As the Google Maps crow flies, it’s a long 4200 km (2610 miles) drive back home which, according to Google Maps, would take less than two days (41 hours) of continuous driving to make. Mapquest puts the trip at 4160 km (2585 miles). Either way it’s a long drive through 8 states and 3 provinces. I bet it would be an interesting trip to take though. I may have to try it one of these days.
Extreme overclocking
Probably not something that will make it to anybody’s desktop anytime soon, but it’s still pretty cool. A group of Italian overclocking enthusiasts have managed to get a P4 631 up to 8 GHz! Naturally there was a little bit of extreme cooling going on in the form of liquid nitrogen and some hardware modifications to the voltage regulators. There’s only a benchmark of some fractal calculations at 8 GHz, so I don’t know how much performance increase there was going up to that speed. Pretty moot anyway because I doubt anybody would want to rig up a machine that required continuous cryogenic coolling to run. Still a very impressive OC
Found at Slashdot.
Houseboat Hooligans: Wilma
On my first houseboating trip (Houseboat Hooligans 2.5), one of the guys brought Wilma along. Once we got underway, a hole was punched into Wilma and her insides pulverized with a coat hanger. Then booze was poured into her.
Wilma was a watermelon. There was much drinking from Wilma done on that trip. The usual practice with Wilma was to fill her up with enough booze to get a good buzz going and then head out visiting different boats and parties. A guy carrying a watermelon and drinking from it naturally attracts a fair bit of attention, so many people ended up sampling from Wilma and pronouncing it an excellent idea. At some point while making the rounds to different parties, Wilma would run out of booze. Sometimes instead of having to head back to the boat for a refill, the current party hosts would generously offer to refill Wilma from their stocks so everyone could continue drinking from the melon. This quickly developed into a scheme to get free booze by filling Wilma with enough booze for people to get a taste before ‘running out’. People, so enamoured with drinking out of a watermelon would offer to refill Wilma with some of their booze so the party could continue uninterrupted.
This went on for about 4 days before Wilma was broken. Then everybody feasted on the booze soaked rind.
On the way to Pluto
The New Horizons probe destined for Pluto is hurtling towards Jupiter now for an additional speed boost. On the way, the science instruments will be getting a bit of testing making observations of Jupiter and its moons. Should be a good workout for the system.
After the probe’s encounter with Jupiter, it will be speeding off towards Pluto at a pretty good clip of 52 000 mph (nearly 84 000 km/h or 23 km/s). That will make it the fastest probe sent out to date. Even at that speed it won’t reach Pluto for another 8 years though. You can follow the probe’s trajectory here.
Neat stuff. It will be cool to see what kind of things we’ll learn about Pluto in 8 years time.
Just take my TeX file, please!
One thing that drives me batty about submitting manuscripts to journals is that just about every one of them has a slightly different format for how they want things. Everything from margins, fonts and how things are referenced/cited to the title page and file format for the submitted manuscript. Drives me nuts.
AIP has a good system going where you can use LaTeX and the RevTeX macros to create your manuscript. All you do is specify the journal you’re submitting to in the \documentclass and it’s ready for submission. The journal style file takes care of all the formatting for you. Works for all the AIP journals. It’s great. Sadly TeX/LaTex remains obscure enough outside the basic sciences that there aren’t any medical related journals that I know of (at least none that I would be submitting manuscripts to anyway) that take TeX/LaTeX files. It’s a shame really. The more I do with LaTeX, the more I like it. The output that’s generated looks so much nicer than anything Word puts out, and doing equations/figures is dead easy. The learning curve is a little bit steeper, but if you can figure out HTML, basic TeX is well within your grasp. Both are essentially just markup languages so there’s really not that much to learn.
Honestly, MS Word sucks for creating manuscripts for publication (IMO). You spend all your time making things look right, and then if you take it to another computer where the default styles/formats might be slightly different, everything looks screwed up. Do you fix it? Leave it alone? Hope it looks ok to the journal editor? Will the reviewers ding you for a crappy looking manuscript because their styles/formats have messed up your manuscript?
My ideal world? Every journal publisher would provide LaTeX style files for their journals and accept LaTeX manuscripts, or at least provide MS Word style libraries and/or templates for their journals (like AIP’s Toolkit 2000). I think it would make creating manuscripts so much easier.
Ok, I’m done now (can you tell I’ve been spending all day trying to cram my manuscript into a Word document?).