Once in Cambodia I went to a buddhist temple. On the stone walls some depictions of the buda had him holding a measuring square - I was like, who would have thought buda would be interested in Pythagorean affairs.
Potentially feasible alternate interpretation: given that the Indian religious / ruling caste in Cambodia who brought Hinduism and Buddhism had arrived by boat and were sophisticated seafarers there is a chance this would be an astronomic device rather than a geometric tool for ground-based construction. The only reference I can find in the Pali texts to construction whatsoever is negative referring to undesirable mental habits, ie. https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.11.than....House-builder, you're seen! You will not build a house again. All your rafters broken, the ridge pole dismantled, immersed in dismantling, the mind has attained to the end of craving. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%85kh%C4%81ra for interpretation)
PS. If you ever get the chance to compare parts of Cambodian hinterland (eg. area around Battambang) with South India (eg. western Tamil Nadu) you will realise they bear a striking topographic resemblance: vast tropical plains punctuated by extremely vertical mountains. Beautiful setting for settled agriculture.
Construction of sites for Yajna[0] and specifically, the Yajna Vedi[1] where the central fire was located, required precision and mathematical calculations[2]. Based on the origins of Hinduism/Buddhism, I'll not be surprised if instruments of calculation were common in religious affairs.
Sure, there's a lot of mathematical mysticism in India and I have seen this at Jain sites. However, the Buddha subject would suggest a Buddhist reference. My recollection is that Cambodian sites with bitraditional syncretism were periodically built out or converted between the two traditions - not constructed blended, ie. a Buddha figure would not be carved with a Hindu item.
Yes, you can see it in the temples as well, even the buddhist ones use the Hindu style with straight lines instead of the round stupas.
I think that particular stone carving was recent(ish) but might be wrong. It was a very small local wat and I think I went into it randomly while walking around - the depiction didn't felt buddhist nor hindu at all, if anything it looked masonic or automatically generated from a set of symbols.
In siem reap on the main road, that goes to the city when you come from the airport, there's a few temples close to the city. If I'm remembering correctly (+6 years ago), it will be in one on the right side of the road (coming into the city), black stone walls. I had a picture of it but can't find it, typical buddha pose, halo like around the head, but instead of resting hands on the lap it was holding the square.
I wonder if you could use an air "force field" to capture the rocket. e.g. a circular arrangement of air turbines, dynamically adjusted to smoothly capture and land the rocket. Has something like this been tried?
I'm not sure if that's ever been tried, but it certainly won't work for SpaceX. The landing system has to be able to work on any solid, flat surface in the solar system, such as the surface of Mars. There are no force fields on Mars.
Edit: Every thread on HN or reddit usually has people suggesting other methods of landing rockets that require huge, specialized infrastructure. The primary goal here is to land on Mars without large or complex infrastructure. So even if you think you can devise a cheaper or 'better' system, if it doesn't work on Mars, it doesn't work at all.
The amount of CFM of air needed to lift a rocket booster would be immense. Back of the envelope math suggests somewhere around a football stadiums worth of air per second.
It seems to me that they'll have to use the rocket engine to slow the rocket down regardless of how it is recovered. Once that's being done it is just a matter of increasing precision in order to set it down with no additional complexity.
That said, there is complexity in having higher performance valves and such to get a fast system response, but still that's improved performance of existing equipment as opposed to adding more stuff.
When you look at any design out of SpaceX, you need to keep in mind the fact that Elon himself drives the requirement of 'this has to help humans get to Mars'. It extends through the Falcon, the Dragon and a whole heap of other aspects of what they do.
I wonder why Google didn't also bid on Novell's patents when they were up for sale. CPTN Holdings, a Microsoft-led group that includes Apple, EMC, and Oracle is currently in the process of buying 882 of Novell’s patents.
"We noticed over the last couple of years that the Java developer community — unlike the .NET developer community — was starting to experiment with dynamic languages."
What? He must have missed IronPython and IronRuby. IronPython's performance has been far superior to Jython primarily because of the dynamic language support in CLR. Unfortunately, MS seems to have abandoned these efforts.
IronPython was quite young at the time (1.0 only made it out in November of that year). As far as I can remember, IronRuby didn't even exist at the time, and the CLR had no dynamic language support.
So he's probably correct in that the .NET developer community hadn't yet significantly embraced dynamic languages on the platform.
This post is a great rebuttal to those who think that Google is becoming a lumbering giant. I wonder how long it would have taken Microsoft to respond to a similar situation.
> I wonder how long it would have taken Microsoft to respond to a similar situation.
When ASP.NET's AES implementation was exposed to automated attack recently, the DevDiv guys got out in front of the issue with a workaround in about four days:
One of the search terms mentioned in the NY Times articles was "Christian Audigier glasses". On Bing, the questionable www.decormyeyes.com site is still the 5th listing.
Not at all! For the reason that google explained on the blog, it is a dumb response to remove or penalize this particular company in the wake of the media froth. The admirable and responsible thing to do is to figure out how to make the thing work better in general to cover the hundreds or thousands of similar cases not in the New York Times.
This issue is complex and I don't have great overall answers. It isn't clear how search results should bias based on sentiment. (That's discussed on the blog and here.) One thing I am sure of is that I respect discovering a result they consider bad and looking at the algorithms that caused the result and I don't respect deciding that you got egg on your face for the results of your algorithm in this case and jiggering the results.
Of course, we don't know that Bing didn't come up with algorithmic improvements, but the comment you're replying to isn't refuted in any way by the fact that the result has disappeared (or greatly diminished) in Bing. To the contrary, in addition to my bias to agree with the OP on Google / Bing, when one company says, "We've taken a look, made small improvements already that have some impact, and we're looking to make more" and the search result simply disappears in the other case, I'm inclined to take that as specific evidence of the former doing the better job.
You can't argue that Microsoft didn't respond quickly, because there has been a change in Bing's results. The original comment asked "how long until Microsoft addressed this problem?", and it appears that Microsoft has now addressed it, so the point that the comment made stands.
The fact that Microsoft may or may not have addressed the problem by "jiggering the result" has nothing to do with it. There is no evidence one way or the other.
You may be deeply suspicious of Microsoft's behavior, and that's perfectly fine. Let's just be clear about what we're saying. It would have been more direct to say "Microsoft may have responded quickly, but I bet they just cheated."
> and the search result simply disappears in the other case
Except that the search result didn't disappear on Bing. it had the same behavior as on Google.
You seem to have a bias to assume that Google did something algorithmic and Bing just hand crafted the search results based on absolutely no facts at all:)
EnterpriseDB is essentially an Oracle-compatible PostgreSQL. Unfortunately, however, its not open source. I guess Google can buy them and open source their software just to piss off Oracle.
