MIT OpenCourseWare is putting an amazing amount of undergraduate- and graduate-level coursework online, for free. It's just about the most amazing thing since Google Books.

Information wants to be free.

...R2D2 would be named A2BT and Luke, betrayed at the last, (stabbed in the back, as it were) would (of course) utter "A2, BT?"

...you might get it.

Now, returning to Gary Geiserman: "Roll yourself up in some tin foil."

Congratulations to Memorex, whose 1 GB jump drive just survived its inevitable household survival test. It went through the 'heavy soil' wash cycle and the normal cycle through the drier and not only functions, it suffered no data loss. Four stars, highly recommended.

And I don't mean stealing elections, but instead this amusing link to a poll on porn prefs, blatantly stolen after a random walk turned it up. I figured y'all would be into this sort of thing ;-) So help out a random stranger in the totally public internet by telling them just how sick and depraved you are. After all, you never wanted to run for ( Read more... )

Because of the challenges of accurately measuring volume, I weighed a nice big gob of spit, the sort you'd work up to spit on the ground in disgust. I didn't have the benefit of wad of chewing tobacco, but I had been drinking coffee. Large or small, it turned out to be 1.66 g, and I'll approximate the density of spit as that of water, 1.00, to ( Read more... )

I guessed I would hit ~50% really useful material here, and I was right:
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Reflecting on my upper bound on the size of a drop in the bucket, the ppm value for the more common 5 gal bucket (1.76 ppm) got me thinking that a metric standard Bucket could be defined such that a drop in it would yield exactly 1 ppm. The resulting unit fulfils all requirements for a metric unit: it is mathematically simple, elegant, even ( Read more... )

Tonight, someone dismissed a company's charity program, at 1.2% of the annual budget, as "a drop in the bucket," so I started wondering about the proper usage of this dimensionless unit of triviality. I submit that the smallest volume to be considered a bucket (thereby giving the largest value for the ratio drop:bucket) is two gallons; anything ( Read more... )