SnakeLegs

Why does the Ten Ingredient Rice only have nine ingredients?

Rice
Pork
Ham
Chicken
Beef
Shrimp
Onions
Bean sprouts
Eggs
_______ ????

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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]
 
 

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  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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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
Time
RFC 868
TCP/UDP port 37
TAICLOCK
http://cr.yp.to/proto/taiclock.txt
UDP port 4014

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What time is it in New Delhi?
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.  [...]

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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 [...]

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