Archive for the ‘Random’ Category

Why there was room left over in Archimedes’ students’ tweets

Monday, May 4th, 2009
The beautiful number.  As opposed to the golden ratio.
The beautiful number. As opposed to the golden ratio. (pi.ytmnd.com)

This morning, among its usual Monday welter of bad-news-about-the-newspaper-industry stories, the NYT reminded us about something else that isn’t new:

URL shorteners, which abbreviate unwieldy Web addresses into bite-size links, have been around for years…

via Shorter URLs May Offer Tracking Benefits to Marketers – NYTimes.com.

Years? How about millenia?  After all, which is easier to remember:

  π 

or

3.14159265358979323846…

??

And not only that, Wikipedia reminds us that 

The constant is named “π” because “π” is the first letter of the Greek words περιφέρεια (periphery) and περίμετρος (perimeter), probably referring to its use in the formula to find the circumference, or perimeter, of a circle.

Two shorteners for the price of one, then.  

(Props to @BrentDPayne for putting π in a tweet, leading to this epiphany.)

1,217,000 items and 51 hours later…

Monday, April 20th, 2009

timemachine1…an 89-gig initial backup of the primary Mac, via Wi-Fi to a Time Capsule across the room, is complete. Next up, the recently re-commissioned laptop.  And then the tertiary G4.

Who knew having a terabyte of backup capacity on the ol’ home network would be so much fun.

Poisson d’avril, take 2 [Google]

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity

 

Happy April 1 from Google:

 

Introducing CADIE

Technical specifications

CADIE’s personal World Wide Website

Gmail Autopilot by CADIE

Poisson d’avril! [Guardian]

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

Some of my Twitterfied friends took this literally, not noticing that when it showed up online here in the U.S., it was already April 1 across the pond.  Anyway, the tone is just right.

Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink | Media | The Guardian .