...ars, and who subsequently recited passages from the novel the way early Christians, hiding in dim catacombs, must have read with secret, feverish ecstasy from the epistles of Paul. You know the kind: mop-haired hipsters dragging themselves through The Broom of the System, Wallace’s first novel, getting their angry fix from the essays of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and Consider the Lobster. I was one of them. I am one of them still.
The Turbulent Genius of David Foster Wallace
9 years
The first, a dispersal technique called "ballooning", is more commonly used by baby spiders, although some adults use it as well. The spider climbs to the top of vegetation and releases a streamer of silk that catches on the breeze and carries the spider aloft.
Spiders have been caught flying like this up to three kilometres above the ground, Robinson said. Raining spiders in Goulburn? Entirely possible, scientist says
Spiders have been caught flying like this up to three kilometres above the ground, Robinson said. Raining spiders in Goulburn? Entirely possible, scientist says
9 years
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...onto the path. Once on the final path, he banked gently right until he had a heading that would prevent the crosswind from blowing him off the final approach. In pilot land, this is known as crabbing.
The maximum recommended crosswind for an A320 is 43 mph, although in the hands of an experienced crosswind pilot, it can handle 45 mph. The tower was calling the winds 35 mph with gusts to 42 mph, and to make it interesting, a slight tailwind component. I had previously told the flight attendants and passengers that the landing would...
Flight Level 390 - Blog
9 years
...tion and told the co-pilot, "I don't know about you, but I'm ready for a little nap." It was 2:30 A.M. I called Mother and reported the bird strikes, then started on the paper work, an evil necessity.
A few minutes later, the co-pilot and I walked around the aircraft looking for damage. It was so foggy, that our flashlight beams looked like phasers. On the left side of the aircraft, underneath the wing and the engine pylon, were large areas of blood splatters, tiny pieces of body parts, and feathers. Embedded in the landing gear, other body parts. It was a mess... A mechanic, also piercing the fog with his flashlight, yelled, "Hey Cap, you got a goose hunting license?"
A fair question, considering...
Flight Level 390 - Blog
9 years
...tead of variables. And you can just copy and paste and edit instead of using subroutines. The language was designed to minimize keystrokes, so you can use it as a super-obscure command-line language! Regular expressions have been one of the most successful ways we have stopped normal people from infiltrating the elite corps of hackers. And it was so close to not happening! SNOBOL was already there at Bell Labs with Ken and so obviously superior in every way that only a god like Ken could have stepped in and killed it.
Leaked transcript of censored Bret Victor talk
9 years
Hemingway had intended to write a nonfiction book about bullfighting, but then decided that the week's experiences had presented him with enough material for a novel.[7] A few days after the fiesta ended, on his birthday (21 July), he began writing what would eventually become The Sun Also Rises.[9] By 17 August, with 14 chapters written and a working title of Fiesta chosen, Hemingway returned to Paris. He finished the draft on 21 September 1925, writing a foreword the following weekend and changing the title to The Lost Generation.[10]
The Sun Also Rises - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
9 years
9 years
...ent directly to the Board of Economic Warfare and then to the Office of Strategic Services. There she pioneered the development of original techniques for analyzing Nazi Germany's military abilities. She devised a statistical model for estimating the size of the German submarine fleet in the North Atlantic, which after the war, was found to have been startlingly accurate. Calculated Past G.N.P.
Mary Painter Garin, 71, Innovator In Economic and Statistical Work - NYTimes.com
9 years
...tistical power affects the reliability of the P value obtained from an experiment, with reference to previous Points of Significance articles published in Nature Methods, to help convey these issues. We suggest that, for this reason, the P value's preeminence16 is unjustified and arguments about null-hypothesis tests become virtually irrelevant. Researchers would do better to discard the P value and use alternative statistical measures for data interpretation.
The fickle P value generates irreproducible results : Nature Methods : Nature Publishing Group
9 years
...nded Season 20 of “Jeopardy!”1 on a thunderous note, correctly answering 44 of the 60 clues and setting the “Jeopardy!” single game cash record with $75,000. His competitors combined for just $3,000. During the next month and a half, while the show was off the air, the producers instituted a major change: more rehearsal time for new contestants. The new policy stated that the game couldn’t start until every contestant had successfully outbuzzed his competitors in real game-play conditions. According to Jeopardy executive producer Harry Friedman, the change was unrelated to Jennings’s streak.
Why Ken Jennings’s ‘Jeopardy!’ Streak Is Nearly Impossible To Break | FiveThirtyEight
9 years
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