Hot / Cold

January 17th, 2012 § 4 comments § permalink

English: Lifted toilet seat reveals compost bi...

Image via Wikipedia

I hate cold. it makes me angry and antisocial. nothing special, just the way I am. I can take cold if necessary, I just know that I don’t like it. I don’t see why I would change that. I’m assuming I’m not the only one, but also expect that there are some cold-lover out there as well.

However, this condition made me specially sensitive to some social phenomena. the latest one, that I really really don’t understand is people’s behavior on public restrooms. They seem to be either specially designed for cold-lovers, or there is much more cold-lover out there than I imagined.

a) more often than not they are without heating. I get that, landlords are cheap and save money on heating. it’s not nice of them, but nobody spends lots of time in public toilets anyway. and I can handle my anger in small quantities anyway.

b) more often than not, there is an open window right behind the toilet seat. again, I can understand the reasons, even though they annoy me – nobody likes the smell of the person before him, and landlords are cheap and save money on ventilation.

c) roughly half of public restrooms don’t offer warm water. again, cheap landlords. however, in the other half that does, more often than not, like 80% of the time, the hot/cold water faucet is turned all the way to the cold one. let’s ponder a bit on this observation:

  • every time you use public restroom, someone else was there before you and you inherit their ‘preferred environment’. this means the water temperature preference is being suggested to you.
  • a lot of public restrooms don’t offer hot water, but those that do are not being used most of the time.
  • there is no way that so many people would be making a mistake in turning the faucet. all the faucets on the planet use the same direction for hot / cold water – all the faucets everybody is using at home, in their own bathroom and kitchen, use the same layout. they should be programmed to instinctively know which way to turn for warm.
Now, the question I have is this: does this experience mean, that 80% of people are actually cold-lovers and prefer being exposed to cold elements? Do they wash the dishes with cold water then? maybe that’s why they invented washing machines – so they don’t have to be exposed to warm water for too long?
I just don’t get it.
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Martin Luther King Jr Quotes: 12 Inspirational Excerpts on Tumblr

January 17th, 2012 § Comments Off on Martin Luther King Jr Quotes: 12 Inspirational Excerpts on Tumblr § permalink

no other words necessary.

Martin Luther King Jr Quotes: 12 Inspirational Excerpts on Tumblr

Many in the United States got the day off work Monday in celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights leader and minister credited with bringing equal rights to African Americans, and tangentially, many other minority groups. Even after his assassination in 1968, his legacy as well as his moving speeches have inspired p

via: mashable.com 

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Reblogged: 18 Key Observations about the State of Blogging in 2011

January 17th, 2012 § Comments Off on Reblogged: 18 Key Observations about the State of Blogging in 2011 § permalink

I’m always excited when I see someone ponder the ‘blogging’ as a phenomena. while technorati is doing a decent job surveying us, not enough second-level interpretors are out there, explaining the findings and focusing us on the most relevant angles. this one is decent:

18 Key Observations about the State of Blogging in 2011

Tweet Blogging is a profession and a passion that has been transformational. The feedback has changed and informed me. I have written, travelled, presented and networked. It has allowed me to learn and to communicate with a global audience that has been enlightening, inspiring and empowering. It asks questions of you. Will people appreciate your th

via: www.jeffbullas.com

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Reblogged: IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

January 16th, 2012 § Comments Off on Reblogged: IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms § permalink

wow! i find it amuzing how they neatly separate ‘theoretical’ from ‘engineering’ problem here – as if the ‘theoretists’ these days weren’t building complex machines to perform experiments as well…

sigle nano

Image via Wikipedia

IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms

IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms
Instead of just storing all your songs of a drive, breakthrough also will let you store all your videos
IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms requ

via: www.computerworld.com

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Download Entire Wikipedia for Offline Use With an HTML5 App

January 5th, 2012 § Comments Off on Download Entire Wikipedia for Offline Use With an HTML5 App § permalink

Image representing Amazon Kindle as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase

i always wanted to carry wikipedia with me. i remember japanese started manufacturing small tamagochi-style gadgets with it, but they didn’t catch on. recently i was very happy to receive kindle with whispernet, where one of the key features for me is global access to wikipedia.

so this is just brilliant – somebody put it in a browser:

This application saves and downloads a copy of nearly all of the textual content of the English Wikipedia locally so that it can be accessed without internet connectivity. It downloads and saves a compressed dump file and an index, 14MB for the small version and 1GB for the larger one (you can select which one from the settings). Using WebWorkers and the File API, it seeks to a specific part of the compressed dump, decompresses it with a pure javascript implementation of LZMA and renders the Wikitext as HTML. All of this happens almost instantly.

via Download Entire Wikipedia for Offline Use With an HTML5 App.

… and it works flawlesly! can’t wait to be able to download it to my ipad as well.

i like cloud and all, i recently moved all my music collection to it, but when it comes to the sum of all world knowledge, that has to be available always.

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reblog: These Words Are Now Banned from the English Language [Language]

January 4th, 2012 § Comments Off on reblog: These Words Are Now Banned from the English Language [Language] § permalink

AMAZING!

Every year Lake Superior State University bans a bunch of words and phrases from the English language for good. They just released their list today and, I must say, it is amazing. Oh wait, we can’t say “amazing” anymore.The number one word for removal was “amazing,” which people say is overused but I say is actually quite handy. How can you get ri…

via These Words Are Now Banned from the English Language [Language].

… or should I say, AWESOME!

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