Sudoku - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sudoku (数独, sūdoku?) listen (help·info) is a logic-based number placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 boxes (also called blocks or regions) contains the digits from 1 to 9, only one time each (that is, exclusively). The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid.
Completed Sudoku puzzles are a type of Latin square, with an additional constraint on the contents of individual regions. Leonhard Euler is sometimes incorrectly cited as the source of the puzzle, based on his work with Latin squares.[1]
The modern puzzle was invented by an American architect, Howard Garns, in 1979 and published by Dell Magazines under the name “Number Place”.[2] It became popular in Japan in 1986, after it was published by Nikoli and given the name Sudoku, meaning single number. [3] It became an international hit in 2005.
Latin square - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Latin square is an n × n table filled with n different symbols in such a way that each symbol occurs exactly once in each row and exactly once in each column. Here is an example:
begin{bmatrix} 1 & 2 & 3 \ 2 & 3 & 1 \ 3 & 1 & 2 \ end{bmatrix}
Latin squares occur as the multiplication tables (Cayley tables) of quasigroups. They have applications in the design of experiments and in error correcting codes.
The name Latin square originates from Leonhard Euler, who used Latin characters as symbols.
A Latin square is said to be reduced (also, normalized or in standard form) if its first row and first column are in natural order. For example, the Latin square above is reduced because both its first row and its first column are 1,2,3 (rather than 3,1,2 or any other order). We can make any Latin square reduced by permuting (reordering) the rows and columns.
Freon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Freon is DuPont’s trade name for its odorless, colorless, nonflammable, and noncorrosive chlorofluorocarbon and hydrochlorofluorocarbon refrigerants, which are used in air conditioning and refrigeration systems. Freon is also used as an inhalant drug for its intoxicating properties.
[edit] History
They were initially developed in the early 20th century as an alternative to the toxic gases that were previously used as refrigerants, such as ammonia, chloromethane, and sulfur dioxide. Freon, in this case dichlorodifluoromethane, was invented by Thomas Midgley, Jr. with co-inventor Charles Kettering.[1] Each Freon is designated by a number; for instance, Freon-11 is trichlorofluoromethane, while Freon-12 is dichlorodifluoromethane. In the 1990s, most uses of Freon were phased out due to the negative effects that chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons have on the Earth’s ozone layer.
David Shore - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
is a Canadian-born writer, best known for his work writing and producing in television. A former lawyer, Shore became known for his work on Family Law and NYPD Blue. Shore also produced many episodes of the hit cult television series Due South, before creating a show of his own, House, M. D.
“This is easy as long as you can follow it.”
- Roger Waggoner, in linear algebra class
Hugh Laurie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
James Hugh Calum Laurie, OBE (born 11 June 1959) is an English actor, comedian, writer, and musician. Laurie reached fame in the United Kingdom as one half of the Fry and Laurie double act, with friend and comedy partner Stephen Fry. Since 2004 he has become known to international audiences as Gregory House, protagonist in the American television drama, House.
“No pain ever hurt anybody.”
- Roger Waggoner, in linear algebra class
Superman Doesn’t Soar
Lex Luthor’s a geek. He quotes Arthur C. Clarke (”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he tells his girlfriend) and gives one of his thugs a digital video camera to document his crimes. And Lex admires Prometheus, the god who gave fire — the first killer app — to humans.
Superman, on the other hand, is a faith-based guy. He serves a higher power. Voices in his head dictate his every move.
So, does Superman Returns give us a juicy faith-versus-science battle? No such luck.
Filled with big ideas that never quite gel and spiked with suggestive imagery that ultimately feels meaningless, Bryan Singer’s film floats from one gorgeous scene to another without quite connecting the emotional or narrative dots.
At 157 minutes long, it’s both bloated and provocative, an overlong essay by a bright student who read the texts but didn’t finish working out his thesis.
Compact Cassette - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. Although it was originally intended as a medium for dictation, improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications.[1] Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers. Between the early 1960s and early 2000s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP and later the Compact Disc.[2] The word cassette is a French word meaning “little box.”
Compact Cassettes consist of two miniature spools, between which a magnetic tape is passed and wound. These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell. Two stereo pairs of tracks (four total) or two monaural audio tracks are available on the tape; one stereo pair or one monophonic track is played or recorded when the tape is moving in one direction and the second pair when moving in the other direction. This reversal is achieved either by manually flipping the cassette or by having the machine itself change the direction of tape movement (”auto-reverse”).
10 Reasons Why High Definition DVD Formats Have Already Failed — Audioholics Home Theater Reviews and News
I’m not typically a doom and gloom kind of guy - really, I’m rather optimistic. But this pending format release/war is simply the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen in a long time. The hype machine is entirely enthusiast-created and since that day I realized Steve Jobs could sell a fart provided he sued a public Mac forum for talking about it before its release, I began to understand the power of public mania.
There are a number of reasons why the new high definition DVD formats have already failed and I’ll gladly go over some of them in this article. I am not a soothsayer, but I do study the industry - and at times, sit back and take assessment of what’s happening from both a consumer and manufacturer perspective.
Seat of female libido revealed - sex - 26 June 2006 - New Scientist
The precise part of the brain likely to be the seat of heterosexual desire in women has been revealed by experiments on mice.
The study confirms that the hormone oestrogen is vital for arousal, but only in the specific area of the brain called the ventromedial nucleus (VMN) in the hypothalamus.
Sonoko Ogawa of the University of Tsukuba in Japan and her collaborators in the US discovered this by blocking the effects of oestrogen exclusively in that part of the brain in mice. They did this with tiny slugs of genetic material called small hairpin RNAs designed to block production of oestrogen receptor alpha, the molecule where oestrogen docks on cells in the VMN and elsewhere in the body.
They used a harmless virus to shuttle the RNAs exclusively into the VMN, so that oestrogen signals would only be blocked there and nowhere else in the body. The effect was dramatic - the females refused to have sex.
“They became extremely aggressive towards males, and started biting and kicking when males approached,” says Ogawa. The females refused to mate and none of them showed the usual signs of sexual receptivity. By contrast, control females injected with neutral RNAs mated as usual. View a video of the normal mice (top) and those in which sexual receptivity was blocked (bottom).
Data compression - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computer science and information theory, data compression or source coding is the process of encoding information using fewer bits (or other information-bearing units) than an unencoded representation would use through use of specific encoding schemes. For example, this article could be encoded with fewer bits if one were to accept the convention that the word “compression” be encoded as “comp.” One popular instance of compression with which many computer users are familiar is the ZIP file format, which, as well as providing compression, acts as an archiver, storing many files in a single output file.
As with any communication, compressed data communication only works when both the sender and receiver of the information understand the encoding scheme. For example, this text makes sense only if the receiver understands that it is intended to be interpreted as characters representing the English language. Similarly, compressed data can only be understood if the decoding method is known by the receiver.
Compression is useful because it helps reduce the consumption of expensive resources, such as hard disk space or transmission bandwidth. On the downside, compressed data must be decompressed to be used, and this extra processing may be detrimental to some applications. For instance, a compression scheme for video may require expensive hardware for the video to be decompressed fast enough to be viewed as it’s being decompressed (the option of decompressing the video in full before watching it may be inconvenient, and requires storage space for the decompressed video). The design of data compression schemes therefore involves trade-offs among various factors, including the degree of compression, the amount of distortion introduced (if using a lossy compression scheme), and the computational resources required to compress and uncompress the data.
FM broadcasting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
FM broadcasting is a broadcast technology invented by Edwin Howard Armstrong that uses frequency modulation (FM) to provide high-fidelity sound over broadcast radio.
MP3 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is an audio encoding format.
It uses a lossy compression algorithm that is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording, yet still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio to most listeners. An MP3 digital file created using the mid-range bitrate setting of 128 kbit/s results in a file that is typically about 1/10th the size of the digital data found on an audio CD.
MP3 is an audio-specific format. It was invented by a team of European engineers at Philips, CCETT (Centre commun d’études de télévision et télécommunications), IRT and Fraunhofer Society, who worked in the framework of the EUREKA 147 DAB digital radio research program, and it became an ISO/IEC standard in 1991. The compression works by removing certain parts of sound that are deemed beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people. It provides a representation of pulse-code modulation — encoding audio in much less space than straightforward methods, by using psychoacoustic models to discard components less audible to human hearing, and recording the remaining information in an efficient manner. This is quite different from the principles used by, say, JPEG, an image compression format, which are purely frequency domain based.
Monosodium glutamate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Monosodium glutamate, sodium glutamate, flavour enhancer 621, EU food additive code: E621, HS code: 29224220 (IUPAC name 2-aminopentanedioic acid. Also known as 2-aminoglutaric acid), commonly known as MSG, Ajinomoto, Vetsin, or Accent, is a sodium salt of glutamic acid. MSG is a food additive and it is commonly marketed as a “flavour enhancer”.
Although traditional Asian cuisine uses flavour-enhancing ingredients which contain high concentrations of MSG, it was not isolated until 1907. MSG was subsequently patented by the Japanese Ajinomoto Corporation in 1909. In its pure form, it appears as a white crystalline powder; when dissolved in water (or saliva) it rapidly dissociates into sodium cations and glutamate anions (glutamate is the anionic form of glutamic acid, a naturally occurring amino acid).
Human Facts
The following information about humans is 100% true. It has to be, because I got the information off the Internet. And we all know that everything on the Internet is fact. Thusly, I don’t want to hear any disputing of my factual facts of truthly truth. (No I did not just copy the page on animal facts, and switch the words “animal” to “human”.)
* Your skull is made up of 29 different bones.
* Human blood travels 60,000 miles per day on its journey through the arteries, arterioles and capillaries and back through the venules and veins. (I hope it takes the freeway.)
* Your ears and nose continue to grow throughout your entire life.
* If you were freeze-dried, 10% of your body weight would be from the microorganisms on your body. (Now doesn’t that just make you want to puke.)
* A sneeze zooms out of your mouth at over 100 m.p.h.
* Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself. (Mmmmm… This is making me hungry!)
* You burn 26 calories in a one minute kiss. (Use this as a pickup line in the gym.)
* A person weighs less at high tide. (So check the time of day before getting weighed.)
* There are 45 miles of nerves in the skin of a human being.
* The average human blinks his eyes 6,205,000 times each year. (Yes, this is true. I counted.)
* The arteries and veins surrounding the brain stem called the “circle of Willis” looks like a stick person with a large head.
* The average human produces a quart of saliva a day or 10,000 gallons in a lifetime.
* You use an average of 43 muscles for a frown.
* You use an average of 17 muscles for a smile.
* Your left lung is smaller than your right lung to make room for your heart.
* Between the time of death and the onset of rigor mortis in a human body, the contraction of the muscles can cause the body to turn over on its side. (That would be VERY freaky to watch!)
* Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
* Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
* Every person has a unique tongue print. (So if you accidentally lick something at a crime scene…)
* The average human’s heart will beat 3,000,000,000 times in their lifetime. (I’m in the process of counting this one.)
Big Numbers
Ever wonder what a number with 228 zeros after it is called? No? Well who asked you anyway? Actually, it’s called a quinseptuagintillion. Duh! Here is a list of all the big numbers up till the infamous centillion. Just some more incredibly useless trivia for you from TheAlmightyGuru.
The Phonetic Alphabet
Ever try to tell someone how to spell your name over the phone? It’s not the easiest thing to to when half the letters in our alphabet sound just like the others. That is why humans created the phonetic alphabet. Instead of saying the letter, you say a word that starts with that letter. There is one for practically every language and alaphbet. This one is the current English variation that has been in use since 1955. It is used by NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization), ITU (International Telecommunication Union), and the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration).
A - Alpha
B - Bravo
C - Charlie
D - Delta
E - Echo
F - Foxtrot
G - Golf
H - Hotel
I - India
J - Juliet
K - Kilo
L - Lima
M - Mike
N - November
O - Oscar
P - Papa
Q - Quebec
R - Romeo
S - Sierra
T - Tango
U - Uniform
V - Victor
W - Whiskey
X - Xray
Y - Yankee
Z - Zulu
Asia Times Online :: Middle East News - Muslims, Westerners - same, same
WASHINGTON - The world views of Muslims and Westerners in many respects are mirror images, according to the results of a major new survey, which suggests that European Muslims, who held the most tolerant views, could be a bridge between the two groups.
“Many in the West see Muslims as fanatical, violent and … lacking tolerance,” according to an analysis of the survey by the Washington-based Pew Global Attitudes Project. “Muslims in the Middle East and Asia generally see Westerners as selfish, immoral and greedy as well as violent and fanatical.”
But the survey also found that was less true among European Muslims. “In many ways, the views of Europe’s Muslims represent a middle ground between the way Western publics and
Muslims in the Middle East and Asia view each other,” it said.
The Size Of Our World
Graphical representations of the size of Earth against other astronomical bodies.
Bill Gates admits to Internet video piracy - The INQUIRER
MICROSOFT’S abdicating ruler, Sir William Gates III, has admitted to a nefarious underworld life of watching pirated videos.
In a long interview with the Wall Street Journal, Gates admitted to like watching pirated movies on YouTube.
The interview went thus:
Hack: You watch physics lectures and Harlem Globetrotters [on YouTube]?
Gates: This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places.
Hack: But those were stolen, correct?
Gates: Stolen’s a strong word. It’s copyrighted content that the owner wasn’t paid for. So yes.
Opps. So if you get caught with a copy of a pirated version of Windows XP, Bill seems to be suggesting that ’stolen’ would be a strong word for what you have.
Either that, or Bill considers the software and movie industry’s stance on pirated material is a bit harsh when it is applied to an individual.
Game Genie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Game Genie is a series of cheat cartridges designed by Codemasters and sold by Camerica and Galoob for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, Mega Drive/Genesis, and Sega Game Gear that modifies game data, allowing the player to cheat, manipulate various aspects of games, and sometimes view unused content and functions. Although there are currently no Game Genie products on the market, most video game console emulators feature Game Genie support. Also, emulators that have Game Genie support allow a near unlimited amount of codes to be entered whereas the actual products have a much smaller limit that usually tops between 3 and 6 codes. The Action Replay, Code Breaker, and GameShark are similar hacking devices that acted as a spiritual successor on later generation consoles, although they were created by entirely different companies.
What to Expect at Your First Gay Pride
Gay Pride for Beginners
What to expect at your first gay pride celebration
If you’ve never been to gay pride, you may be anxious about what to expect at your first gay pride parade or celebration. Here are some tips for attending gay pride for the first time.
Gay Prides come in all different sizes. If you live in Boise, there might be 500 people at your gay pride event. If you live in Boston, the number could be closer to 500,000. Bigger is not necessarily better, and the smaller the community, the more likely your attendance at pride will have an impact.
Your gay pride may involve a parade or march with celebrity speakers and performers or it may just be a community gathering, like a picnic or softball game. Most medium to large cities have a gay pride celebration of some sort. Here’s a complete listing of gay pride events around the globe.
Display resolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
display resolution of a digital television or computer display typically refers to the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by different factors in cathode ray tube (CRT) and flat panel or projection displays using fixed picture-element (pixel) arrays.
One use of the term “display resolution” applies to fixed-pixel-array displays such as plasma display panels (PDPs), liquid crystal displays (LCDs), digital light processing (DLP) projectors, or similar technologies, and is simply the physical number of columns and rows of pixels creating the display (e.g., 800×600 or 1024×768). A consequence of having a fixed grid display is that for multiformat video inputs all displays need a “scaling-engine” (a digital video processor that includes a memory array) to match the incoming picture format to the display.
Note that the use of the word resolution here is misleading. The term “display resolution” is usually used to mean pixel dimensions (e.g., 1024×768), which does not tell you anything about the resolution of the display on which the image is actually formed (which would typically be given in pixels per inch (digital) or number of lines measured horizontally, per picture height (analog)).
MS Ipod Parody
What happens if Microsoft had designed the Ipod?
