Wow, stalkers rejoice?!

Now if you want to fool the people and know about their online status even when they have logged in with invisible feature activated, then this is possible. Poor Gtalk!

Check If Someone is Invisible, Offline Or Blocked You On GTalk

Somebody is in the news recently for allegedly getting assaulted after uttering fighting words. It turns out fighting words are commonly excepted from protected free speech. Contrary to the elementary folklore, free speech appears not to be universal, but is thought to be based on the libertarian principles argued by Mill, that speech which does not do harm to others should not be proscribed. All right, so far this is all common knowledge. But is that all? Is free speech (harm or not) a flawed idea to begin with? There is an old and generally discursive article by Kendall called The “Open Society” and Its Fallacies, which challenges the tenets of Mill’s libertarian stance on speech at its core.
(Read the article)

Saw some advice on what to do in case your elevator loses power and starts to freefall. Things like pushing all the buttons, standing against the wall, etc. I’d like to ask an even more basic question: Why would this scenario even happen? Has it ever happened? If so, it must have been an elevator with incredibly bad engineering.

I don’t know how elevators actually are designed, but I know they have counterweights and brakes. So if I were to design them, I’d be sure the brakes are always engaged mechanically by default, and only could be released under power. I would then make sure the shaft is long and there is an emergency spring-loaded bungee cord to make sure the elevator never hits bottom. I’d even add enough padding at the bottom and make sure the shaft below first floor (where the elevator is not supposed to go) are entirely made of braking material. How could anybody die by falling in such a design?

This article (also this) proposes that there are two types of perfect pitch, “ability to perceptually encode” and “heightened tonal memory”. And these groups perform differently on a tonal matching test. I take the first to mean the ability to match any tone whatsoever precisely, while the second one to mean the ability to have long-term memory of certain heard tones.
(Read the article)

[18:01] fakalin: hey
[18:01] fakalin: did you try wolfram alpha
[18:02] me: waht
[18:02] fakalin: what
[18:02] fakalin: jeez you’re out of touch
[18:02] fakalin: http://www.wolframalpha.com/
(Read the article)

This is a good one, and this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/04/AR2009050400027.html

At our Mountain View headquarters, we have some fields that we need to mow occasionally to clear weeds and brush to reduce fire hazard. This spring we decided to take a low-carbon approach: Instead of using noisy mowers that run on gasoline and pollute the air, we’ve rented some goats from California Grazing to do the job for us (we’re not “kidding”). A herder brings about 200 goats and they spend roughly a week with us at Google, eating the grass and fertilizing at the same time. The goats are herded with the help of Jen, a border collie. It costs us about the same as mowing, and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.

Right… Somebody already asked the question I had though:

Anthony – May 1st, 2009 at 11:53 am PDT
Who’s gonna pick up the poop?

A very important question indeed. Maybe these goats wore diapers.

Is this a joke?

Windows XP Mode is an add-on for Windows 7 Professional and higher that comes in two parts, each of which has its own setup. The first is Windows Virtual PC, a new version of Microsoft’s free desktop virtualization platform, and the second is Virtual Windows XP itself, which is a virtual hard drive pre-loaded and licensed with Windows XP Service Pack 3.

The magic happens when you then close Virtual XP. Windows 7 whirs and grinds and creates a new Start Menu group called Virtual Windows XP Applications, in my case full of Office 2000 applications. I started Word 2000, and after a couple of minutes’ initialization, it opened in its own window, just like a native application. Impressive, until I started typing and found a severe delay between striking a key and text appearing on the page. (Edit: the couple of minutes are for booting Windows XP in the virtual machine?)

Just me or is this an incredible kludge? If the integration is that weak, it probably makes sense to just let the virtual machine be transparent rather than be a sleight-of-hand.

and

When you shut down Windows 7 after using Windows XP Mode, the virtual machine hibernates by default, which is convenient but could in time lead to degraded performance.

Bad idea…

That’s the gist of the title of this article criticizing Hu Shi’s advocacy of the baihuawen movement earlier last century. It says that far from reforming literature, in which it failed and was doomed to fail unbeknownst to the advocates, the movement unleashed a quiet revolution that overturned the classes in society. The elites lost their wenyan which separated them from the foolish masses and thus must allow the foolish masses, who are anybody who can read but perhaps not think, to participate and have their opinions be counted as equals.

This opening sets up this opinion later in the piece:

而对于一个健康、合理的社会来说，知识分子绝对应该是社会的唯一的统治阶级。
In a healthy, sensible society, the intellectual elite should absolutely be the society’s sole ruling class.

(Read the article)

Here is a problem described to me by fakalin. Given n red points and n blue points, no three of which are collinear, prove that there exists a pairing of red and blue points such that the line segments connecting each pair do not intersect.

(Read the article)