Mandelbrot pushed his discoveries as methods for modeling real-world objects, including things like what you describe. so, the impetus for his popularization of fractals was this practical reason. at least, that's how Mandelbrot promoted fractals
What matters is whatever they are blabbering about actually gets them out of office or paints a negative picture to enough people that it makes a difference.
If it is not effective, that's when things get interesting, I believe. It could mean a number of things; younger people are voting more, games are becoming more widely accepted as not a bad thing, for instance.
In the latter case, one could argue that the perpetrators are very much out of touch.
If it works (and I hope it doesn't) then I guess it can be viewed as a successful way to win, but it's a bit desperate if they're resorting to attacking something like that over policy or similar.
If it doesn't work, I hope for the most part it means the wider population assumes she'd be good at her job and what she does online is her own business, but if it means younger people think of voting that's also a good thing.
I am generally a pedestrian, and in my experience when I am running on a paved path and cyclists go around me, they sometimes say "on your left" which works pretty well, but bells are great.
> I am generally a pedestrian, and in my experience when I am running on a paved path and cyclists go around me, they sometimes say "on your left" which works pretty well, but bells are great.
As a cyclist, I don't feel like it works very well. About 50% of the time the pedestrian startles and dodges when they hear you say it. In about 50% of those cases, the direction they dodge is to the left. And this is on the bike path where pedestrians are presumably accustomed to and expecting bicycle traffic.
I still do it for the sake of courtesy (and the hope that it will eventually become a common and well-understood practice), but I don't rely on it and give pedestrians as wide a berth as possible as well.
Single pedestrians/runners are almost never a problem. Even couples are OK. What can be risky is when you have a group of 3, 4 or more - they tend to be focusing more on each other than their environment and when they get startled they will often all jump in different directions.
[NB This isn't a serious problem, but I do spend a reasonable amount of time on cycle paths trying to co-exist with other path users on civilised terms!]
I had a great experience buying my first car, a new-used car, from Enterprise Car Sales, a branch of the car rental company. We were able to have a good conversation, and I found that they are a "different" kind of car dealer because they have fixed, no haggle prices for all of their cars.
They are, however, still a car dealer as customers are not able to buy the car online, but they are able to pay to ship the car to the nearest Enterprise dealer. Like every other dealer however, there is a surprising amount of paperwork.
It wasn't entirely painless, but it was the closest to a pleasant experience as I was comfortable with. I was not comfortable negotiating how much I lose with a normal dealer.
I wish I could buy a Tesla vehicle now, but I don't have the money to do so, and I don't want to be in debt for a long time.
But there is a big benefit: you know what the price of the item is. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Think about Apple gear: your gear-head computer friends scoff and say "I'd never pay the Apple tax, they're not worth the extra price".
More transparent pricing is always better for the consumer. It forces the market to price their items more competitively.
Now imagine if everyone got their Apple at a different price based on the mood that the Genius Bar guy was in that morning.
In other words, given a point on Earth (or any planet) and it's angle relative to the sun it orbits, when that point aligns exactly with and faces the center of the sun, it is noon.
Consider this: The way everyone refers to time is "X Units before noon", much like the 24-hour clock (no am/pm), except 0 is noon. The key is that X must be flexible, it should have no maximum, and no minimum.
This is not literally true. The period between solar noons oscillates and varies up to tens of seconds away from precisely 12 hours, thanks to the differing orbital speed of the Earth between perihelion and aphelion. What you're referring to is "mean noon", true solar noon averaged over the course of a year. See "mean sun" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_sun
More complications arise from the position of the Moon. The Earth's rotation is affected by tides (stronger when the Moon is at perigee), and by the Earth's orbit around the Earth-Moon barycenter. Precession of the Earth's rotational axis is also a factor. And many more astromechanical effects also subtly affect the timing of the apparent position of the Sun.
Locking our timekeeping to the actual position of the Sun actually proves to be an intractable problem. At some point, we need abstractions to simplify and assume that that the relation to the Sun is good-enough. Famously, the Julian calendar was good-enough for millennia until the relation to the sun drifted off true by more than 10 days. So arguing over leap seconds could be seen as rather trivial.
This is amazing stuff. Thanks!
I agree that arguing over leap seconds is trivial. We're at a good enough point now, assuming leap seconds are handled correctly, such that accounting for those seconds keeps us on track.
reminds me of "relative time" Jews and Muslims (and Japanese, until 1872) use.
This is a French wikipedia article I stumbled upon: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaot_zmaniot
Leap seconds are a work-around to make the 24-hour clock keep time correctly. The reason so many problems occurred was a combination of insufficient programming, but also the affect an inaccurate system.
I'm not sure what a correct system should be, but I know that it can't be based on the Earth, the sun, or any one galaxy. In order to have accurate time, it must be external to all of these things, like a meter stick is to an object.
The possible problem with this is that there will come a time when "3:00 pm" is in the middle of the night, the time to wake up for work will always "change".
> I'm not sure what a correct system should be, but I know that it can't be based on the Earth, the sun, or any one galaxy. In order to have accurate time, it must be external to all of these things, like a meter stick is to an object.
But Einstein's theory of relativity makes that impossible -- there is no absolute time. The larger reason for debates like this is because any timekeeping convention is relative.
As to a "meter stick", that's also relative, and therefore arbitrary, for the same reason -- relativity theory.
"3:00 pm" is in the middle of the night, the time to wake up for work will always "change"..
well, one time .. but do you !really! care about how the folks in +600 yrs measure time? I'd guess they invent some kind of "glacial-period-light-saving-time" by then...
Well, we're still using the Gregorian Calendar, and according to Wikipedia, that was released in 1582 [1]. When designing a system as eternal as time, I believe that it should still be easily usable in 100, 600, or 10,000 years; on any planet, and in any galaxy.
I know it's a joke, but it's lazy programming/lazy thoughts like this that caused the issues with the systems in the first place :)
Although I still don't fully understand why leap seconds caused such a problem - we can handle leap years and we can handle daylight savings, surely this is just another clock correction action such as these?
The problem with programming for a leap second is you don't know when a leap second will occur. Compare this to a leap year, which happen every 4 years, always. Leap seconds are sporadic [1]. Programming a clock to accept the time of 11:59:60 only on occasion is trivial in a web app, but slightly more complex in a firmware or high-reliability system like flight controls.
I'm currently using Google Docs Spreadsheets to keep track of my personal financial data. It is much more manual, but once the view over the data is set, all one needs to do is enter new credits and debits.
Here's how I have it set up:
I have one sheet with 6 columns: Account, Transaction Date, Post Date, Credit, Debit, Description .
When I have a new charge, I add a new row and fill it out accordingly. Every week, or at the end of the month when my statement comes in, I fill in the Post Date and check the charge.
I then check if the statement is balanced with my data.
In another sheet for viewing the data, I use functions DSUM and DAVERAGE, to consolidate information, and I store Criteria Constraints within the same sheet, in a separate section.
All textual data is stored in a third sheet which is referenced in the two other sheets using the INDEX function. The INDEX functions reference custom Ranges so that the data sheets don't have to change.
Doing it this way is a bit of work up front, but once everything is hammered out, I believe it's a smooth system. It may not be the most secure, but it allows me to enter data from any computer, my phone or my tablet, so I really have no excuse to not keep track of my charges or not know exactly how much money I have.
thanks for the info. i am actually using this for my business so as much as I love the simplicity I just need a bit more versatility for sending invoices, viewing quick overviews, etc. thanks though!
This is entirely speculation on my part, but maybe this is some insight into how many spam accounts there are on Twitter.
I am fairly worried by the security policy at Twitter.
For example, I have a friend who had his Twitter account hacked. As an experiment, he deactivated the account, but did not change the password. Whoever had the password logged into the hacked account and reactivated it. When he received the email of the reactivation, there was no "If you did not initiate this, click here" option.
There really ought to be some general rule of account classification in a broad-based public service. My very rough rule of thumb:
10% of accounts are active (daily/weeekly participation)
1% of accounts are "whales" (provide high level to the service).
~15-50% of accounts are some-time users.
~25-50% of accounts are one-time users (registered but never used)
If your service is sufficiently old, call it 5-10 years ...
~25-50% of accounts are expired / no longer reachable (usually the contact email/phone is no longer valid).
Active spammers don't have to be a high level of the service to be disruptive, but can be anywhere from 1-25%, mostly depending on how effective you are at rooting them out.
Very, very rough, and no, I don't have a particularly good basis to back these up other than the first 2-3 values.
Has something like that been done before?