Random knowledge

During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and fake buildings to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air. See the pictures

1. Open Excel.
2. In a blank worksheet, select “Save as” and choose “Save as web page”.
3. Click on Publish and Add interactivity.
4. Save as any name you like.
5. Load in the page with MS Internet Explorer, Excel will appear in the webpage.
6. Go to row 2000 Column WC
7. Highlight all of row 2000 and press Tab.
8. Hold the keys Ctrl, Alt, Shift and click on the Office Icon.
9. And…

Use the arrow keys to drive your car. The “0″ key to drop paint slicks. The spacebar to shoot. The “H” key for headlights. NOTE: you need DirectX for this to work.

And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced.
But all was not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird.
The bird gazed down upon the unbelievers and cast fire
and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed, and the
followers of Mammon cowered in horror.

-from The Book of Mozilla, 7:15 (Any idea where this comes from ?)

The game of chess has its roots in rationalism. And, like the Enlightenment itself, argues Sally Feldman, it’s a force for both liberation and tyranny.

Whatever became of Geff, the Talking Mongoose of Doarlish Cashen? What this baffling creature was doing on the Isle of Man to begin with is mystery enough. And what of Pasquale Erto, the Human Rainbow from Naples, who would appear nude and in a self-induced trance, with rays of light six yards long emanating from his body? It is a pity no camera ever captured the full effect. Adrian Searle attends a very strange exhibition - and wonders how these pictures ever fooled anyone.

“Ma’am, books are like Kryptonite to gangs.” Steve Wasserman worries about the decline of coverage of books in newspapers.

Want to outsource your personal life ? Indian call centers is the answer (it’s an American thing… - not something I see myself doing)

And here is a story about an egg that costs 8.9 GBP, eh 8.9 million GBP, a Fabergé egg that is.

On April 25, 1792, the official executioner of the French Revolution, Charles-Louis Sanson, said of the guillotine (named after Joseph Ignace Guillotin):

Today the machine invented for the purpose of decapitating criminals sentenced to death will be put to work for the first time. Relative to the methods of execution practised heretofore, this machine has several advantages. It is less repugnant: no man’s hands will be tainted with the blood of his fellow being, and the worst of the ordeal for the condemned man will be his own fear of death, a fear more painful to him than the stroke which deprives him of life.

Below the epitaph on a separate panel is written:

The initials O.S. are a notation for Old Style and that is a reference to the change of dating that occurred during Jefferson’s life time from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar under the British Calendar (New Style) Act 1750.

Related post.

How can you convert in excel decimal time into 12- or 24-hour notation ?

Answer: if you have the number 4.50 (=A1) and you really want 4:30 or 4:30AM use =A1/24 and format as needed. If it should be 17:00 or 5:30PM use =(A1/24)+0.5

How can you convert to decimal time ?

Answer: to get the opposite, that is a decimal time from a true time, use =A1*24 (A1 being the true time format of course in this case)

Now this is simple enough, but why is this correct ?

The answer follows from the fact that Microsoft Excel stores dates as sequential numbers known as serial values and times as decimal fractions because time is considered a portion of a day. This decimal number is a value ranging from 0 to 0.99999999, representing the times from 0:00:00 (12:00:00 A.M.) to 23:59:59 (11:59:59 P.M.). Example: 21:42:10 equals 21/24 + 42/(24*60) + 10/(24*60*60) or 0.90428241. Now if you go back to the true time 4:30, this is stored by excel as 0.1875. If you multiply this by 24, you get 4.5
To display the serial number of a particular time, you can also use the TIME worksheet function if needed.

We need to make two remarks however.

Above explanation is valid for converting time, but not always for converting dates or dates with time! Originally, Excel for Windows was based on the 1900 date system, because it enabled better compatibility with other spreadsheet programs that were designed to run under MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, and therefore it became the default date system. Originally, Microsoft Excel for the Macintosh was based on the 1904 date system, because it enabled better compatibility with early Macintosh computers that did not support dates before January 2, 1904, and therefore it became the default date system. Or January 1, 1900 has serial value 1 and December 31, 9999 serial value 2958465 if you use the WIndows version. If you use Macintosh, than January 2, 1904 has serial value 1 and December 31, 9999 serial value 2957003. The difference between the two date systems is 1,462 days; that is, the serial value of a date in the 1900 date system is always 1,462 days greater than the serial value of the same date in the 1904 date system. So be careful if you use spreadsheets made on another system ! To solve differences when doing a copy/paste or with external referencing of 2 excel sheets based on a different date system, you need to add/substract 1462 days.

A second issue is the way excel interpretes two-digit years. 00 through 29 is interpreted as the years 2000 through 2029. For example, if you type the date 28/5/19, Excel assumes the date is May 28, 2019. 30 through 99 is interpreted as the years 1930 through 1999. For example, if you type the date 28/5/98, Excel assumes the date is May 28, 1998.
In Microsoft Windows, you can change the way two-digit years are interpreted for all Microsoft Windows programs that you have installed (or you can of course just type the correct 4-digit year):

1. Click the Start button, and then click Control Panel.
2. In Windows Vista, click Clock, Language, and Region. In Windows XP, click Date, Time, Language, and Regional Options.
3. Click Regional and Language Options.
4. In Windows Vista, in the Regional and Language Options dialog box, click the Formats tab. In Windows XP, in the Regional and Language Options dialog box, click the Regional Options tab.
5. In Windows Vista, click Customize this format. In Windows XP, click Customize.
6. Click the Date tab.
7. In the When a two-digit year is entered, interpret it as a year between box, change the upper limit for the century. As you change the upper-limit year, the lower-limit year automatically changes.

Update: perhaps I will post some more of these simple tutorials in the future as not everyone is looking for ‘advanced’ tutorials.

Ha ! Northern Lights, the opening episode of Philip Pullman’s fantasy series His Dark Materials, premiers Dec 5th. with Nicole Kidman as Mrs Coulter. Review at the Guardian. Watch the trailer. Northern Lights was some time ago declared the finest children’s book of the past 70 years.

Construisons demain (French link) premiered at Batimat in Paris earlier this month. This House of the Future, built of wood and covering nearly 200 sq. m., is a project by Eric Wuilmot, one of the architects of “Maison A” (French link) assisted by Domoconsulting for the home automation design.The system showcases low-energy living with three prefabricated wooden modules, resource and energy efficient systems, healthy finish materials, and inviting living spaces. The house was constructed by Construction Millet Bois. The house is not a finished product as such, but more a concept to show what the possibilities are to construct an ecological house that is close to being a passive house (which I find a very interesting idea).

The Ponzo illusion is an optical illusion that was first demonstrated by the Italian psychologist Mario Ponzo (1882-1960) in 1913. He suggested that the human mind judges an object’s size based on its background. The upper horizontal line segment in the figure appears to be longer than the lower line segment despite the fact that both are the same length.

The Millennium Prize Problems are seven problems in mathematics that were stated by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. Currently, six of the problems remain unsolved. A correct solution to each problem results in a $1,000,000 prize (sometimes called a Millennium Prize) being awarded by the institute. Only the Poincaré conjecture has been solved, and the solver has not pursued the conditions necessary to claim the prize.

The problems are:

• P = NP problem (
• The Hodge conjecture
• The Riemann hypothesis
• Yang-Mills existence and mass gap
• Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness
• The Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture
• The Poincaré conjecture (solved)

The links in the list are the wikipedia entries as these can give you at least an idea of what these problems are about. If you want to read the official problem description, please go to the CMI Millennium Problems, select one of the problems and read the pdf files.

There are easier ways to get rich…

Update: you can also have a go at the 23 (24) Hilbert problems (Mathworld - wikipedia).

The Very Short Introductions series (or VSI series) is a book series published by the Oxford University Press publishing house. Each book in the series offers a concise yet cogent introduction to a particular subject. Written by acknowledged experts, most books are between 100-150 pages and contain suggestions for further reading.

n., the study of saints (Greek άγιος (hagios, “‘holy’”) + -γραφία (-graphy, “‘writing’”)). See also the Bollandists, an association of Jesuit scholars — philologists and historians — who since the early seventeenth century have studied hagiography and the cult of the saints in Christianity. Their most important publication has been the Acta Sanctorum.

“There was that time upon the river of Rhone, in a certain wood between Arles and Avignon, a great dragon, half beast and half fish, greater than an ox, longer than an horse, having teeth sharp as a sword, and horned on either side, head like a lion, tail like a serpent, and defended him with two wings on either side, and could not be beaten with cast of stones ne with other armour, and was as strong as twelve lions or bears; which dragon lay hiding and lurking in the river, and perished them that passed by and drowned ships.” This was the description given by Jacques De Voragine in ”The Golden Legend” ( about 1255 ) of the amphibious monster known as the Tarasque.

Legend has it that the creature inhabited the area of Nerluc in Provence, and devastated the landscape far and wide. The Tarasque was a sort of dragon with six short legs like a bear’s, an ox-like body covered with a turtle shell, and a scaly tail that ended in a scorpion’s sting. It had a lion’s head.

Saint Martha found the beast and charmed it with hymns and prayers, and led back the tamed Tarasque to the city. The people, terrified by the monster, attacked it when it drew nigh. The monster offered no resistance and died there. Martha then preached to the people and converted many of them to Christianity. Sorry for what they had done to the tamed monster, the newly-Christianized townspeople changed the town’s name to Tarascon.

Why is Joseph Heller’s famous ‘Catch’ called ‘22′? Why is Bertie’s manservant called Jeeves? And why does the postman always ring twice (in a book that has no postman)? In these fascinating extracts from his new book, Gary Dexter reveals the story behind the stories.

Querty.08, an article on technology convergence.

Two teams of scientists have given human skin cells many of the properties of embryonic stem cells—a development that could ease political, ethical, and medical concerns over the highly controversial research topic. Report by NG and SCIAM.

Not really something to read, but to try out : SAGE, Open Source Mathematics Software.

Browse Dream Anatomy at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. A fantastic site.

And yet another one : Bodies of Knowledge. Our bodies are incredibly complex machines. Every second of every day we are powered by beating hearts, and carried around by intricate skeletons. Pipes, organs, hormones and brain cells keep us eating, breathing, growing and thinking. And yet few of us ever get to see the amazing mechanisms hidden beneath our own skin. For thousands of years the inner workings of the body have provoked fascination, confusion, amazement and even disgust. This site looks at the way different cultures, at various points in history, have looked at the body, and how these ideas have been translated into pictures.

I am changing the design of Random Knowledge. The general theme is The Journalist. Some minor modifications still need to be done (e.g. I don’t like the RSS button in the sidebar to be underlined, etc.)

Zen rules !

Recently my Firefox browser hangs when I’m trying to open a pdf file in the browser. The only solution I found till now is to disable the browser plugin and force pdf links to open with Acrobat outside of the browser.

How-to for Firefox 2: Go to “Tools”, “Options” and select “Content”. Next to “File Types” click the “Manage…” button. Select “PDF” from the list of extensions, click the “Change Action” button and change the action to “Open them with the Default Application”.

When you want to open a pdf link in your Firefox browser, Firefox will open now a download window, download the pdf file and open it with Acrobat.

This is not the ideal solution for me as I would like the pdf links to open in a new tab inside the browser, but the above solution works fine too (and quite fast). I wonder if there is another solution to this issue.

Chase Jarvis assembled a list of 150 blogs about photograhpy, design and pop culture. Some of them I already knew, but there are some fine discoveries to be made here (via)

A photo editor, the Magnum blog, I love typography, the Wooster Collective, and many more to be discovered. Chase was going to provide an OPML with this collection, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Using a problem-solving method called the Cascades algorithm, Carlos Guestrin, assistant professor of computer science and machine learning, and his students compiled a list of the best 100 blogs to read to find the biggest news on the Web as early as possible, blogcascades. It includes well-known blogs, such as Instapundit and Boing Boing, but also some more obscure ones like Watcher of Weasels and Don Surber. The original paper, a ppt presentation and a video presentation are available at blogcascades, but you’ll need to be familiar with optimization problems and complexity classes. Remember Pareto ? (via)

RK sez: I love it when people make a decent analysis.

James Wood about Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Writer discusses the vivid way Tolstoy renders the vitality of his characters. Tolstoy is the great novelist of physical involuntariness. The body helplessly confesses itself, and he seems merely to run and… Review at The New Yorker.

Amazon has launched its first electronic book reader, a wireless reading device named Kindle, hoping to drag one of the last bastions of the analogue world into the digital age. Review at The Guardian.

Update: the Kindle ingnites the flames…(37 Signals).

The tumultuous decades between the wars saw the birth and development of a new genre—pulp fiction—that sought in the gritty seams of American life a fresh moral code, one that made sense for hard times and harder people. A review at Bookforum by John Banville. Big Book of Pulps is 1168 pages filled with crimefighters, villains, and dames, and in which the editor compares pulp fiction with jazz…another “entirely . . . American invention.”

‘Many enemies, much honour’, Sigmund Freud thought. It is an opinion that Craig Venter undoubtedly shares, for he quotes with relish a remark once addressed to him by a government functionary: ‘This is Washington, and we judge people by the quality of their enemies, and son, you have some of the best.’ Walter Gratzer reviews A Life Decoded: My Genome - My Life by J Craig Venter