Why does the Ten Ingredient Rice only have nine ingredients?
- Rice
- Pork
- Ham
- Chicken
- Beef
- Shrimp
- Onions
- Bean sprouts
- Eggs
- _______ ????
Continue reading ‘Nine Ingredient Ten Ingredient Fried Rice’ »
Archive for September, 2006
I had to follow up (see this post) and compare Missouri cities’ population to see if they follow expections for Zipf distribution. [Data from InfoPlease]
Continue reading ‘Missouri Population and Zipf Distribution’ »
Here’s one of the best foods around — fried zucchini ["biologically, the zucchini is a fruit, being the swollen ovary of the zucchini flower" -- didn't know that].
- Mix together some raw eggs in a big bowl.
- Put some corn meal in another bowl.
- Cut up your zucchini into thin slices.
- Dip them in the egg.
- Dip them in the corn meal.
- Fry ‘em up in vegetable oil until they’re lightly golden. Put them on layers of paper towels immediately, to soak up the extra oil.
I generally eat about half of them before they’re ever put on the table. Yummy.
After reading the seven books in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, I did a little light follow-up reading on mathematical prediction and modeling of group actions. “Modeling Civil Violence: An Agent-Based Computational Approach” from The Brookings Institution was interesting.
Also interesting was “Seeing Around Corners,” by Jonathan Rauch, in the April 2002 “The Atlantic.” His analyses ranges from racial housing trends, the demise of the Anasazi, battling corruption (public high-profile arrests work best), and Zipf’s Law.
[From the article:] Every so often scientists notice a rule or a regularity that makes no particular sense on its face but seems to hold true nonetheless. One such is a curiosity called Zipf’s Law. George Kingsley Zipf was a Harvard linguist who in the 1930s noticed that the distribution of words adhered to a regular statistical pattern. The most common word in English-”the”-appears roughly twice as often in ordinary usage as the second most common word, three times as often as the third most common, ten times as often as the tenth most common, and so on. As an afterthought, Zipf also observed that cities’ sizes followed the same sort of pattern, which became known as a Zipf distribution. Oversimplifying a bit, if you rank cities by population, you find that City No. 10 will have roughly a tenth as many residents as City No. 1, City No. 100 a hundredth as many, and so forth. (Actually the relationship isn’t quite that clean, but mathematically it is strong nonetheless.) Subsequent observers later noticed that this same Zipfian relationship between size and rank applies to many things: for instance, corporations and firms in a modern economy are Zipf-distributed.
Now, that sounded rather strange to me, so I decided to test it.
Trolling was much funnier before the Internet came along. See any of Don Novello’s “Lazlo Letters” books, for instance.
I was working at the dining room table one day and looked over at my daughter, who was playing the same Clifford computer game she always played. The picture on the screen was perfectly innocent, but I thought it was rather funny and decided to have a little Lazlo moment with the Scholastic tech support people. I didn’t draw this out nearly as much as I could have, but it amuses me all the same.
Click the “more” link below….
clifford_enema.jpg
graphdnszone.pl is a script I’ve been using for a while to give me a quick picture of a zone, using the GraphViz perl module. It’s so much simpler to be able to look at a node www.example.com and see what IP address(es) it points to, and what may be CNAME’d to it, or what other A records point to the same IP’s.
For instance, here’s a picture sample of part of the UK. zone. Click on the thumbnail to open linked picture in a new window.
Download the script: graphdnszone_pl.txt and the required patch from here.
Just change the server and zone names. I’ll add those as arguments later. As you can tell, it’s not finished, but it does what I currently need it to do.
And I typically convert the output to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), because it scales (go figure) and allows text searches. Adobe’s SVG Viewer works fine.
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a picture of a thousand words is worth a million words. And you can quote me on that.
GraphViz is handy graph visualization software. Go to the GraphViz website and check out their Gallery, at least.
When coupled with Perl, GraphViz becomes truly spectacular. Leon Brocard’s GraphViz Perl module just might save you a lot of time. One thing I needed modified on it, however, was the handling of node names. If you wanted a node named “bob@example.com” the module would produce a generic node name of “node141″, which was restrictive for the two things I primarily use the module for (email addresses, and DNS mapping).
What follows is a quick diff to allow one to use arbitrary node and cluster names. They’re just straightforward regexes. They work for everything I use them for, and I haven’t had them bomb out. I think the reserved words (e.g., “graph”) need expanded, as well, but this will work for now.
While looking at the time conversion methods in .NET, I was surprised by this entry in the .NET Date and Time FAQ:
Q: “Does the .NET Framework support time zone conversions to any given time zone?”
A: “People are often surprised why this feature cannot be supplied by Microsoft at low cost. In particular, data to do conversions exists in the Windows registry and is used by the time zone selection dialog. However, there is a big distinction between having UI and registry data and having an API. This is a more expensive feature for Microsoft to undertake than most people would imagine because (a) an API must provide consistent behavior from one machine to another so we cant just re-expose the registry data, and, (b) there is cost for Microsoft in exposing an official time zone conversion because we face ongoing geopolitical costs for any country/region based data we gather and maintain. For example, a country may threaten to boycott our product if it is not listed in the data. This has happened to us with our CultureInfo data on many occasions, and we often need to tweak data in service packs, which is expensive and risky.”
These are the five computer time protocols I recommend providing. For SNTP/NTP, use OpenNTPD (note: if you’re using Solaris 10, check this page for using OpenNTPD Portable with SMF).
SNTP v. 4
RFC 2030
UDP port 123
NTP v. 3
RFC 1305
UDP port 123
Daytime
RFC 867
TCP/UDP port 13
TAICLOCK
http://cr.yp.to/proto/taiclock.txt
UDP port 4014
As I write this (at 4:56 p.m. Central Daylight Time), it’s 3:26 a.m. in New Delhi. In the morning. At night.
Think about that the next time you gripe about calling for computer support during the day and getting someone in India. It’s the middle of the night for them. Their wives or husbands or kids are at home sleeping without them. That’s not pleasant, so lose the attitude, huh?
Mysteries and crime novels have never been my type of reading. The purpose is to figure out whodunit, which, given a finite set of possibilities (limited to the text of the novel), quickly devolves into keeping track of the author’s phrasing, and the author’s ambiguity, and what seemingly meaningless detail has been relayed, until the focus of the novel is the author’s skill in hiding his/her invention from you.
I ran across P.D. James’ list of the five best crime novels, for the Wall Street Journal’s “Five Best” series, and decided to give mysteries another try. It’s turning out to be quite good reading. See the details at the WSJ.
Her list is:
- “Tragedy at Law” by Cyril Hare
- “The Franchise Affair” by Josephine Tey
- “The Moving Toyshop” by Edmund Crispin
- “Murder Must Advertise” by Dorothy L. Sayers
- “Dissolution” by C.J. Sansom
Dissolution was a great book, but being a murder mystery set in a monastery, I was constantly in a Name of the Rose mindset. Dissolution wouldn’t make a bad movie, at that.
The Franchise Affair was a great read, too. I had problems with certain passages of the older English (English English, not American English), but nothing that influenced the stream of the book.
Murder Must Advertise didn’t hold my attention for three pages. Couldn’t do it. It required way too much active engagement; I had to strain to tell who was saying what, and what what was.
The other two are next….