Jersey Girl wrote:I learned that you might not be able to power up your gas furnace with a generator during a bomb cyclone blizzard with 95 mph wind gusts because of dirty sine waves so you should just eat chips in bed with a hat on.
Yes I have cabin fever.
The descriptions I have heard of people walking 2 blocks to the store sound like Jack London's To Build a Fire.
"The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization." - Will Durant "We've kept more promises than we've even made" - Donald Trump "Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist." - Edwin Land
Channeling my inner geek tonight, I realized that we have been on 64-bit computer chips for a while, and I wondered why you never hear about 128-bit chips. It all goes back to the problem of addressable memory. The early Intel chips could address 64 kilobytes of information. When Gates and Allen designed MS/DOS, they looked at the 64kb limit and decided to plan for the future, and gave DOS the capacity of address TEN TIMES as much information, 640 kb. It was easily the biggest design flaw for DOS. There was a way to address the 384 kb of memory above 640 kb that DOS addressed though expanded memory managers, but it involved a lot of trial and error.
Since those early days a lot of the push to go from 16 to 32 and 64 bit processors was the amount of memory they could address. 32 bit processors could address about 3.8 gigabytes of memory, which was beginning to push up against what a lot of RAM hungry programs wanted.
But when we got to 64 bit processors, the amount of addressable memory went from 3.8 gigabytes to 16 Exabytes. This is an INSANELY large number. We go from 3.8 gigabytes up to 1,000 gigabytes, or a terabyte. Get a thousand of those terabytes and you have a petabyte. Take a thousand of those petabytes together and you have an exabyte, and a 64 bit chip addresses 16 exabytes.
There are other reasons to expand to 128 bit architecture, but addressable memory sure ain't one of them.
If someone wants to do the math on how many 64 kilobyte memory systems could load into 16 exabytes, please do the math. I came up with 250 trillion, but I am way too tired to be near a calculator.
"The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization." - Will Durant "We've kept more promises than we've even made" - Donald Trump "Of what meaning is the world without mind? The question cannot exist." - Edwin Land
Today I learned about Eugene Schieffelin. He wanted to introduce all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to the United States. In 1890-91, he released a total of 100 European Starlings in Central Park. That original 100 grew to over 200 million starlings in North America. He was also responsible for introducing the House Sparrow to the U.S. The other birds of the bard didn’t catch on.
All the world’s a cage, and the men and women in it, but ornithologists.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Thanks to Jersey Girl I learned today that the Rolling Stones are better and more versatile musicians than I had heretofore realized. Some of their music is positively brilliant. My formerly highly negative opinion of them as musicians is gone. They will probably never be my favorite musical group of all time, but they have produced some very listenable and enjoyable music.
No precept or claim is more likely to be false than one that can only be supported by invoking the claim of Divine authority for it--no matter who or what claims such authority.
“If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.”
― Harlan Ellison
Res Ipsa wrote:Today I learned about Eugene Schieffelin. He wanted to introduce all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to the United States. In 1890-91, he released a total of 100 European Starlings in Central Park. That original 100 grew to over 200 million starlings in North America. He was also responsible for introducing the House Sparrow to the U.S. The other birds of the bard didn’t catch on.
All the world’s a cage, and the men and women in it, but ornithologists.
Thanks for the background! They are horribly damaging and invasive birds, which I learned shortly after getting married and visiting my sister in law, an avid birder and gardener, in a very rural part of upstate New York.
When I asked her what the 22 on the window sill was for, her response was a very matter of fact, "for getting rid of those ****** starlings."
Jersey Girl wrote:I learned that you might not be able to power up your gas furnace with a generator during a bomb cyclone blizzard with 95 mph wind gusts because of dirty sine waves so you should just eat chips in bed with a hat on.
Yes I have cabin fever.
The descriptions I have heard of people walking 2 blocks to the store sound like Jack London's To Build a Fire.
María del Carmen Tun Cho, a 46-year-old q’eqchi Mayan woman and mother of six, ran the Los Angeles Marathon on Sunday in the traditional clothing—including sandals—of her hometown in the Guatemalan department of Alta Verapaz.
She finished with a time of 4 hours 47:22 minutes which is a bit over 11 minutes per mile. That's actually pretty awesome.
- Doc
In the face of madness, rationality has no power - Xiao Wang, US historiographer, 2287 AD.
Every record...falsified, every book rewritten...every statue...has been renamed or torn down, every date...altered...the process is continuing...minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Ideology is always right.
María del Carmen Tun Cho, a 46-year-old q’eqchi Mayan woman and mother of six, ran the Los Angeles Marathon on Sunday in the traditional clothing—including sandals—of her hometown in the Guatemalan department of Alta Verapaz.
She finished with a time of 4 hours 47:22 minutes which is a bit over 11 minutes per mile. That's actually pretty awesome.
- Doc
Those pesky Lamanites.
Don't take life so seriously in that " sooner or later we are just old men in funny clothes" "Tom 'T-Bone' Wolk"
