Note to self:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=434264

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Hoho… It does suck compared to the Brain and Cognitive Sciences building right across the street.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has sued the architect Frank Gehry and a construction company, claiming that “design and construction failures” in the institute’s $300 million Stata Center resulted in pervasive leaks, cracks and drainage problems that have required costly repairs.

The center, which features angular sections that appear to be falling on top of one another, opened to great acclaim in the spring of 2004. Mr. Gehry once said that it “looks like a party of drunken robots got together to celebrate.”

Gehry should stick to designing museums, and, the MIT planning offices should stick to practicality.

Article.

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Brilliant…

http://hotcaptcha.com/

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I have a good guess now of how cell phone number porting is implemented. Had a number transferred from AT&T to Sprint. The phone actually came with a randomly assigned number and a matching MSID (mobile station id), but Sprint told me to re-program the phone with the desired number and a new non-matching MSID in the area code of the desired number.

The porting process was as follows:

• Immediately, random number stops working, new Sprint-assigned MSID works as phone number!
• Within minutes, AT&T cuts off connection and accounts access to old number, which ceases to work.
• Hours later, MSID stops working as phone number, old number now rings new phone.

The fact that the MSID works as a phone number during porting and remains in the phone’s settings, must mean that it is in fact the true “phone number” identifier for the phone. The phone just gives out its stored “phone number” for the purpose of outgoing calls. I’m guessing every carrier has a pool of phone numbers in each area code to give out, and there is a static allocation database somewhere. During porting, Sprint assigns a new number from its own pool, which becomes the MSID. Then AT&T (who owns the old number) changes its databse to forward calls to the old number on to Sprint, instead of processing them internally. Finally, Sprint changes its database to take those incoming calls and forwards them to the assigned MSID.

When you get a new line, a number from the carrier’s pool is assigned so no forwarding is needed, and that must be why the MSID matches the phone number in that case.

Now, if I were to port again to a third carrier, what would they do? Maybe they’ll look up the number and discover they should talk to AT&T?

Here’s some real information which I haven’t read but maybe corroborates or discounts what I wrote. http://www.syniverse.com/pdfs/GuidetoWNP6thedition.pdf

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“Activesync is truely (sic) a piece of shit where installing software on your pda also inserts an item into your desktop.” [*]

Word.

(Installing and removing software on WinCE with self-deleting cab files… ugh… I don’t want to get started.)

Activesync also has one of the most disorganized program settings interfaces, and it makes no sense. There has been no improvement (save for the changing colors of icons in the GUI) since the earliest versions. Notably, it has no security, so the hack-around solution to make wifi synch’ing work in the past, is no longer supported in the newest versions. The pda file system view also is not a native file system driver, so any file manipulation on the pc is crippled.

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I actually find market efficiency arguments quite appealing, but when the assumptions are not made clear, the inevitable hand-waving gets to be irritating…

Here’s some random guy’s page. He’s a big proponent of using a total market portfolio: http://homepage.mac.com/j.norstad/finance/total.html

His hand-waving is almost convincing, almost. Okay, “J. Norstad”, let’s take you point by point.
(Read the article)

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Ah, hahahaha! I just found this article by the nuts at the American Enterprise Institute from the late 1990s, reproduced below

Stock Prices Are Still Far Too Low

By Kevin A. Hassett, James K. Glassman
Posted: Saturday, January 1, 2000

ON THE ISSUES
AEI Online (Washington)
Publication Date: March 17, 1999

The U.S. stock market, despite astonishing price appreciation over the past seventeen years, could triple or quadruple in value without exceeding its true worth.

(Read the article)

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In the realm of restricted composition, there is Ernest V. Wright’s Gadsby, which avoids the most common letter ‘e’ in English.

In Chinese, there is this elementary passage which plays on the homophone issue of spoken Mandarin Chinese. Every character in the entire passage is pronounced “shi” (with varying tones), but nevertheless at this level the passage would make no sense if recited. But, written in the Classical Chinese idiom, the passage makes perfect sense when read visually (and isn’t particularly difficult to comprehend even for a modern reader).

《施氏食狮史》
石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮。施氏时时适市视狮。十时，适十狮适市。是时，适施氏适市。氏视是十狮，恃矢势，使是十狮逝世。氏拾是十狮尸，适石室。石室湿，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始试食是十狮。食时，始识是十狮，实十石狮尸。试释是事。

This is one demonstration that written Chinese can hold significant semantic content beyond phonetic value, a mechanism that has been key for tying together diverging spoken dialects over a thousand years.

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Note: There has been some confusion about this post. Let me make it very clear — I am NOT Fabrikant, nor do I have any relation to him, or even know of him in any way. I just came across this hilarious correspondence address on the internet. I have NO idea who this guy is, or whether the people commenting below are who they claim to be.

Utilization of divergent integrals and a new symbolism in contact and crack analysis
VI Fabrikant
Prisoner #167932D, Archambault Jail, Ste-Anne-des-Plaines, Quebec, Canada J0N 1H0

Correspondence: Email: [email protected]

Received for publication 15 June 2006. Revision received 1 December 2006.

Abstract
The main potential function, used for the complete solution of the contact and crack problems for elliptical domains, is presentable as an integral of an expression comprising a logarithm of a distance between two points. These integrals were considered to be impossible to compute, though various derivatives of these integrals were computed in the past. The new symbolism, introduced here, combined with utilization of divergent integrals, allows us to compute these integrals exactly and in a closed form. It also introduces a dramatic simplification in the final expressions and restores some mathematical symmetry and elegance.

You can look up this guy on Wikipedia.

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CA income tax form is the worst.
MA is only slightly better.
The federal one is a disaster but at least I’m used to it.
These things require reverse-engineering the spagetti code behind the instructions in order to see the actual calculations, which are all fairly simple. And yet, there is no logic to the instructions, like why the apportioning of income for non-residents need to be calculated multiple times, or why rate and value calculations are interleaved in random order, or why two forms that should give the same answer, don’t… Argh!

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