September 2014 Archives

Sounds From the Deep

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During the Cold War, the United States built a fence from Greenland, through Iceland, to the United Kingdom — an underwater fence, that is, comprised of listening posts called hydrophones.


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One Thing Well : mdp

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mdp A command-line based markdown presentation tool.


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Six Monkeys, One Month

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Grab enough monkeys, enough time, and enough typewriters — an infinite amount of each, which the theorem importantly notes — and you’ll almost certainly end up with the complete works of William Shakespeare.


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Where the King Dare Not Go

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The map above is a screen shot from Google Maps of Mattoon, Illinois.


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This is a guest post by Arijit Banerjea, a Productivity and Time Management coach who helps people gain two extra hours a day. Get his latest free e-book – Productivity Secrets of 7 Billionaires that You can put into Action Right Now! It’s a really long and busy day.


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Frozen Film

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Until 1951, motion pictures were filmed on nitrocellulose  which is highly flammable. When it burns, it produces oxygen as a byproduct, so dousing it with water won’t put the fire out.


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What Google Knows

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Google has become an indispensable part of our lives.  Their brand name has become synonymous with “look it up,” even sprouting joke websites such as “Let Me Google That For You.” In 2008, The Atlantic asked if Google was changing the way we think, a question others have echoed since.


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Bee Fence

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In some contexts, elephants and people coexist peacefully. Until recently, some zoos afforded visitors the luxury of riding the back of an elephant around some of the grounds, but that practice has been largely discontinued due to concerns for the animals’ safety.


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Coins and the Clink

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Flying internationally with $10 in pennies in your carry-on isn’t a great idea. Unless you rolled them in coin wrappers, you’d have a thousand different slugs of metal to deal with. Even if you did roll them up, you’d have twenty rods in your bag adding more than five pounds to your load.


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Mystery Food

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The image above is not of a squash. The yellow fruit (actually, an “accessory fruit”) is called a marañón, and unless you’re already familiar with the picture, you’ve probably never eaten it.  It’s edible (even though urban legend has it as poisonous).


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I am happy to announce that AEM Solr Search is finally out in Beta! Visit http://ift.tt/ZwDFOL and start integrating AEM with Apache Solr.


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A Life, In Instant Pictures

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On March 31, 1979, a Bard College student named Jamie Livingston did something unspectacular — he took the picture, above, with his Polaroid camera.   On April 1, 1979, he took another perfectly uninteresting Polaroid.  On the 2nd, another.  The 3rd, another.


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Bat Man

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The animals we refer to as bats (“microbats,” really) are nocturnal animals — they sleep during the day, waiting until nightfall to forage for food.


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Black Belt Kicking Drills

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This is round three on these drills. Just went through my older notebooks and discovered the orininal list of drills from 1994. As time passes they have been changed to meet ever changing students needs, and somewhat reduced in number. But I feel the need to save the original listing.


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What a difference a year makes. When iOS 7 was looming in 2013, excitement was at a fever pitch to download the newest software from Apple. With such a significant visual change, everyone couldn’t wait to get hold of the new look and feel.


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Pictured above is a relatively recent map of Eastern Europe. To the north of Hungary, you’ll note the country of Slovakia (in pink). It’s home to about five and a half million people, 80% of which are ethnic Slovaks.


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How on earth are you going to tackle all this and keep your peace of mind? You could of course simply fall back on your standard routine of getting the job done on sheer adrenaline and will power.


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Mice Cold Soda

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Seemingly frivolous litigation is a tongue-in-cheek hallmark of the American legal system.


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Not a Bright Idea

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In 1845, French economist Frederic Batistat drafted a petition to the French government, ostensibly from candlemakers and “generally everything connected with lighting.


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Four weeks after GitHub introduced a chunky revamp of its Windows app, the social coding platform’s Mac app has now been given a li’l lovin’ too.


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One Thing Well : Glasswire

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GlassWire displays your network activity on an easy to understand graph while searching for unusual Internet behavior that could indicate malware or violations of your privacy.


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One Thing Well : cgrep

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Cgrep is a grep tool suitable for searching in large code repositories. It supports 30 programming languages and searches that go beyond the simple pattern matching. It enables context-aware filtering and semantic searches through wildcard and combinators.


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One Thing Well : OpenRoss

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The OpenRoss image service provides a way of serving dynamically resized images from Amazon S3 in a way that is fast, efficient, and auto-scales with traffic. Via shit for making websites.


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Saving Sonic

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When most people think of hedgehogs — most people I know, anyway — they think of this guy. He’s blue. He’s fast. He picks up golden rings while spinning across impossible terrain. He’s basically unstoppable. He’d never fall for something like this:


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Paper Airplanes

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For much of the second half of the 20th century, the United States and Soviet Union were at odds in a conflict well-known as the Cold War. Both sides struggled to gain a military advantage over the other, and many advancements in technology and science stemmed from such efforts.


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Marathon Madness

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To modern ears, the events of the 1904 Summer Olympics were anything but Olympian. Originally intended to be in Chicago, the games were moved to St. Louis to coincide with the World’s Fair.


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Leasing the Kingdom

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At only 61 square miles (160 km^2) and as home to only about 37,000 people, Liechtenstein is one of the world’s smallest nations by any measure. Nevertheless, it’s a very well-to-do country, with a per capita gross domestic product well north of $100,000.


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Benzing the Rules

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Rank the world’s nations by per-capita GDP, and you’ll find the Eastern European country of Albania well toward the bottom, at around #100, depending on whose list you go by. Albania comes in at #99 on the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) list, with a per-capita GDP of $8,052, for example.


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The Fast Lane

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Had you spent the afternoon last Saturday channel surfing, you may have come across a bowling tournament — the PBA Tournament of Champions — and watched twelve-year PBA veteran bowler Mika Koivuniemi win the $250,000 first place prize.


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The Slaves of Tromelin Island

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Tromelin Island is a small dot of land — about a third of a square mile, or .8 square kilometers — situated about 220 miles east of Madagascar. (It’s where the red flagged “A” is in the map above.) It is mostly sand; its original name was Ile de Sables, or “island of sand.


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I remember January 10, 2010, rather well: it was the day we lost a project’s complete history. We were using Subversion as our version control system, which kept the project’s history in a central repository on a server.


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Latkes and Turkey

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For Americans, Thanksgiving Day is a time for families to gather and share a meal, traditionally one involving turkey. For Jews, Hanukkah is a time for families to gather and, similarly, share a meal, traditionally one involving fried potato pancakes known as latkes. (Here’s a recipe.


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Contraband Confection

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Pictured above is a chocolate novelty called Kinder Surprise or Kinder Joy. It’s a chocolate egg, costing about $2 or $3.  Each egg has a little toy inside, measuring no more than an inch or two.


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Bridge Over Former Water

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Zrenjanin, Serbia, is the sixth largest city in the country and home to 75,000 people and about a dozen bridges — it is called the “City of Bridges” by some. One of those bridges, though, is patently unnecessary.


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