Stephen’s Untold Stories

Okay, I must admit that I’ve never really had a need to generate some white noise, but it’s good to know that this is available if I ever do.

• http://www.simplynoise.com

I took this quiz a while back and scored 79% Dixie. I just took it again andf scored 96% Dixie. I can’t decide if that’s good or bad, ya’ll.

• Take the Yankee or Dixie Quiz (It’s a short one)

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At least they are interesting to me.

• Madrid, with summers so blazing hot that most people take a long break from work every afternoon, is about 10 miles farther north than Salt Lake City, Utah.
• Portland, Oregon, where it rarely snows, is about 130 miles farther north than Toronto, and over 200 miles farther north than Boston.
• The entire country of England, with over 50 million residents, is a wee bit smaller than the state of Louisiana.

Here is the complete list.

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Who will win?

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Thanks, Rick!

It looks BMW has figured out a way to do just that.

A BMW research group has tested the Internet Protocol to network automotive controllers. The engineers found that IP could well suit the real-time requirements even of safety-critical applications. But the most prominent benefits are in another area: With IP networking, costs for automotive electronics probably could be lowered.

The research group, working at BMW Research and Technology GmbH, an R&D think tank for the Bavarian luxury car maker, had the enviable task to develop a vision of tomorrow’s car networking technology. Their experiments included the usage of standard Ethernet for certain aspects of in-car networking.

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Funny story from New Jersey.

ABERDEEN, N.J. —  The buck didn’t stop when it crashed through a window at an elementary school here Tuesday morning; it ran into the school cafeteria before being let out the back door, police said.

No one was injured in the incident, which took place shortly before 10 a.m. at the Lloyd Road School, the Asbury Park Press reported on its Web site.

Twenty fifth graders and several teachers were startled when the deer crashed through a classroom window, then ran out into the hallway and into the cafeteria, Deputy Police Chief Rick Derechailo told the newspaper.

Police officers and school staff were able to corral the deer using lunch tables and coax him out the back door.

Once outside, the deer unsuccessfully tried to jump through a second classroom window before running off into the woods, said Derechailo.

It was unclear if the deer suffered any injuries.

I certainly hope the deer will be okay. At least he didn’t have to take a standardized test.

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I hope Steve Jobs doesn’t want to kill us all!

A Douglasville, Ga., man said he had flames coming up to his chest when his iPod Nano suddenly burst into flames while he was working.

Danny Williams, who works at a kiosk at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, told WSBTV.com that he had the iPod and a glossy piece of paper in his pocket at the time. He said it was the piece of paper that saved him from being badly burned.

The iPod Nano uses a lithium-ion battery, the same kind that has been recalled for spontaneously setting laptops on fire.

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It looks like some spiders have been busy in Texas. (Click image for larger version)

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This is what it would look like if you printed out the English version. You’d probably need an extra ink cartridge or two.

Using volumes 25cm high and 5cm thick (some 400 pages), each page having two columns, each columns having 80 rows, and each row having 50 characters, ≈ 6MB per volume. As English Wikipedia has 4.4GB of text (October 2006) ≈ 750 volumes. Note that this is a conservative estimate, as it doesn’t include images, tables etc. which take up more surface than the text which describes them. Keep in mind that’s 4.4GB of truth!

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I have no no idea who these people are or even where this was taken, but I can’t stop staring at it.

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At last someone has spent the necessary amount of time and money to insure that a computer can’t be beat at checkers. Our long national nightmare is over!

Developed by computer scientists at the University of Alberta in Canada, Chinook vanquished human competitors at tournaments more than a decade ago. Now, in an article published today on the Web site of the journal Science, the scientists report that they have rigorously proved that Chinook, in a slightly improved version, cannot ever lose. An opponent, no matter how skilled, practiced or determined, can at best achieve a draw.

In essence, that reduces checkers to the level of tic-tac-toe, where the ideal game-playing strategy has been codified into a series of immutable rules. But checkers — or draughts as it is known in Great Britain — is much more complex, with 500 billion billion theoretically possible board positions; it is the most complex game that has been solved to date.

Jonathan Schaeffer, a professor of computer science at the University of Alberta, set out on his checkers-playing quest in 1989, aiming to write software that could challenge the world checkers champion. He and his colleagues finished their computations 18 years later, in April.

“From my point of view, thank god it’s over,” Dr. Schaeffer said.

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I completely forgot that it was Friday the 13th until I read about it online. Here are some interesting facts about this “unlucky” date.

• It’s been estimated that $800 or $900 million (U.S.) is lost in business on this day because people will not fly or do business they would normally do.
• No historical date has been verifiably identified as the origin of the superstition. Before the 20th century, although there is evidence that the number 13 was considered unlucky, and Friday was considered unlucky; there was no link between them.
• Many people are so paralyzed by fear that they are simply unable to get out of bed when Friday the 13th rolls around. The Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute estimates that more than 17 million people are affected by a fear of this day.
• A study published in The British Medical Journal (1993) has shown that there is a significant increase in traffic-related accidents on Friday the 13ths.

Here is the complete list

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I haven’t done much posting about sports lately, but this is a “must see.” The Braves AA manager (Phillip Wellman) puts on an epic show at a recent game. 

No base is safe from his wrath!

A classic battle!