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mogrify -format pdf *.jpgpdfcat *.pdfCheck out all the identical stories on google.
“I decided to challenge myself by setting a goal to see if I could graduate [from college] in only three semesters.” His techniques are like speed reading, except they’re for “speed life.”
His secret? Amphetamines. Also, he is vegan.
The book “Good to Great” profiles several companies that consistently earned several times what the market for their type of product was over a period of at least something like 14 years.
One of the practices they found was that companies would hire for the people, rather than for the job. For example, rather than WFU hiring a system administrator, we would hire a good analytical person. That person can then transition jobs easily.
Furthermore, they found many companies that just hired whenever found someone good, regardless of whether they needed someone. Some “great” companies hired a ton of people during recessions, although they weren’t necessarily making a lot of money, because they wanted to get all the good people who had been laid off elsewhere.
I’m wondering if this is what Google does. They always seem to have system administrator positions open. Maybe they’re just always willing to interview people in case they are great all-around candidates.
This would also explain why Google puts everyone through such a vigorous interview process. Maybe they just want everyone to be able to move positions over time: maybe they just want good people rather than people good at job X.
I have been jogging for the last week or so, at Wake Forest. No one else uses the work-out room I’m in.
Geeky me, I decided to watch Univision while I jog, so I can learn Spanish. Well, so far I have basically watched four programs: “¡Qué Locura!”, a candid-camera show that comes on at 6 PM between two different news shows, “Rebelde”, a soap opera where women pretending to be high school girls dress up in no clothes, “Vida TV” a reality contest show where men who answer questions incorrectly make their wives’ hair get cut off, and some comedy show set in a school where women basically wear no clothes.
I am embarassed to watch Univision. They exploit women in basically all of their shows. I had a longer blog entry where I linked to Unvision’s web page, but I accidentally closed the browser window. Suffice to say, Univision has links to “Bikinis”, “the sexiest women”, “the prettiest women”, and more inappropriate content on their web page.
Jeff Backus, his brother Tim Backus, Chad Bell, Rob West, and I have been bowling.
I bowled over 100 yesterday, two games in a row: 104 and 101. I bowled the 101 because I hit a “X9/” in the last frame (a 20).
The previous week, I was trailing Rob by 15 points at the end of the ninth frame but bowled a “XX8″ (28) in the last frame. It was nutty.
See Slashdot. They’re going to make a new TV series out of The Prisoner!
Professor Libbrecht from Caltech was kind enough to explain the snowflake problem to me, and to give me permission to quote him.
Let’s make the numbers a bit smaller to make things clearer. Say a snowflake contains just 10,000 molecules, and these lined up in a straight line. Most of these are ordinary water molecules, but let’s say 100 are heavier isotopes.
Then the question is, how many ways can you arrange these 100 heavier molecules in this linear crystal? Well, the first heavy molecule could go at position 1, or 2, or any position up to number 10,000. Thus there are 10,000 places to substitute the first heavy molecule.
Similarly, the second heavy molecule has 9,999 possible locations. If you placed just two heavy molecules in the crystal, there are already 99,990,000 different ways to do it. By the time you place all 100, there are nearly 10^400 different ways to arrange things.
Since 10^400 is a very large number, there is basically no chance you would place 100 molecules in the same way twice.
The same logic applies to snow crystals, except all the numbers are much, much larger.
I have been playing Battle for Wesnoth all this week. I’m not very good at strategy games, but I’ve been playing the same levels several times with different tactics to see what works.
Well, tonight I did what I do with every computer game that haunts me: I cheated on it and won. Now that I know the whole story I’m not really going to be interested in learning the strategy, which is really actually what I want. I don’t like getting addicted to games.