Links for 2009-09-11

"Most vampires don't believe in the cross, but that hardly matters. It's the idea of the thing that gives them fits. The cross confronts vampires with their opposite -- with the rejection of power and its single-minded pursuit. It suggests that no one is to be treated as prey -- not even an enemy. The idea of the cross, in other words, suggests that vampires have it wrong, that they have it backwards, in fact, and that those others they regard as prey are actually, somehow, winning.

This notion is incomprehensible for vampires. The one thing they're certain of, the thing that drives them and tells them who they are and how the world works and that they've got it all figured out is that the key to immortality is in choosing to be the predator rather than the prey. The idea that this might be wrong is so befuddling, so contradictory to everything they have chosen to be that it forces them to recoil. They can't get past it."

"Given budgetary constraints, [Berkeley] was only going to be able to provide six teaching assistants for Reich's class. When Reich previously taught a class of 440 students, he needed nine TA's to help grade papers and run weekly break-out discussions of 25 students each. With just six TA's, there would only be enough support to enroll 300 students, Brady said.

Call it third way politics if you like, but Reich, the former Clinton Cabinet member, suggested another option no one else had previously considered. "

"In all the pageantry of the next couple of days, you can bet that only one blemish on the Jordan record will come up, and I suspect it will be mentioned again and again, because it fits a certain heroic narrative: Michael Jordan was once cut from his high school team.

We have been told that in this early disgrace lay the seed of his greatness. As the story goes, he became mad as a hatter, practiced furiously, and set himself on the course to greatness.

Only, it's not true. He was never cut from anything. "

"A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data. "

"Gilbreath's conjecture has been verified for the first several billion sequences, but nobody has proved that every sequence will start with 1. Paul ErdÅs speculated that Gilbreath's conjecture is true but it would be 200 years before anyone could prove it. I find ErdÅs's conjecture more interesting than Gilbreath's conjecture."