Pole of inaccessibility A pole of inaccessibility marks a location that is the most challenging to reach owing to its remoteness from geographical features that could provide access. Often it refers to the most distant point from the coastline. The term describes a geographic construct, not an actual physical phenomenon. Subject to varying definitions, it is of interest mostly to explorers. Northern pole of inaccessibility[edit] Northern pole of inaccessibility The northern pole of inaccessibility ( WikiMiniAtlas 84°03′N 174°51′W / 84.050°N 174.850°W / 84.050; -174.850 (Northern Pole of Inaccessibility)), sometimes known as the Arctic pole of inaccessibility, or just Arctic pole, is located on the Arctic Oceanpack ice at a distance farthest from any land mass. According to some reports, the first person to reach the spot on foot was Sir Wally Herbert, who arrived by dogsled in 1968. Southern pole of inaccessibility[edit] Southern pole of inaccessibility Oceanic pole of inaccessibility[edit] Eurasia[edit]
Criss Cross Lacing There is a subtle variation of Criss Cross Lacing that appears in many shoes that come pre-laced from the factory. The lacing starts with the bottom grey section running across the outside and with the first crossover on the inside. The remainder of the lacing is normal. Visually, this is less consistent and thus less appealing. Historically, there was a period when manufacturers were shipping shoes with the lace ends fed into the bottom eyelets and simply tucked away neatly inside the shoe.
Eventually Consistent - Revisited I wrote a first version of this posting on consistency models about a year ago, but I was never happy with it as it was written in haste and the topic is important enough to receive a more thorough treatment. ACM Queue asked me to revise it for use in their magazine and I took the opportunity to improve the article. This is that new version. Eventually Consistent - Building reliable distributed systems at a worldwide scale demands trade-offs between consistency and availability. At the foundation of Amazon's cloud computing are infrastructure services such as Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service), SimpleDB, and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) that provide the resources for constructing Internet-scale computing platforms and a great variety of applications. Under the covers these services are massive distributed systems that operate on a worldwide scale. Historical Perspective In the mid-'90s, with the rise of larger Internet systems, these practices were revisited. Client-side Consistency
"The Best of edw519" is now free. Reverse Happy Birthday! - edw519 The Best of edw519 A Hacker News Top Contributor by Ed Weissman Copyright 2011 by Ed Weissman. All rights reserved. Foreword Who am I? Chapter 1 - Advice to Young Programmers 1. Chapter 2 - Education 21. Chapter 3 - Careers 31. Chapter 4 - Work Habits 49. Chapter 5 - The Programmer's Lifestyle 87. Chapter 6 - Philosophy 119. Chapter 7 - Building Stuff 158. Chapter 8 - Software Business 187. Chapter 9 - Enterprise Life 210. Chapter 10 - Selling 232. Chapter 11 - Just for Fun 245. Who am I? My name is Ed Weissman and I've been programming professionally for 32 years. I've done work for many companies, both enterprises and small/medium businesses. I started out on IBM mainframes, moved to mini-computers, then to PCs, and finally to web-based technologies. I've started three businesses, two with partners and one alone, selling both services and products. I've worked with hundreds of people on over a thousand projects and encountered over a million lines of code. I never get too technical. (Thanks, Mom.) 1. 2.
The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? by Marcia Angell The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch Basic Books, 226 pp., $15.99 (paper) Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker Crown, 404 pp., $26.00 Unhinged: The Trouble With Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat Free Press, 256 pp., $25.00 It seems that Americans are in the midst of a raging epidemic of mental illness, at least as judged by the increase in the numbers treated for it. A large survey of randomly selected adults, sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and conducted between 2001 and 2003, found that an astonishing 46 percent met criteria established by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for having had at least one mental illness within four broad categories at some time in their lives. What is going on here? The authors emphasize different aspects of the epidemic of mental illness.
Wonder How To » Show & Tell for Creators & Doers Age of the Algorithm Content farms depend heavily on search engines for traffic. Photograph by Marc Rimmer. SOUTH BEND, Ind. This generic piece of sports reporting is remarkable for only one reason: a computer algorithm wrote it. Simply put, an algorithm is a series of instructions that, if properly followed, can lead to the solution of a problem. As computers have become faster and more powerful—and as the costs of storage and bandwidth have plummeted—there is virtually no limit to the specificity, size and complexity of computer algorithms. The algorithm that changed the world was developed in 1998 by two Stanford doctoral students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Page and Brin solved these problems by developing an algorithm that paid more attention to how many other pages were linking to a given site—and the authority those pages brought to the subject—rather than just the text on the page. The world beat a path to their door. Spammers aren’t the only ones who want to crack Google’s code.
Liczby pierwsze Liczba pierwsza to liczba naturalna, mająca dokładnie dwa podzielniki: dzieli się przez 1 oraz przez samą siebie (liczba 1 nie zalicza się do liczb pierwszych, gdyż ma tylko 1 podzielnik). Liczby naturalne większe od 1, nie będące liczbami pierwszymi to liczby złożone; można je rozłożyć na czynniki będące liczbami pierwszymi. Początkowe liczby pierwsze to: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, ... Stąd można ściągnąć skompresowany plik tekstowy zawierający 78.498 początkowych liczb pierwszych ( z zakresu do 1.000.000 ). Liczb pierwszych jest nieskończenie wiele. Udowodnił to już ponad dwa tysiące lat temu Euklides. Załóżmy, że zbiór liczb pierwszych jest ograniczony. Gęstość rozmieszczenia liczb pierwszych wśród liczb naturalnych maleje wraz ze wzrostem tych liczb. Wykres poniżej (sporządzony wg tabeli, której fragment widać obok) przedstawia procentowy udział liczb pierwszych wśród liczb naturalnych od 1 do 20.000.000. x = lnN czyli: N = ex dN = ex . dx k = 5. Jan K.
Bayes' Theorem An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem Bayes' Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction. Your friends and colleagues are talking about something called "Bayes' Theorem" or "Bayes' Rule", or something called Bayesian reasoning. They sound really enthusiastic about it, too, so you google and find a webpage about Bayes' Theorem and... It's this equation. So you came here. Why does a mathematical concept generate this strange enthusiasm in its students? Soon you will know. While there are a few existing online explanations of Bayes' Theorem, my experience with trying to introduce people to Bayesian reasoning is that the existing online explanations are too abstract. Or so they claim. And let's begin. Here's a story problem about a situation that doctors often encounter: What do you think the answer is? Next, suppose I told you that most doctors get the same wrong answer on this problem - usually, only around 15% of doctors get it right. No, it does not!
Become a Programmer, Motherfucker If you don't know how to code, then you can learn even if you think you can't. Thousands of people have learned programming from these fine books: Learn Python The Hard Way Learn Ruby The Hard Way Learn Code The Hard Way I'm also working on a whole series of programming education books at learncodethehardway.org. Learn C The Hard Way Learn SQL The Hard Way Learn Regex The Hard Way Graphics Programming Language Agnostic NerdDinner Walkthrough Assembly Language Bash Clojure Clojure Programming ColdFusion CFML In 100 Minutes Delphi / Pascal Django Djangobook.com Erlang Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good Flex Getting started with Adobe Flex (PDF) Forth Git Grails Getting Start with Grails Haskell Java JavaScript JavaScript (Node.js specific) Latex The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX (perfect for beginners) Linux Advanced Linux Programming Lisp Lua Programming In Lua (for v5 but still largely relevant)Lua Programming Gems (not entirely free, but has a lot of free chapters and accompanying code) Maven Mercurial Nemerle Nemerle
Techno-optimism ‘‘Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?’’ It’s a question I get asked so often that I have a little canned response I can rattle off without thinking: ‘‘In order to be an activist, you have to be both: pessimistic enough to believe that things will get worse if left unchecked, optimistic enough to believe that if you take action, the worst can be prevented.’’ But there’s more to it than that. To understand techno-optimism, it’s useful to look at the free software movement, whose ideology and activism gave rise to the GNU/Linux operating system, the Android mobile operating system, the Firefox and Chrome browsers, the BSD Unix that lives underneath Mac OS X, the Apache web-server and many other web- and e-mail-servers and innumerable other technologies. ‘‘Bug Description: Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This programmerly mindset is the key to understanding the pessimism/optimism duality. This isn’t new.
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge by Maria Popova “The real enemy is the man who tries to mold the human spirit so that it will not dare to spread its wings.” In an age obsessed with practicality, productivity, and efficiency, I frequently worry that we are leaving little room for abstract knowledge and for the kind of curiosity that invites just enough serendipity to allow for the discovery of ideas we didn’t know we were interested in until we are, ideas that we may later transform into new combinations with applications both practical and metaphysical. This concern, it turns out, is hardly new. We hear it said with tiresome iteration that ours is a materialistic age, the main concern of which should be the wider distribution of material goods and worldly opportunities. Mr. Flexner goes on to contend that the work of Hertz and Maxwell is exemplary of the motives underpinning all instances of monumental scientific discovery, bringing to mind Richard Feynman’s timeless wisdom. This lament, alas, is timelier than ever.