Here's the 4-second video that FRC wanted - as one of us said, ultimate proof that the 33Across engineering team always over-delivers :-)
Here's the 4-second video that FRC wanted - as one of us said, ultimate proof that the 33Across engineering team always over-delivers :-)
Please tell me it is so
But what will you give me
Such a little firebrand
And I have no mother or father
From that dark day to the present
Far and few, far and few
Look what I pictured on road
At midday
scraped the cupboard
On that little heap of stones
But
You decide, if they die or not
Sorry for your father
Dead or alive
If I were
In the middle of a wood
Reed broke the silence
An inn when he suddenly noticed
You can save more on the goods for solving man's problems
And here's the secret to the origins of this poem.
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It's amazing. Don't you agree? And I didn't even have to reorder the lines!
And there's more:
I was a baby Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo Panic in Atlantic City disco Please tell me it is so Quit your day job Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo If I had anywhere else to go In the middle of a wood Enlarge, expand and strengthen Said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo
Dear Is my card at yours? Don't worry Nor fear the mockery of thy yellow flowers If I had anywhere else to go Place where I reside A good place to make your condition better I am not deceitful I shall be one with nature herb and stone But I knew no one else in the house agreed And hardly knew what it meant I was a baby Arbitrary Story floor Toxine destroyer Have you anything more to add? If we got nothing lasting in their stead Now it so happened that on one occasion Reed had made her promise that she would Bring electricity back to your love circle! The voltage will be high Get a full-mast again Choose your topic Become virile like a rabbit! Bessie came in with a pastry tart for me Caplet-formed dong-booster Which they ate with a runcible spoon When girls fight daily Bessie will help you pack your things Indeed she's hot What else we've got An inn when he suddenly noticed It was now late He set off for home To thank his generous host Forget Asking For A Link Your reply is blocked
I depart as air I shake my locks at the runaway sun I bequeath myself to the dirt To grow from the grass I love. If you want me again Look for me under your boot soles You will hardly know Who I am or what I mean But I shall be good health to you nevertheless. Missing me one place? Search another I stop somewhere Waiting for you
We, however, decided to turn this little exericse into a game, which as a matter of fact, also turned out to be a good game to occupy young minds during the holidays! Here is how you would play it:
The game has 15 rounds. Each round lasts 1 minute. We tried to cover 15 numbers in the game.
Each round consists of:
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The kiss you can remember
Is not a real kiss
Just as the circle you can see
Is not a true circle
The perfect kiss is as pleasant dream
Pure experience untainted
By awful reality of tangibles
That everywhere surrounds us
You must emerge from it
With but vague recall
Too fleeting to capture
Too slippery to grasp
Too pristine to bind
By fetters of finite memory
You will remember starting
But should you bethink anything after
Then, my friend, I'm afraid
You must try again
And again
Until mindlessness becomes you
Copyright (c) 2008, Anand Venkataraman I find it interesting that much bandwidth is spent describing what is a purely experiential thing. Indeed, words mean nothing here, and it is an irony of life that we often waste the most words in talking precisely about things over which words are so poignantly powerless!" ]]>
On a Linux command line, you want something like:
echo "SELECT MEDIAN(foo) FROM bar" | mysql -p mydb
echo "SELECT AVG(foo) FROM bar" | mysql -p mydb
The answer to this question is what potentially distinguishes a good engineer or scientist from a good manager. A good manager is focused on getting the job done, and does not care too much about exactly how it is done as long as she is confident it's being done efficiently. A good scientist or engineer is naturally curious, and wants to solve the problem a particular way just to know whether it can be done or not. The good engineer will most likely come up with one of the many excellent answers on the MySql forum. A good manager will likely say, "Is there a reason it has to be done in MySql? 'Cos I don't know the answer off the top of my head, but I'm sure I can find it soon enough if I browse a few minutes. If you just want the median efficiently, and don't care how I get it, I'd probably just use some combination of MySql and Perl/php/whatever:
echo SELECT foo FROM bar ORDER BY foo \
| mysql -N -p mydb \
| perl -e 'use POSIX qw(floor ceil);
@f = <>;
($a,$b) = (floor(@f/2-0.5), ceil(@f/2-0.5));
$median = ($f[$a]+$f[$b])/2;
print "$median\n";
'
echo "SELECT foo FROM bar order by foo" | mysql -p mydb -N | median
echo "SELECT foo FROM bar" | mysql -p mydb -N | median-unsorted
use DBI;
use POSIX qw(floor ceil);
...
my $sth = dbh->prepare('SELECT foo FROM bar ORDER BY foo");
$sth->execute();
my @f = $sth->fetchrow_array();
my($a,$b) = (floor(@f/2-0.5), ceil(@f/2-0.5));
my $median = ($f[$a]+$f[$b])/2;
...
SELECT AVG(foo) FROM (SELECT foo FROM bar ORDER BY foo limit m,n) as x
Finally, lest you worry about the memory requirements imposed by sucking in an entire column into a Perl or other such array let me reassure you that (a) Perl's implementation of in-memory arrays is very efficient, (b) you can easily read in arrays with millions of rows without taking up more than a few tens of megabytes of memory and (c) if, in fact, your table had many billions of rows, you should be able to get a very good approximation to your true median by sampling every nth row (Why?). This last point is especially relevant to scalable data analysis. You can calculate your answer as a median of medians by farming out computations using such paradigms as MapReduce. ]]>
]]> Now I'm not arguing that even our humane interrogation techniques are immoral and therefore should be abolished. Nor am I calling for greater cooperation from web-site owners in sharing sensitive information with the government. I'm only pointing out the poignant inconsistency in people's perceptions of what is allowable and what is not. Indeed, it is a rather paradoxical inconsistency, for on the one hand we sometimes allow the system to probe what we cherish as our most private and sacred sanctuaries, but on the other, we clamor with our loudest voices when the same system attempts to investigate information on the Internet, arguably many times removed from our mind-cores!
The righteousness (or lack of it) of various investigative procedures is not my concern here. But I am interested in exploring what persons who are genuinely concerned about the loss of their privacy might do to thwart authoritarian attempts to invade it. After all, do we not assume that it is natural for a suspect to attempt concealment despite being badgered at the stand? And do we not think it reasonable that polygraph test takers have at least tried to learn techniques to beat it? Why else would we find so much humor in George Costanza's parting advice to Seinfeld, who has to take the polygraph to prove he doesn't like Melrose place? "Remember," he says "It's not a lie if you believe it." That is is the perfect analogue to wiping your tracks clean on the Internet. A probe will discover nothing.
So having said that, we now ask: Is it possible to have an absolutely anonymous Internet experience - a veritable no-strings-attached one-night-stand with your browser? I confess it scares me a little to know that there are people who might want this - I mean, concern for privacy and a desire to enjoy an unsnooped life by making it "hard" for people to track you is one thing. But going out of one's way to make it practically impossible to associate one's online activity with oneself is borderline creepy. Who would want to do this?
The fact, however, is that most people are at the other end of the spectrum. They are naive enough to not know even to clear their browser histories and cookies when they leave their stations. Over the last day or so, we quickly put together a website using entirely free resources on an old PC (Clearly, with more resources, the scope for tracking and profiling users is vastly greater). The page shows how much information about users is likely logged by all the websites they visit. (Mar 2009 - The page is no longer active after we let the domain name expire)
Having been in online advertising long enough and being aware as I am of the information that we unwittingly make available to humongously hungry hosts out there, I confess to still being mildly unsettled to see all of the information distilled and presented in one place like this. But yet, I typically settle for the most common precautions one should take, like clearing browser caches periodically, and refreshing DHCP addresses once in a while. If I wanted to be absolutely anonymous, the effort involved is simply too much and is not worth it for most of us. Nevertheless, here are three precautions such a person might be inclined to take, and actions authorities might assume to address attempts at attaining absolute anonymity.
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$ gawk 'BEGIN {for(i=0;i<1e4;i++)print rand()+rand()+rand()}' \
| histo -stars -scale 50 -interval 0.15
# NumSamples = 10000; Max = 2.94838; Min = 0.0360424
# Mean = 1.5030500454; Variance = 0.253799739614845; SD = 0.503785410283828
# Each * represents a count of 50
0.0360 - 0.1860 [ 13]: *
0.1860 - 0.3360 [ 58]: **
0.3360 - 0.4860 [ 125]: ***
0.4860 - 0.6360 [ 250]: *****
0.6360 - 0.7860 [ 374]: ********
0.7860 - 0.9360 [ 552]: ************
0.9360 - 1.0860 [ 758]: ****************
1.0860 - 1.2360 [ 942]: *******************
1.2360 - 1.3860 [ 1026]: *********************
1.3860 - 1.5360 [ 1130]: ***********************
1.5360 - 1.6860 [ 1145]: ***********************
1.6860 - 1.8360 [ 1006]: *********************
1.8360 - 1.9860 [ 854]: ******************
1.9860 - 2.1360 [ 652]: **************
2.1360 - 2.2860 [ 501]: ***********
2.2860 - 2.4360 [ 306]: *******
2.4360 - 2.5860 [ 174]: ****
2.5860 - 2.7360 [ 108]: ***
2.7360 - 2.8860 [ 25]: *
2.8860 - 3.0360 [ 1]: *