26 July 2004 22:33
current music: compilation cd, cake (friend is a four letter word) --tracks two three and z1 are by cake.current wallpaper: a very poor screen shot, that still conveys much much good.
current OS: {sigh} still microsloth windoze 5.1.2600 but, i've been thinking seriously of late about linux. that would be such fun. "oh the fun they had" (asimov short story predicting the eradication of mankind due to its bully nature).
me, browsing hard last night, and {ahem} working hard today (with our duck):
======
back to my browsing from yesterday. most of it was done sifting through definitions and appendicies at Eric Raymond's The Jargon File. an interesting read, i might say. some random quotes:
[explaining to british readers about acme] Acme devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable and violent ways.
...
Two decades later, well-known hacker Henry Spencer described the Perl scripting language as a “Swiss-Army chainsaw”, intending to convey his evaluation of the language as exceedingly powerful but ugly and noisy and prone to belch noxious fumes. This had two results: (1) Perl fans adopted the epithet as a badge of pride, and (2) it entered more general usage to describe software that is highly versatile but distressingly inelegant.
...
Interestingly enough, one 1 attoparsec per microfortnight approximately equals 1 inch per second (the actual figure is 1.0043 inch per second).
speaking of which...
wikipedia.org, Lists of strange units of measurement is a quick and tantalizing read. they linked htese chaps across the pond who obviously are as bored as i :).
…Firkin of water, which I think works out to 90 lbs. Thanks Chris Hedley [In this system the speed of light is 1.79*10^12furlongs/fortnight] {and the national speed limit (A roads) is 161280f/f}
For angles, Mr Passingham Indeed suggests that the shed unit of rotation should be the ajar, defined as: the angle between a door and its frame when there's a slight draught coming through: subsequent discussion indicates that the chord of this angle will be the width of a British Standard Cat.
Atomic physics has a unit called the "barn", equal to 10^-28m^2, and a Hubble is 10^9 light years, so a Hubble-barn is about 1 and 2/3 pints,or just less than one of those new-fangled litre thingies, which means that drinking a couple of brown ales is like emptying a bottle the length of the universe with the cross-sectional area of a medium-sized nucleus.
And you thought it was a long way to the Gents. Boonie calculates the Hubble-radius barn is about 13 liters. This is the volume of a straw that has the cross-sectional area of a barn and a length equal to the radius of the universe (given by H^{-1}c). If you use the old value of H, 55 km/s/Mpc, you get 17 liters. The extreme value of H near 100 reduces this by half. The current value is 40 < H < 100 so a median value would give about 13 liters. The fact that a gallon milk jug has the same volume as a straw with the area of a medium sized nucleus such as Silicon that reaches to the end of the universe is one way to visualize just how small and how big those two numbers really are.http://www.uk-rec-sheds.org.uk/faq60.txt
raymond has a good vocab, here's the words i looked up on m-w last night...
m-w.com, m-w.com, m-w.com
m-w.com, m-w.com, m-w.com
m-w.com, m-w.com, m-w.com
m-w.com, m-w.com, m-w.com
m-w.com, m-w.com, m-w.com
m-w.com, m-w.com
22:33 email me permalink / commentary (0)
