Links posted on January 06, 2008
Those of you at lunch on Thursday got to see the incredible amount of work put in to saving some trees near the ESB renovation. There is an article in the latest issue of The Alcalde about trees in UT's history and the current effort towards creating a more tree friendly plan for new construction. [more inside]
Motion Mountain - "the self-published 1,500-page (!!), still-unfinished physics textbook written and designed by your polymath genius uncle who dwells on a mountain with the spirits of departed philosophers (whom he quotes, in German). It's what a physics textbook would be like if a poet wrote it..." (I'll note that in my once-over, the actual crackpot index is far, far lower than the above-linked might indicate, possibly even down to background levels).
I wouldn't put it at the core of my own get-your-own-physics-degree-on-the-back-of-a-tour-bus curriculum, but I'd certainly make it an optional reading alongside The Flying Circus of Physics. Where he's right, he's compelling, and where he's heterodox, it's interesting to reason examine both sides. (See the Butterfly Effect on p.286.) The way he looks at and presents concepts is fascinating and visual and beautifully written; even the typesetting is artful and delicate.
I'd really like to hear other's opinions, especially curmudgeonly ones, as I'm not sure yet how carefully I should endorse the book. [more inside]
Photos with a that random guy in the background A couple edge towards harmless NSFW, if you care. [thx kottke]
Fun game If you're allowed to play computer games, that is. [more inside]
In other word news, it seems it's time for me to go off on another etymology rant. This List of Banished Words is pretty funny, so it's no fair to get peeved about their prissy insistence that "decimate" (originally meaning 'to kill of one in ten, as by lottery' -- from how the Romans did mutineers) hasn't and shouldn't be extended to mean "devastate".
But I'm surprised that none of the dictionaries (OED, M-W, Bartleby, MSN) I looked in had the very common signal-processing sense of decimation meaning 'divide a sample into, then eliminate a fraction of, many small slices". Google shows about a million hits for
(decimation OR decimate) (sampling OR signal OR MPEG)
and wikipedia had an entry, of course.
So the next time someone tells you that wikipedia is an unreliable reference, remind them there's more than one way to be wrong. [more inside]
Ladies and Gents, your 2007 word of the year: Subprime. A good choice, I think. Full rundown here [PDF].