Environmentally-Friendly Light Bulbs

The NY Times has a good article about Walmart trying to sell more environmentally-friendly light bulbs, but meeting a variety of obstacles: Wal-Mart Puts Some Muscle Behind Power-Sipping Bulbs (via Slashdot and Metafilter).

I have one of these light bulbs (given to me by Seattle City Light) and its lasted at least 18 months (and it's in a lamp that is on most of the time that I'm home). Unfortunately, I still have 3/4th of a package of regular light bulbs to use up before I get more.

Yangtze Dolphin Extinct

Yangtze Dolphin Extinct [UK Times; via Metafilter].

A sad encore to the West African Black Rhino's Extinction earlier this year.

The Land Of Contradictions

Only in JesusLand and centre of the Free World could a Christmas Wreath in the shape of the Peace Sign be "symbol of Satan" or "anti-Iraq-War protest".

Isaiah 9.6: "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counseller, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace." (KJV) comes to mind with respect to the former and "If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own." (Franklin D. Roosevelt) for the later.

Who Can Name The Bigger Number?

Who Can Name The Bigger Number? (via Metafilter).

...

Ackermann numbers are pretty big, but they’re not yet big enough. The quest for still bigger numbers takes us back to the formalists. After Ackermann demonstrated that ‘primitive recursive’ isn’t what we mean by ‘computable,’ the question still stood: what do we mean by ‘computable’? In 1936, Alonzo Church and Alan Turing independently answered this question. While Church answered using a logical formalism called the lambda calculus, Turing answered using an idealized computing machine—the Turing machine—that, in essence, is equivalent to every Compaq, Dell, Macintosh, and Cray in the modern world. Turing’s paper describing his machine, "On Computable Numbers," is rightly celebrated as the founding document of computer science.

...

"Very nice," you say (or perhaps you say, "not nice at all"). "But what does all this have to do with big numbers?" Aha! The connection wasn’t published until May of 1962. Then, in the Bell System Technical Journal, nestled between pragmatically-minded papers on "Multiport Structures" and "Waveguide Pressure Seals," appeared the modestly titled "On Non-Computable Functions" by Tibor Rado. In this paper, Rado introduced the biggest numbers anyone had ever imagined.

...

I miss 365.

Funny Links

• Real-Life Recreation of The Simpsons Intro (via Funkaoshi).



• Calvin & Hobbes: Writer's Block



• $39-Dollar Experiment (via Metafilter): I was sitting around one day, skimming through a pile of bills that I needed to pay. I looked over at a new, unopened roll of stamps that I had sitting in front of me, and I thought to myself, "$39... for a roll of stamps? Geez... You can't get much for $39 nowadays. Or can you...?" ... I decided I was going to try something — I was going to take my roll of stamps and send 100 letters to 100 different companies, asking for free stuff.
  
  For example,
  
  Dear Sir or Madam:
  I have to tell you – I love your chicken. It's the best fried chicken around. The breading... I could eat a bucket full of just the breading. Breading and skin. That's the ticket! Anyway, your chicken is outstanding. If I weren't afraid of being arrested, I'd go to KFC to lick other people's fingers – that's how much I like your chicken. Please send me a coupon for a free chicken, so that I do not have to resort to licking strangers' fingers. Thank you in advance,
  Tom Locke, fried chicken enthusiast