Oleg Zabluda's blog
Saturday, October 20, 2012
 
Weird Al Yankovic collection with originals
Weird Al Yankovic collection with originals

Michael Jackson - Beat It
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Eat It

Greg Kihn "Geopardy" Jeopardy- Greg Kihn
Weird Al Yankovic - I Lost On Jeopardy

Madonna - Like A Virgin (video)
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Like A Surgeon

Michael Jackson - Bad
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Fat

Nirvana - Smells Like Teen Spirit
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Smells Like Nirvana

Coolio- Gangster's Paradise Coolio- Gangster's Paradise
"Weird" Al Yankovic - Amish Paradise

Chamillionaire - Ridin' ft. Krayzie Bone
"Weird Al" Yankovic - White & Nerdy

Bob Dylan - Subterranean Homesick Blues Subterranian Homesick Blues
"Weird Al" Yankovic - Bob (done completely in palindromes)
Google Instant with Bob Dylan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 10:50 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
 
William Mitchell (1879-1936) was a Curtiss LeMay (1906-1990) of his time, before it was cool.
William Mitchell (1879-1936) was a Curtiss LeMay (1906-1990) of his time, before it was cool.

Mitchell was United States Army general and the father of the U.S. Air Force. After WWI, he was appointed deputy director of the Air Service and began advocating increased investment in air power. He pissed off Army brass with his arguments and criticism and in 1925 was demoted back to Colonel, and later that year, was court-martialed for insubordination after accusing Army and Navy leaders of an "treasonable administration of the national defense" for investing in battleships instead of aircraft carriers. That same year Curtiss LeMay enrolled in ROTC.

After his death, Mitchell was posthumously promoted back to Major General, and received many other honors. He is also the only individual after whom a type of American military aircraft, the North American B-25 Mitchell (1940), is named.

Good thing Curtis LeMay was not posthumously promoted to 5-star general. Yet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_B-25_Mitchell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mitchell

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 10:17 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
 
1 mole of moles weighs about half the mass of the Moon.
1 mole of moles weighs about half the mass of the Moon. But 1 моль молей weighs only about as much as Vesta. Mind blown, Einsteins.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Avogadro%27s+number*2oz%2Fm_Moon

Star-nosed moles (Condylura cristata) "Звездонос/звездорыл"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star-nosed_mole (2oz=55g)
Eastern/common mole (Scalopus aquaticus) "Восточноамериканский крот"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_mole (2.6oz=75g) 

[2] Clothes Moth (Tinea pellionella) "Моль шубная", нападает преимущественно на меха, и подгрызает на своём пути все волоса независимо от того, съедает их или нет.
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Шубная_моль
Moths/butterflies weigh between 0.003 (smallest) - 3.0 grams (largest)

We just celebrated Mole Day, celebrated  on Oct 23, at 6:02 am i.e.
at 6:02 10/23 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_Day

http://what-if.xkcd.com/4/   

#sciencesunday  
http://what-if.xkcd.com/4/

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 8:15 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
 
Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL). It was involved in at...
Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL). It was involved in at least 6 accidents in 1985-1987, where patients were given massive 100x overdoses of radiation (20000 rad), causing serious injures and 3 deaths, due to

- Software race condition + arithmetic overflow (PDP11 assembly)
- Absence of hardware interlocks. Software was reused from older models, which did have hardware interlocks, masking software defects "proving" that software was reliable, since there was no reporting of triggering.

The system was designed and developed in a way that made it non-testable:

- Therac-25 was never tested with the combination of software and hardware until it was assembled at the hospital.
- The failure only occurred with a particular nonstandard improbable sequence of keystrokes within eight seconds. This sequence of keystrokes was improbable, and it took some practice before operators were able to work quickly enough to trigger this failure mode.
- The hardware provided no way for the software to verify that sensors were working correctly
- AECL personnel, as well as machine operators, initially did not believe complaints.

"An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents" from IEEE Computer, Jul 1993
http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs3604/lib/Therac_25/Therac_1.html
[...]
A significant amount of software for life-critical systems comes from ... firms that fit the profile of those resistant to or uninformed of the principles of either system safety or software engineering.

It is still a common belief that any good engineer can build software, regardless of whether he or she is trained in state-of-the-art software-engineering procedures. ...

Most accidents are system accidents; that is, they stem from complex interactions between various components and activities. To attribute a single cause to an accident is usually a serious mistake.
[...]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 7:31 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
 
Bay Area X-Planes
Bay Area X-Planes




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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 2:00 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster

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