Bombardier Q400 digression
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Q400 passenger airplane by The Cranky Flier on Flickr |
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Blades by Jason Mullins on Flickr |
Mild science, tech news, stories, reviews, opinion, maps, and humor
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Q400 passenger airplane by The Cranky Flier on Flickr |
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Blades by Jason Mullins on Flickr |
As I wrote in a prior post, about an 1870s cartographic depiction of America as a young hog, I wish the University of Michigan Map Library blog hadn't been discontinued. It isn't surprising, as Web 2.0, i.e. user contributed web content, has been in decline for years. It's difficult to believe that Technorati, once the authority for blog activity, tracked millions of blogs at one time.
Technorati sounded great! It was a blog search engine that was superior to Google's Blog Search. Google Blog Search vanished years ago, like many Google services.
The BBC seemed VERY excited about Technorati, and blogging in general: A new blog created every second: In August 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs, up from 7.8 million in March of the same year, according to the BBC. Blog count was doubling every five months! Maybe.
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Look familiar?
This was the Technorati landing page
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Even though the dot com bubble was years earlier, there was an awful lot of Internet hype.
"Baker’s Sanitary Piggery involved a clean environment and wholesome food for its porcine residents - it was even rumored they had individual beds, and slept under sheets. That may have been hyperbole, but it underscores Baker’s belief that public health depended greatly on sanitary food production."He didn't blame pigs for the filth and squalor in which they, um, wallowed.
Howdy Ma'am,
Just spam, I am.
Five syllables short-- Bloggerel Doggerel blog, 2007
Verse is courtesy of The Climateer, who doesn't write about climate too often, thankfully! He has a great blog description which is perpetually relevant: "In war, everything not censored is a lie."
The Climateer DOES write about investment bankers who blame statistics for their poor trading decisions... or possibly, outright deceptive practices. There was a lot of that going on in 2008. I finally hoisted some posts about double-digit standard deviations from my bookmarks and read them.
"One of the more memorable moments of last summer’s credit crunch came when the CFO of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar, announced in August that Goldman’s flagship GEO hedge fund had lost 27% of its value since the start of the year."As Mr. Viniar explained, “We were seeing things that were 25-standard deviation moves, several days in a row.”
The shape on the left is a group of super-imposed polar surfaces. There is much more, along with detailed explanations, equations, etc.
You will also find pleasing drawing such as those I shared in my Cornucopia of Mathematics post, dating back to the turn of the century, uh, this century. Although I didn't hot link to the images (well, maybe one), and gave full credit to the source, a 2003 academic event at a university in New England, I noticed a few months later that the source web pages had gone 404 error not found.
Think Tank Watch's editor-in-chief seems rather pleased with himself. There's nothing wrong with taking pride in good work.
One of Harvard’s best think tank sources: Think Tank Watch. #thinktankshttps://t.co/7mwFAnKm8H
— Think Tank Watch (@ThinkTankWatch) March 24, 2021
Think Tank Watch has learned that the center-left Brookings Institution is in the late stages of a merger deal with the conservative Heritage Foundation to form a new think tank behemoth called "Brookitage."
The news comes via unnamed sources. Is there any other way to get information in Washington D.C. than 'unnamed sources'? Of course not!
"We cannot afford to be just a liberal think tank in today's polarized political atmosphere," said a senior level Brookings official. "Bringing the most well-known liberal think tank together with the most well-known conservative think tank would send a huge message to Capitol Hill. Things need to change."
It is unusual for think tanks to take such an active political role. Also, think tanks tend to be hothouses of similar ideologies. Brookings and Heritage are not similar, so merging will no doubt be uncomfortable for all involved. Also, Heritage is likely none too happy with that portmanteau of a name, Brookitage.
"If the Reagan tax cuts actually affected the supply side of the macro economy... then we should have observed an unparalleled increase in the growth rate of real potential GDP... Yes, real potential GDP did grow at a pretty good clip immediately after the Reagan recession, but it quickly faded... even at its peak it was only barely above the growth rates during the Nixon, Ford and Carter years and well below rates enjoyed during the LBJ and Clinton years."
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Aluminum Necklace circa 1950 0.75 in x 6.25 in. |
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The former CHF publication, Periodic Tabloid: Musings on the Molecular |
"The subject of our dissection is an online bank robbery.Not the all-too-common attack against an online banking user, his computer and his identity, but an attack against the bank itself - or more precisely, against the bank's online banking application.
An online banking attack has four distinct phases:
- Vulnerability Finding Phase
- Vulnerability Exploitation Phase
- Buying Time Phase
- Extraction Phase..."