that his belief that Jews would accept Christ prior to the Last Judgement was hopelessly naiive. And so he turned his energy towards hatred. Last week I saw a Fox News ‘anchor’ reporting from Northern Israel, as a rocket had just landed injuring a civilian. Around him, everyone was wearing normal clothes, however he was wearing a helmet and full body armour, it would be less worrying if this were cowardice rather than showmanship. As the injured woman was lead into an ambulance, she desperately tried to wave the camera crew away, she was covered in blood and did not…
Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy – Advanced Physics Forums “We can choose to look at thermodynamic entropy in two different ways. One approach would say that a high entropy state is information poor because there is so much disorder, and the disorder is essentially random. The other approach would say that a high entropy state is information rich because to truly describe the exact state of randomness in all its gory detail would require lots of information.” This outlines the confusion of the difference in the ‘sign’ between Shannon and Boltzmann entropy. It is basically a confusion over the difference between a state which has meaning to a particular observer, and the notion of absolute meaning where bits of information are stored in the smallest possible moving (hence thermodynamic) particles. What if the latter case were subjective? There is possibly no such thing as absolute entropy, or energy or information…
Nice explanation of diff between Shannon and Boltzmann etropy. Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy – Advanced Physics Forums The information entropy is the log of the number of accesible states, and is dimensionless. The thermodynamic entropy is equal to the information entropy times the Boltzman (sic) constant. (kB = 1.38×10^-23 J/K) so the thermodynamic entropy has units of energy per degree kelvin. It is worth noting that present day computers process so little information compared to the number of equivalent thermodynamic states accesible to them, that the information entropy of the device is insignificant compared to the thermal entropy. I believe this means that present day computers operate nowhere near the thermodynamic limits of computation, so in a certain sense the equivalence of the two forms of entropy is irrelevant except that it does allow one to place theoretical limits on the process of computation.
We’ve moved Wists to hardware with five times the horsepower and into new datacenters. the overall speed is several times faster than just before the move. Traffic has been doubling every two and a half months (interestingly with no reflection of this on Alexa – oh well), and we’re getting ready for the roll out of Wists rev 2! Since its such a pain for people to install bookmarklets in Internet Explorer, we’ve automated the process with an installer. Wists, top web picks from for all. Wists, social shopping scrapbook, wishlist
Would capsules of pig fat in plane seats deter an Islamic Fundamentalist suicide bomber? Urban Legends Reference Pages: Rumors of War (Pershing the Thought) The logic of an irrational deterrent, such as pig fat, which is really an imaginary weapon unless god is a nasty piece of work himself, seems at first glance to be less of a moral dilemma to me than other inevitable anti-muslim stereotyping and encroachment on civil liberty that a less stable society brings with it. However, I suspect that, because religious beliefs are irrational, they are actually based often on subconscious convenience. In other words, if being covered in pig fat prevented you from being a martyr, the belief system of people who conveniently distort the very nature of a loving god by killing in his name would evolve around this inconvenient fact and it would only be a deterrent against the majority of moderate…
Some people from The Twelve Tribes : The Commonwealth of Israel parked up three really nicely restored old 50s buses in Washington Square last night. I think they are Christans, but are playing ‘Irish/ Israeli’ folk music in NYC next week. I would suggest that they should be called Oi Vay Maria. Anyway, I learned this really interesting fact – If you are a hippy traveller, the best place to park up your trailer for free, is the car park at a mega Walmart. Hippies and ultra-consumer capitalism have a symbiotic relationship after all.