Tag Archives: religion

Links: Oct 27

This has been a busy month and, what pleases me, very productive. Apple’s recent announcement managed to surprise in many ways, which is delightful as well; if you’re still on Mountain Lion consider upgrading, Mavericks got it right in so many places, that it’s even difficult to tell which changes are most compelling.

I’ve lagged on links, however, so catching up:

Technology

  • What nohup does:

  • Query against over 1500 global DNS servers

English

Other

  • I’ve finally found where the phrase “With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine” comes from! Appears it’s from RFC1925:

(3) With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they
are going to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them
as they fly overhead.

But references to flying pigs appear even in Lewis Carrol’s Alice:

"Thinking again?" the Duchess asked, with another dig of her sharp little chin.
"I've a right to think," said Alice sharply, for she was beginning to feel a little worried.
"Just about as much right," said the Duchess, "as pigs have to fly...." — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 9.


 

Links: 20 Sep

Technology

Other

> How about a sysctl that does “for the love of kbaek, don’t ever kill these
> processes when OOM. If nothing else can be killed, I’d rather you panic”?

An aircraft company discovered that it was cheaper to fly its planes with less fuel on board. The planes would be lighter and use less fuel and money was saved. On rare occasions however the amount of fuel was insufficient, and the plane would crash. This problem was solved by the engineers of the company by the development of a special OOF (out-of-fuel) mechanism. In emergency cases a passenger was selected and thrown out of the plane. (When necessary, the procedure was repeated.) A large body of theory was developed and many publications were devoted to the problem of properly selecting the victim to be ejected. Should the victim be chosen at random? Or should one choose the heaviest person? Or the oldest? Should passengers pay in order not to be ejected, so that the victim would be the poorest on board? And if for example the heaviest person was chosen, should there be a special exception in case that was the pilot? Should first class passengers be exempted? Now that the OOF mechanism existed, it would be activated every now and then, and eject passengers even when there was no fuel shortage. The engineers are still studying precisely how this malfunction is caused.

Remember measles? That old-timey disease we officially eliminated in the United States 13 years ago? Thanks to the wonder of inoculation, measles should be entirely nonexistent in this country, but yesterday the Center for Disease Control reported 159 cases from January through August of this year.

What’s unique about this year’s outbreak is that the CDC has finally admitted the spread of this “eliminated” disease is based on religious communities’ philosophical aversion to vaccines and reliance on divine healing through the Word of God. According to the report, 91 percent of the reported cases were in people who were unvaccinated, or didn’t know their vaccination status, and “of those who were unvaccinated, 79 percent had philosophical objections to vaccination.”

  • London Heathrow’s glissade timelapse: