Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Peoples Archive | Great people telling their life stories

Peoples Archive is dedicated to collecting for posterity the stories of the great thinkers, creators, and achievers of our time. The people whose stories you see on this site are leaders of their field, whose work has influenced and changed our world.



Benoit Mandelbrot
Quentin Blake
Stan Lee
Donald Knuth

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

The Great War Archive

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/

The Great War Archive contains over 6,500 items contributed by the general public between March and June 2008. Every item originates from, or relates to, someone's experience of the First World War, either abroad or at home. Contributions were received via a special website and also through a series of open days at libraries and museums throughout the country.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

The Dictionary of New Zealand biography

From : http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/ :


"This website provides access to biographies of over 3,000 New Zealanders who 'made their mark' on this country. In order to access all the site's features - searching, saving your own search results, links between biographies, over 2,000 images, and selections from the New Zealand Historical Atlas"
The age of horrorism

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11, one of Britain's most celebrated and original writers analyses - and abhors - the rise of extreme Islamism. In a penetrating and wide-ranging essay he offers a trenchant critique of the grotesque creed and questions the West's faltering response to this eruption of evil.
From The Orwell Prize

The Orwell Prize is the pre-eminent British prize for political writing. There are two annual awards: a Book Prize and a Journalism Prize. They are awarded to the book, and for the journalism, which is judged to have best achieved George Orwell’s aim to ‘make political writing into an art’.

Fuel efficiency and slow driving

Need to look into this, but its a pretty good place to start:

From http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=993269&cid=25350317

Since most of these things don't change while we're driving, the proportionality can be expressed more simply:

F = kv^2

In other words, fluid drag is equal to some constant multiplied by speed squared.

The cube comes into it if you multiply both sides by v again:

Fv = kv^3

Because Fv is force times speed, which is just another way to write power. (Fv = Fd/t = E/t = P where d is distance, t is time, E is energy, and P is power.) Therefore the power dissipated by fluid drag (and thus the power required to maintain speed) is proportional to the cube of the speed.
Standard Candle @ Live Bait 1:
Sweet child o'mine:

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Joined-up Thinking: How to Connect Everything to Everything Else by Stevyn Colgan

Review of : Joined-up Thinking: How to Connect Everything to Everything Else by Stevyn Colgan


"the chapters introduce us to item A, which is linked to item B, which relates to C, whose story is incomplete without D, and so on and lo and behold, before you know it you're back at A, having had no idea where we were going."


And at Amazon

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

Review at : http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10797600


"He describes three trends converging to create the bubble. By 2006 the growing trend towards deregulation had pushed three-quarters of all lending outside the purview of regulators. Securitisation created a serious agency problem, leaving loan originators, who were paid up-front, with no incentive to avoid bad credits and every reason to piggyback inappropriate products onto good ones (in one particularly depressing tale, a retired postal worker whose mortgage is almost paid off is switched to an interest-only product that leaves him in danger of losing his home). Banks and rating agencies were gripped by the pretence that all finance can be calculated by risk-modelling eggheads. It did not help that many investors blindly accepted the rating agencies as a kind of “financial Supreme Court”."

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Smaller Banks Thrive Out of the Fray of Crisis

From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/25/AR2008092504155_2.html?sid=ST2008092600236&s_pos=

Smaller banks, by contrast, make few mortgage loans, and their lending is fueled by deposits, rather than borrowing. That has insulated them from the troubles on Wall Street.

"We're drowning in liquidity because people are pulling money out from other places and depositing it with us," said Peter Fitzgerald, chairman of Chain Bridge Bancorp in McLean. "Our bank has benefited tremendously."

Sunday, September 28, 2008

Simon Peyton Jones Interview

From : http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1974033854


"Was Haskell created simply as an open standard for purely functional programming languages?

Haskell isn’t a standard in the ISO standard sense – it’s not formally standardized at all. It started as a group of people each wanting to use a common language, rather than having their own languages that were different in minor ways. So if that’s an open standard, then yes, that’s what we were trying to do. "
The Programmer's Night Song - E. Derman (Emanuel Derman's Blog)
From http://www.ederman.com/new/docs/after-goethe.html

The Programmer's Night Song (After Goethe)

The fluorescent tubes
Are dim.
In all the cubes
You cannot glimpse
One screen aglow.
Even the Spanish cleaning lady's dined.
One last trash can lined,
She too will go.



Abendlied (JW von Goethe)
From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Abendlied (Wandrers Nachtlied II) > Notturno (Wanderer's Nightsong) (Translation / Uebersetzung) :



Abendlied
(Wandrers Nachtlied II)

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.






Wanderers Night Song
From http://www.natureparktravel.com/ilmenau/night-songs.htm

Wanderers Night Song
O'ver all the hilltops
Is quiet now,
In all the tree-tops
Hearest thou
Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait; soon like these
Thou too shalt rest

Translation by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Control Room only, baldy - Babelfish translation :


Evensong—Wayfarer’s Nightsong II
Over all summits
Is rest,
In all treetops
You feel
Hardly a breath;
The small birds are silent in the forest.
Control room only, balde
You rest also.