Thursday, September 11, 2008

I don't read a lot of blogs

But this is one of my favorite ones.

Stevey's Blog Rants

If you're a touch-typist, you know the profile I'm talking about. It's dirty. People don't talk about dirty secrets in polite company. Illtyperacy is the bastard incest child hiding in the industry's basement. I swear, people get really uncomfortable talking about it. We programmers act all enlightened on Reddit, but we can't face our own biggest socio-cultural dirty secret.

Interesting stuff!

A very interesting story. 

Are the F.B.I.s Probabilities About DNA Matches Crazy? - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog
The men matched at 9 of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people.

The [Federal Bureau of Investigation] estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. But the mug shots of the two felons suggested that they were not related: One was black, the other white.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Alex doesn't think pending home sales is a good metric to follow

In my opinion this metric is a useless metric to follow.  Pending home sales are not a forecast because they are so easily bloated by ineligible home buyers.  So any down turn can look dramatic but means nothing.  This number could have dropped 90% and it would have as little meaning.

July pending home sales down 3.2% - Sep. 9, 2008
The Pending Home Sales Index fell to 86.5, after gaining 5.8% in June, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). It now stands 6.7% below July 2007's reading of 92.8.

Monday, September 08, 2008

Finally we're getting somewhere

I think this is fabulous news. If we can finally prove there are dimensions outside of the 3rd then the next problem will be to figure out how to communicate with whatever it is over on the other side. Assuming there is anything over there to communicate with. Arguably there is because what is the point of having another dimension if nothing is in it? Although it could all just be inert but I'd argue the fact that we exist lends credibility that something alive is in the 4th or 5th dimension.

Although time itself is going to be a problem to get anything done. You see, though we live through multiple decades, centuries and millennium our existence in the other dimension is just a fleeting moment. By the time we get a communication out there we will have ceased to exist as our time will have passed. In fact, out time is so brief over there they may have not realize we existed before we are gone.

But at least we are starting to look.

Super-smasher targets massive mystery - LHC- msnbc.com
For years, string theorists have noted that their equations come out better if they assume that the universe has nine or 10 spatial dimensions instead of the three we can perceive. The LHC could provide the first evidence of those extra dimensions: Some theorists say the collisions could produce anomalously heavy particles, suggesting that part of their momentum was going into the extradimensional realm. Harvard physicist Lisa Randall estimates that the LHC could nail down the evidence for extra dimensions in five years.