Felsius - The Obvious Solution to an Age Old Problem

All very true. Just as it's probably easier to drive if you understand how a car works and how the laws of physics work on it, it's useful to understand the inner workings of as much of what you're doing as possible.

However....

Maths. With an S.

In some remote outposts.

There's no "I" in team.

But there is an "M" and an "E".

 

The R statistical language (or library; no simple term really describes it) has become very popular. One can do almost anything by just knowing what to 'call'. No cautions appear if underlying rules are violated because R does not know.

I am old and cranky enough to doubt whether that is appropriate use of computational power. If any other old cranks here have done analysis of variance by hand, please step up and collect your likes.

The kids just don't get it. It seems to be an underlying human theme that they never do. Yet we seem to bumble along, suggesting that I'd better keep my objections quiet. Probably.

 

Maths. Heard it all before. But as math is a short version of mathematics, not mathematic, it's thin soup.

 

Honestly, you Americans, with your "math" and your "sports".

 

The kids are too busy programming our VCRs for us.

 

Calculus refers to that math thing, or kidney stones or stuff needing to be scraped off teeth. Seems odd until one gets to the root word meaning small pebble.

Perhaps it remains odd.

 

I think (it happens a lot these days) that 'math' is a cropped form of the word mathematics and 'maths' is an abbreviation which grammatically should carry an apostrophe before the s.

 

In the math, Calculus only works if you can make sure the pebbles are infinitely small. d y/d pebble.

 

Those with a sense of curiosity want to know how things work, but one of the benefits/curses of modern technology is that we don't need to know before being able to use it. Most people can use a refrigerator - the exception being those who leave the door open whilst busy elsewhere - but very few have much concept of how and why they work. (Why is the fridge leaking? There's no water in it...) Sport events on TV no longer display 'live via satellite', not because it's widely understood, but because so few have any idea what a geostationary satellite (Thank you, Mr Clarke) is or does. The world becomes ever more complex, yet too many seem to be getting simpler. It's not an encouraging trend.

As for the metric system, I was 'lucky' enough to have just finished learning and memorising a bizarre plethora of pints and pecks when the country came to its senses and tossed it all out. I was convinced there was once some diabolical king with 12 fingers who'd enforced his version of reality on his confused subjects. Multiplying and dividing by 10 instead was so much more logical that I ignored any conversions and wholly adopted the 'new' way. I still have numbers like 1760 and 5280 and 186,000 in my head, but they are relics from another age.

 

One I have that I am not getting rid of soon 86,400

c_almost_a_day == 86400 - 1;

If Test_date between Start_ date and End_date + c_almost_a_day do..

Tests from midnight one day to 11:59:59 PM another day, which is used often in payoll.

 

So tell me about this new age. How do you now measure age? How many minutes in your hour? How many hours in your day? How many days in your week? How many weeks in your month? How many months in your year?

Good thing you don't have to juggle all those funny irregular numbers anymore.

 

Fair point, but...calendars are curious things, full of history and politics. Measurement of time is a little different, because it's based on existing planetary rhythms. Earth years aren't the same as Mars years or Jupiter years, and nothing's going to change that anytime soon. Our calendars used to be somewhat more logical - October was the eighth month, until Julius and Augustus got involved and decided they wanted the nicest months named after themselves. And there would be 13 months of 28 days each, but we seem to have this weird superstition that gives us 12 unequal months instead. In some ways, time measurement is more logical than it once was, after the invention of time zones which eliminated the concept of local 'high noon' and made railway timetables possible.

 

On the subject of not knowing how fridges work and being busy elsewhere ....

IF YOU LEAVE THE SPREADABLE BUTTER-BASED SPREAD OUTSIDE OF THE FRIDGE ON A HOT DAY BECAUSE YOU CAN'T BE BOTHERED TO PUT IT BACK IN THE FRIDGE AFTER YOU'VE MADE A SANDWICH, IT WILL DE-EMULSIFY AND WILL THEN SET SOLID WHEN I PUT IT BACK IN THE FRIDGE TO STOP IT GOING RANCID, AND THEN IT WON'T SPREAD EASILY WHEN I HAVE TO MAKE THE KIDS' SANDWICHES FOR SCHOOL TOMORROW MORNING.

.... is a thing some people might say, or at least think underneath their extraordinarily calm exterior.

Isn't that because it's not necessarily via satellite any more? It could be coming through undersea fibreoptic cables. Or, using IP technology, in packets, some of which come through any one of a number of satellites and some of which come through a variety of combinations of undersea cables.

Yes. I think it's because, for one thing, things are more complicated; for another, user interfaces hide the workings of things, and for another, things are just harder to visualise as they stop working on a visible, mechanical level. It's a lot easier to get your head around how an old manual telephone exchange works - because it's really no different to plumbing or railway junctions - than a modern IP system.

For me as a kid, school was metric and shops were imperial. Which was less than ideal.

 

Aside from TV the vast bulk of intercontinental bits are sea cabled. And there are many more o fsuch cables than one might imagine. Backup service on the fly, in case a submarine accidentally nips one.

We usta talk about shooting TV signals out to space with omnidirectional antennas using frequencies atmosphere does not 'bend back' well. While this is still done, the new thing is 'overspray' from geostationary sat uplinks.

Most of things ET would like to snoop on (let's say internet cat pix) don't go through sky I think.

 

In 2006 or 2007, this happened, just off Hong Kong. It was a trawler, if I remember correctly. The Internet in HK pretty much died. We could just about send e-mails, but you couldn't even read a newspaper site for about two weeks. The Finance Secretary of Hong Kong said it was a relief it happened when it did - just after Christmas - as if it had happened before Christmas, making it impossible for HK companies to receive orders for Christmas tat from European and American clients, it would have seriously damaged the economy.

It was terrible. You don't realise how much you rely on the Internet until you don't have it.

If such a thing happened now, it wouldn't be as bad, because there are so many more cables. But it was awful. The only time I've seen anything as bad was during the Edison Chen photo scandal (Edison Chen photo scandal - Wikipedia) which broke the Internet in China in early 2008. (Edison, a Hong Kong pop star, had been secretly shagging all the Hong Kong lady pop stars, including all the married ones (most of whom were married to gentleman pop stars). And he'd been taking pictures, and storing them in an unsecured folder on his computer, which he then took to a shop to get fixed. The shop person found them and uploaded them. So many people in China wanted to see these pictures that it broke the Internet in China, as the system was just overwhelmed by traffic. Also, all of the pop stars and actors in Hong Kong stopped speaking to each other, which made TV shows very awkward.)

You'd be surprised....

EP435: Made of Cats - Escape Pod

 

What's heavier: a kilogram of platinum-iridium alloy on Earth, or a kilogram of feathers on Mars? Or one liter of water on Jupiter?

 

The duo-decimal decimal (base 12) system has the distinction of being divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. That meant that equal shares were available for a greater number of individual ways. The number 10 can only be divided by 2 to get whole numbers, but is easier to juggle for the struggling human brain...

 

There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.

 

Looking at my clock this morning, it occurred to me, this is a numeric display convention that arose in the last 20~30 years, the rectilinear universal digit, making the numbers zero through nine by various omissions:

 

What a strange alarm clock you have. Can't work out the time from it! Reminds me of that boring book I borrowed from the local library, terrible story with no plot, but it did explain every word as you read along. Think it was called Thesaurus, or something like that.