On the 8 Spot

There was not a single class that I didn’t sleep on in college. The problem was I had this bad habit of sitting in the first or second row. If I had professors as easily offended as the one in this article , I would not have passed any of my subject! Hehe, good thing I had such wonderful professors!

Sleepy student barred from taking final exams

AIE BALAGTAS SEE, GMANews.TV 03/19/2009 | 11:24 PM

MANILA, Philippines – A second-year college student in Manila was barred from taking the final examinations by her professor after she was caught sleeping during a lecture, a television report said Thursday.

In his report on GMA News’ “24 Oras,” JP Soriano said Elizabeth Balitaan, a student of La Consolacion College, has admitted falling asleep while her Finance professor Ronald Pastrana was lecturing, but said it was due to a headache.

Balitaan said she tried talking to Pastrana but he refused to listen to her.

“Kinausap ko na po siya. Sinundan ko siya sa Dean’s Office tapos hindi niya ako pinansin. Tapos failed na daw po ako [kasi] parang nakakabastos daw ang ginawa ko,” Balitaan said.

[I tried talking to him but he won’t listen to me. He told me to consider myself failed for sleeping in the class.]

Balitaan was later allowed to take the exam by the school administration, the report said.

The incident however upset Balitaan’s mother, who went to see Pastrana to discuss the problem.

Pastrana, for his part, said he did not allow Balitaan to take the examination because she missed a lot in the lecture.

via GMANews.TV – Sleepy student barred from taking final exams – Odds and Ends – Official Website of GMA News and Public Affairs – Latest Philippine News – BETA.

saw this at reddit! This is an excellent idea, hope they can come up with something like this for programs, there are a lot of virtual machines right now hope they could make one for every significant operating system or computer architecture that we still have access to right now, while a few of the original designers are still alive to help with the details!

The Rosetta Disk is the physical companion of the Rosetta Digital Language Archive, and a prototype of one facet of The Long Now Foundation’s 10,000-Year Library. The Rosetta Disk is intended to be a durable archive of human languages, as well as an aesthetic object that suggests a journey of the imagination across culture and history. We have attempted to create a unique physical artifact which evokes the great diversity of human experience as well as the incredible variety of symbolic systems we have constructed to understand and communicate that experience.

The Disk surface shown here, meant to be a guide to the contents, is etched with a central image of the earth and a message written in eight major world languages: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.” The text begins at eye-readable scale and spirals down to nano-scale. This tapered ring of languages is intended to maximize the number of people that will be able to read something immediately upon picking up the Disk, as well as implying the directions for using it—‘get a magnifier and there is more.’

On the reverse side of the disk from the globe graphic are over 13,000 microetched pages of language documentation. Since each page is a physical rather than digital image, there is no platform or format dependency. Reading the Disk requires only optical magnification. Each page is .019 inches, or half a millimeter, across. This is about equal in width to 5 human hairs, and can be read with a 650X microscope (individual pages are clearly visible with 100X magnification).

The 13,000 pages in the collection contain documentation on over 1500 languages gathered from archives around the world. For each language we have several categories of data—descriptions of the speech community, maps of their location(s), and information on writing systems and literacy. We also collect grammatical information including descriptions of the sounds of the language, how words and larger linguistic structures like sentences are formed, a basic vocabulary list (known as a “Swadesh List”), and whenever possible, texts. Many of our texts are transcribed oral narratives. Others are translations such as the beginning chapters of the Book of Genesis or the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

via Concept —.

I wrote this yesterday about my take on business and snake’s oil sales men and realize that sometimes they are not trying to fool you into a decision.  It is sad but sometimes people don’t try to think things through and investigate the stuff they are trying to say. Here Linus Torvalds shows us why a lot of reviews cannot be trusted, and judging from the way he says this I believe he is even referring to some people who are said to be professional reviewers. Things like this used to make me sad, then I realized that when something becomes useless they tend to become irrelevant to people and they tend to be cast off, like a year old fad. The thing is we need to try to live more aware of things and try to always go beyond what is obvious and easy to get. Do not subscribe to labels and pre conceptions, exercise that which we have that makes us more than animals!

Sadly, almost none of the reviews seemed to ever catch on to that, as they were all looking at the (totally irrelevant) throughput numbers that basically don’t matter in any real-life situation. Everybody just quoted the nice big marketing numbers, because finding the numbers that matter more to actual human perception (notably: average and maximum latency) was so much harder, and most disk benchmarks are crap and don’t even give those numbers.

Which is why I was so happy to see this review at AnandTech. Half the numbers quoted are still the worthless ones (I guess you can’t avoid quoting the industry standard benchmarks, even when they are horribly bad), but much of the actual discussion is about how unusable a drive is when it has maximum latencies in the hundreds of milliseconds.

via Linus’ blog: SSD followup.

One might ask: why should I pay for the sins of my countrymen’s ancestors? Simple. We are rich for the same reason Africans are poor. They are poor because they were born into a poor continent. We are rich because we were born into a rich one. I’m one of the richest 1% of people on the planet. This is not because I’m smart, or hard-working or charming. It’s because I was born in the right place. Any individual who thinks their wealth is the result of their own effort is just an idiot.

Of course, this argument has no weight whatsoever. But this is because empirical evidence and ethical considerations have no role in politics, except as thin veils for ego and self-interest.

via Stumbling and Mumbling: The legacy of slavery.

Visit Big Picture blog here for more Recession related pics

I find myself sometimes pausing when I feel I am saying something that even I cannot do. I sometiomes think that staying quite is the most optimal course of action because I do not fancy being called a hypocrite , which I confess that I am often called. The thing is I have a simple heuristic when to shut-up and when to bring it. I state my case whenever I believe that the person can still change his/her mind or to be more exact if I believe the words from a hypocritical me can still change his/her mind, otherwise I shut-up.

Read the whole thing it’s short and at least for me a little poignant!

Through all my years in school, my best teachers jumped into the pool all the time and came up laughing and snorting with water up their noses. They wrote prose and code. They read about new ideas and wanted to try them out in the lab. Their excitement was palpable. Fun was part of the life, and that’s what I wanted.

I hope I can embody a little of that excitement and fun as a faculty member to our students, as a father to my daughters. But some days, that is more of a challenge than others.

via Knowing and Doing: March 2009 Archives.