Poplars Farmhouse

Introduction « Big Dave’s Telegraph Crossword Blog

Introduction « Big Dave’s Telegraph Crossword Blog

comic-960px.jpg (JPEG Image, 960×5687 pixels)

comic-960px.jpg (JPEG Image, 960×5687 pixels)

Finally, tangible PROOF of MACRO-EVOLUTION

Finally, tangible PROOF of MACRO-EVOLUTION: "Adam_PoE
The following 22 examples have complete dinosaur-to-bird transitional fossils with no morphological gaps:

Eoraptor, Herrerasaurus, Ceratosaurus, Allosaurus, Compsognathus, Sinosauropteryx, Protarchaeopteryx, Caudipteryx, Velociraptor, Sinovenator, Beipiaosaurus, Sinornithosaurus, Microraptor, Archaeopteryx, Rahonavis, Confuciusornis, Sinornis, Patagopteryx, Hesperornis, Apsaravis, Ichthyornis, and Columba."

Apologetics Press - Hummingbirds—Float Like a Butterfly, Pollinate Like a Bee

Apologetics Press - Hummingbirds—Float Like a Butterfly, Pollinate Like a Bee: "Consider how the hummingbird is described by the keeper of tropical birds at the London Zoo: “A hummingbird may be better depicted as a hybrid helicopter/jet fighter which has a huge, highly tuned and fuel-injected engine. The structure of the wing of the hummingbird is quite unlike that of every other of the 9,000 or so bird species” (as quoted in Burgess, 2000, p. 105). Stuart Burgess, author of Hallmarks of Design, remarked:"

Dr. Dobb's | Susan L. Graham Awarded 2009 IEEE Von Neumann Medal | June 16, 2009

Dr. Dobb's | Susan L. Graham Awarded 2009 IEEE Von Neumann Medal | June 16, 2009: "Susan L. Graham Awarded 2009 IEEE Von Neumann Medal
Deirdre Blake
Graham's innovations include a sophisticated pattern-matching algorithm and an elimination-style algorithm for analyzing the flow of values in a program"

Hedy Lamarr and Frequency Hopping

Hedy Lamarr - Biography
Was co-inventor (with composer George Antheil) of the earliest known form of the telecommunications method known as "frequency hopping", which used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or to jam. The method received U.S. patent number 2,292,387 on Aug. 11, 1942, under the name "Secret Communications System". Frequency hopping is now widely used in cellular phones and other modern technology. However neither she nor Antheil profited from this fact, because their patents were allowed to expire decades before the modern wireless boom. She received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997 for her work pioneering work in spread-spectrum technology.

Fay Wray - Empire State lights dimmed

Fay Wray - Biography
On August 10, 2004, two days after her death, the lights on the Empire State Building in New York City (scene of the climax from her most popular film, "King Kong") were dimmed for 15 minutes in her memory.

Chuck Lorre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Chuck Lorre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Vanity Cards

At the end of most episodes of these three shows, Lorre features a vanity card consisting of a message that usually reads like an editorial, essay, or observation on life. Because the card is shown for only a few seconds at most, the viewer who wants to read it likely would have to do so via playback and pause. Lorre also posts his vanity cards on his website. CBS has censored Lorre's vanity cards on several separate occasions"

Wonderfalls - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wonderfalls - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Cast and crew

The series was a United States/Canada co-production, filmed in Niagara Falls, Ontario and Toronto, Ontario,[11] and with several Canadian actors cast in lead roles (including the show’s star). It was created by Bryan Fuller (Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies) and Todd Holland (The Larry Sanders Show, Malcolm in the Middle) with executive producer Tim Minear (writer and director for Firefly and Angel)."

Joan of Arcadia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joan of Arcadia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "On initial release, the show was a favorite with critics and won the prestigious Humanitas Prize, the People's Choice Award, as well as being one of the few television shows to be nominated for an Emmy Award in the first season, for Best Dramatic Series."

Ellen Muth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ellen Muth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Ellen Anna Muth[1] (born March 6, 1981) is an American actress, known for her role as George Lass in Showtime's short-lived series Dead Like Me. She is a member of Intertel and Mensa.[2]"

Hacking through the Amazon with a shiny new MachetEC2 « blog.infochimps.org – Organizing Huge Information Sources

Hacking through the Amazon with a shiny new MachetEC2 « blog.infochimps.org – Organizing Huge Information Sources: "Hacking through the Amazon with a shiny new MachetEC2

with 11 comments

Hold on to your pith helmets: the Infochimps are releasing an Amazon Machine Image designed for data processing, analysis, and visualization.

Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows users to instantiate a virtual computer with a pre-installed operating system, software packages, and up to 1 TB of data loaded on disk, ready to work with, from a shared image (an “Amazon Machine Image”, or AMI).

MachetEC2 is an effort by a group of Infochimps to create an AMI for data processing, analysis, and visualization. If you create an instance of MachetEC2, you’ll be have an environment with tools designed for working with data ready to go. You can load in your own data, grab one of our datasets, or try grabbing the data from one of Amazon’s Public Data Sets. No matter what, you’ll be hacking in minutes."

Slashdot | Web Analytics Databases Get Even Larger

Slashdot | Web Analytics Databases Get Even Larger: "'Web analytics databases are getting even larger. eBay now has a 6 1/2 petabyte warehouse running on Greenplum — user data — to go with its more established 2 1/2 petabyte Teradata system. Between the two databases, the metrics are enormous — 17 trillion rows, 150 billion new rows per day, millions of queries per day, and so on. Meanwhile, Facebook has 2 1/2 petabytes managed by Hadoop, not running on a conventional DBMS at all, Yahoo has over a petabyte (on a homegrown system), and Fox/MySpace has two different multi-hundred terabyte systems (Greenplum and Aster Data nCluster). eBay and Fox are the two Greenplum customers I wrote in about last August, when they both seemed to be headed to the petabyte range in a hurry. These are basically all web log/clickstream databases, except that network event data is even more voluminous than the pure clickstream stuff.'"

NCSA: A look inside one of the world's most capable supercomputer facilities

NCSA: A look inside one of the world's most capable supercomputer facilities: "Ron told me it took the NCSA 19 years to reach the petabyte milestone of storage requirement. This happened in 2005. But, it only took another 12 months to reach the second petabyte (2006) milestone. The third came in only eight months (2007) and right now they’re estimating six months more to reach number four. To put that into perspective, a petabyte is approximately 1,500,000 CDs worth of data, which is enough to fill a football field five discs high with CDs laid end to end."

Monster group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Monster group - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In the mathematical field of group theory, the Monster group M or F1 (also known as the Fischer-Griess Monster, or the Friendly Giant) is a group of finite order

246 · 320 · 59 · 76 · 112 · 133 · 17 · 19 · 23 · 29 · 31 · 41 · 47 · 59 · 71
= 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368000000000
≈ 8 · 1053.

It is a simple group, meaning it does not have any normal subgroups except for the subgroup consisting only of the identity element, and M itself.

The finite simple groups have been completely classified (the classification of finite simple groups). The list of finite simple groups consists of 18 countably infinite families, plus 26 sporadic groups that do not follow such a systematic pattern. The Monster group is the largest of these sporadic groups and contains all but six of the other sporadic groups as subquotients. Robert Griess has called these six exceptions pariahs, and refers to the others as the happy family."

Riemann hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Riemann hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Riemann hypothesis implies results about the distribution of prime numbers that are in some ways as good as possible. Along with suitable generalizations, it is considered by many mathematicians to be the most important unresolved problem in pure mathematics (Bombieri 2000). Since it was formulated, it has withstood concentrated efforts from many outstanding mathematicians, though several arguments such as Deligne's proof of the Riemann hypothesis over finite fields, and extensive computer calculations verifying that the first 10 trillion zeros lie on the critical line, suggest that it is probably true."

Roeg's bizarre story about Einstein, Monroe, McCarthy, and Di Maggio - Insignificance - Epinions.com

Roeg's bizarre story about Einstein, Monroe, McCarthy, and Di Maggio - Insignificance - Epinions.com: "'Insignificance' is a story that takes place over the course of one night in 1954 New York City. The film takes four major celebrities of the time (Monroe, Senator McCarthy, Einstein, and Joe Dimaggio) and puts them through a series of meetings in and around Albert Einstein's NYC hotel room. Apparently, Einstein (coined the Professor) is in NYC awaiting the next day's McCarthy commie trial, when Marylin Monroe comes for a late night visit. Monroe seems dedicated to proving that she knows Einstein's Theory of Relativity in an amusing sequence, and ultimately tries to get the genius into bed. Enter Joe Di Maggio (Monroe's husband), and with all of his jealousy and overwhelming masculinity seems intent on taking the actress home. Senator McCarthy is a weasely obsessive bully who enters the other three characters' lives serving as the antagonist"

Arcadia (play) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Arcadia (play) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Arcadia explores the nature of evidence and truth in the context of modern ideas about history, mathematics and physics. It shows how the clues left by the past are interpreted by scholars. The play refers to a wide array of subjects, including mathematics, physics, thermodynamics, computer algorithms, fractals, population dynamics, chaos theory vs. determinism (especially in the context of love and death), classics, landscape design, romanticism vs. classicism, English literature (particularly poetry), Byron, 18th century periodicals, modern academia, and even South Pacific botany. These are the concrete topics of conversation; the more abstract philosophical resonances veer off into epistemology, nihilism, the origins of lust, and madness.

The themes presented within Arcadia are based in a series of dichotomies. The most prominent of these is the idea of chaos versus order, presented through Stoppard's discussion of chaos theory within the play. The action of Arcadia and the characters within it reflect this theory; everything is gradually dispersing into a state of chaos and entropy (represented by the final scene), and yet within that chaos, order can be found. Valentine summarizes this idea: 'In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing.' Within the chaos that develops over the course of the play—through the overlap of time periods, through increasingly complicated ideas that are presented, through the variances between what is correct and what is assumed—connections and order can still be recognized. The characters attempt to define the order of the world through their ideas and theories, and they are continually overturned (as with Bernard's theory). Yet order manages to resurface when they manage to exert their free will over fate: Bernard accepts the defeat of his ideas, Septimus refuses Thomasina's invitation."

The medium is the message - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The medium is the message - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "McLuhan frequently punned on the word 'message' changing it to 'mass age', 'mess age', and 'massage'; a later book, The Medium is the Massage by McLuhan and Quentin Fiore,[6] was originally to be titled The Medium is the Message, but McLuhan preferred the new title which is said to have been a printing error."

Hyperreality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hyperreality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In semiotics and postmodern philosophy, the term hyperreality characterizes the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality is a means to characterise the way consciousness defines what is actually 'real' in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter the original event or experience being depicted. Some famous theorists of hyperreality include Jean Baudrillard, Albert Borgmann, Daniel Boorstin, and Umberto Eco."

Amazon.co.uk: Customer Reviews: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (Harbrace Paperbound Library ; Hpl 75)

Amazon.co.uk: Customer Reviews: The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again (Harbrace Paperbound Library ; Hpl 75): "Andy's response to an excess of abstract art was Pop Art.

Andy's response to an excess of abstract philosophy was Pop Philosophy.

This book is not so much about Andy Warhol as it is about Warhol making philosophy pop. To make philosophy pop, Andy shared his observations and values, just as to make art pop, Andy shared the Campbell soup he enjoyed so often.

Philosophy has been abstract for so long, we had forgotten it could be anything else. It had belonged to academicians for so long, we had forgotten it could belong to anyone else."

Report on Probability A | Classic Book Reviews | SCI FI Weekly

Report on Probability A | Classic Book Reviews | SCI FI Weekly: "Brian Aldiss' seminal, ineluctable, ineffable and unique New Wave novel opens with an epigram from Goethe: 'Do not, I beg you, look for anything beyond phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson.' True to this warning signpost, Aldiss proceeds to present us with a narrative that is all mysterious surface with no access to interior meanings save that which the reader might hypothesize."

Bell's theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bell's theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Bell's theorem is a no-go theorem, loosely stating that:

No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.

It is the most famous legacy of the late physicist John S. Bell. The theorem has important implications for physics itself and philosophy of science as well. Physically, Bell's theorem proves that local hidden variable theories cannot remove the statistical nature of quantum mechanics. Philosophically, Bell's theorem implies that if quantum mechanics is correct, the universe is not locally deterministic."

John Horton Conway - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Horton Conway - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "He invented a new system of numbers, the surreal numbers, which are closely related to certain games and have been the subject of a mathematical novel by Donald Knuth. He also invented a nomenclature for exceedingly large numbers, the Conway chained arrow notation. Much of this is discussed in the 0th part of ONAG.

He is also known for the invention of the Game of Life, one of the early and still celebrated examples of a cellular automaton."

Edsger W. Dijkstra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Edsger W. Dijkstra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Dijkstra was known for his essays on programming; he was the first to make the claim that programming is so inherently difficult and complex that programmers need to harness every trick and abstraction possible in hopes of managing the complexity of it successfully.

Dijkstra believed that computer science was more abstract than programming; he once said, 'Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.'"

The Conqueror - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Conqueror - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Cancer controversy

The exterior scenes were shot on location near St. George, Utah, 137 miles downwind of the United States government's Nevada Test Site, Operation Upshot-Knothole, where extensive above-ground nuclear weapons testing occurred during the 1950s. The cast and crew spent many difficult weeks on the site. In addition, Hughes later shipped 60 tons of dirt back to Hollywood for re-shoots. The cast and crew knew about the nuclear tests, there are pictures of Wayne holding a Geiger counter during production, but the link between exposure to radioactive fallout and cancer was poorly understood then.

Powell died of cancer in January 1963, only a few years after the picture's completion. Hayward, Wayne, and Moorehead all died of cancer in the mid to late 1970s. Cast member actor John Hoyt died of lung cancer in 1991. Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 1960 and committed suicide after he learned it was terminal. Skeptics point to other factors such as the wide use of tobacco— Wayne and Moorehead in particular were heavy smokers — and the notion that cancer resulting from radiation exposure does not have such a long incubation period. The cast and crew totaled 220. 91 developed some form of cancer by 1981 and 46 had died of it by then.[1] Dr. Robert Pendleton, professor of biology at the University of Utah, stated, 'With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop...I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law.'[1][2]"

John von Neumann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John von Neumann - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "John von Neumann (Hungarian: margittai Neumann János Lajos) (December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian American[1] mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields,[2] including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis, hydrodynamics (of explosions), and statistics, as well as many other mathematical fields. He is generally regarded as one of the foremost mathematicians of the 20th century.[1] The mathematician Jean Dieudonné called von Neumann 'the last of the great mathematicians.'[3] Even in the city in the time that produced Szilárd (1898), Wigner (1902), and Teller (1908) his brilliance stood out.[4] Most notably, von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, a principal member of the Manhattan Project and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (as one of the few originally appointed), and a key figure in the development of game theory[5][2] and the concepts of cellular automata[2] and the universal constructor. Along with Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb."

Donald Knuth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Donald Knuth - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Awards

* First ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, 1971
* Turing Award, 1974
* National Medal of Science, 1979



* John von Neumann Medal, 1995
* Harvey Prize from the Technion, 1995[9]
* Kyoto Prize, 1996

[edit] Knuth’s humor

Knuth is known for his 'professional humor'.
One of Knuth’s reward checks

* He used to pay a finder’s fee of $2.56 for any typographical errors or mistakes discovered in his books, because “256 pennies is one hexadecimal dollar”, and $.32 for “valuable suggestions”. (His bounty for errata in 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated, is, however, $3.16). According to an article in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review, these Knuth reward checks are “among computerdom’s most prized trophies”. Knuth had to stop sending such checks in 2008 due to bank fraud, and instead now gives each error finder a publicly listed balance in his fictitious 'Bank of San Serriffe'.[10][11]
* Version numbers of his TeX software approach the transcendental number π, in that versions increment in the style 3, 3.1, 3.14. 3.141, and so on. Version numbers of Metafont approach the important number e similarly.
* He once warned a correspondent, “Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.”[1]"

Frances E. Allen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Frances E. Allen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In 2007 Allen was recognized for her work in high performance computing when she received the A.M. Turing Award for 2006. She became the first woman recipient in the forty year history of the award which is considered the Nobel Prize for computing and is given by the Association for Computing Machinery."

Barbara Liskov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Barbara Liskov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Liskov is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). In 2004 she won the John von Neumann Medal for 'fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems'. She is the author of three books and over a hundred technical papers.

Liskov received the 2008 Turing Award from the ACM[4] for her work in the design of programming languages and software methodology that led to the development of object-oriented programming.[5] Specifically, Liskov developed two programming languages, CLU in the 1970s and Argus in the 1980s.[5] The ACM cited her contributions to the practical and theoretical foundations of 'programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.'[6]"

Ada Lovelace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ada Lovelace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Ada Lovelace met and corresponded with Charles Babbage on many occasions, including socially and in relation to Babbage's Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. Babbage was impressed by Lovelace's intellect and writing skills. He called her 'The Enchantress of Numbers'. In 1843 he wrote of her:[18]

Forget this world and all its troubles and if
possible its multitudinous Charlatans — every thing
in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

During a nine-month period in 1842-43, Lovelace translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's memoir on Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes.[19] The notes are longer than the memoir itself and include (Section G), in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, which would have run correctly had the Analytical Engine ever been built. Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer[20] and her method is recognised as the world's first computer program."

Neville Smith - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neville Smith - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In 1971 Smith became notable for writing the screenplay to Gumshoe, the first major film directorial assignment for Stephen Frears. He also played a small role in that film. In 1977 he wrote the screenplay to Apaches, the notable short documentary by John Mackenzie, about children playing on farms, which became the most notorious public information film of all time."

Veronica Lake (I) - Biography

Veronica Lake (I) - Biography: "When former lover Marlon Brando read in a newspaper that a reporter had found Veronica Lake working as a cocktail waitress in a Manhattan bar, he instructed his accountant to send her a check for a thousand dollars. Out of pride, she never cashed it, but kept it framed in her Miami living room to show her friends."

Évariste Galois - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Évariste Galois - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Whatever the reasons behind the duel, Galois was so convinced of his impending death that he stayed up all night writing letters to his Republican friends and composing what would become his mathematical testament, the famous letter to Auguste Chevalier outlining his ideas.[13] Hermann Weyl, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, said of this testament, 'This letter, if judged by the novelty and profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most substantial piece of writing in the whole literature of mankind.' However, the legend of Galois pouring his mathematical thoughts onto paper the night before he died seems to have been exaggerated. In these final papers he outlined the rough edges of some work he had been doing in analysis and annotated a copy of the manuscript submitted to the academy and other papers. On 30 May 1832, early in the morning, he was shot in the abdomen and died the following day at ten in the Cochin hospital (probably of peritonitis) after refusing the offices of a priest. He was 20 years old."

Sue Lyon - Biography

Sue Lyon - Biography: "She met Gary 'Cotton' Adamson at the Colorado State Penitentiary, where he was currently serving time for murder and robbery. She worked as a cocktail waitress and lived in an hotel in Denver nearby. She married him in 1973 and began working for prison reform and conjugal rights. Unfortunately this was another short-lived marriage as she divorced him after he committed yet another robbery."

Hedy Lamarr - Biography

Hedy Lamarr - Biography: "Was co-inventor (with composer George Antheil) of the earliest known form of the telecommunications method known as 'frequency hopping', which used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or to jam. The method received U.S. patent number 2,292,387 on Aug. 11, 1942, under the name 'Secret Communications System'. Frequency hopping is now widely used in cellular phones and other modern technology. However neither she nor Antheil profited from this fact, because their patents were allowed to expire decades before the modern wireless boom. She received an award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997 for her work pioneering work in spread-spectrum technology."

Jim Dale (I) - Awards

Jim Dale (I) - Awards: "Academy Awards, USA
Year Result Award Category/Recipient(s)
1967 Nominated Oscar Best Music, Original Song
for: Georgy Girl (1966)
Shared with:
Tom Springfield (music)"

Reg Varney - Biography

Reg Varney - Biography: "When the world's first ATM opened at Barclays Bank in north London's Enfield district 27 June 1967, Varney became the very first person to use the machine"

Fay Wray - Biography

Fay Wray - Biography: "On August 10, 2004, two days after her death, the lights on the Empire State Building in New York City (scene of the climax from her most popular film, 'King Kong') were dimmed for 15 minutes in her memory."

iGoogle

iGoogle: "Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
- Malcolm Forbes
A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.
- Robert Frost"