You karma whore... ;) (Yes, I upmoded you xD)

But happy holidays!

As a friend of mine has pointed out to me repeatedly, the quality of the Economist's reporting has decreased substantially since they vamped up their online offerings, often pushing stories before they are ready and without the reflection that was the signature of the Economist. This piece is especially disappointing.

Drupal. Don't.

Approach Drupal like it's the head cheerleader at your High School with a raging case of gonoherpesyphilaids.

You're just jealous because you didn't think of it first... I upmoded you, too though. :)

Regardless, it's still a nice thing to do, don't you think?

New Years

Consider collectd (http://collectd.org/). Unlike a lot of the usual suspects, collectd is a daemon that records the usual server health stats every 10 seconds into rrd files. After running it for two years on a few dozen systems, it's never failed or caused undue load on its own. We often see events that would have gone completely unnoticed in a 5-minute monitoring window.

Working on Christmas is just another edge you can get over your competitors.

pmarca "is" Marc Andreessen, co-author of Mosaic / Netscape and co-founder of Netscape Communications.

As a college undergrad (yes, I profess my status as a CS underling) doing a senior thesis in GA, I have read some papers on this GA's applied to trading. The dirty secret that these papers do not tell you is that: genetic algorithms are quite stochastic, meaning that they can evolve quite varying quality of technical trading rules, depending on the mood of the CS God during any particular evolution trials.

And these papers' results, in the interest of the authors who wrote them, will only tell you the best trial run that they have gotten - but the trouble is: out in the real world, judging your trading agent's performance is not by running hundreds of GA trials on historical stock data and publishing the best results; but you have gotta put your money where your GA technical rules tell you, whether the rules evolved are sub-optimal or not.

The kinetic energy goes to infinity as the speed of a particle approaches the speed of light, so there's no upper bound on the kinetic energy a particle can have in special relativity. The formula you possibly had in mind, mv^2/2, is valid only for v much less than c; for relativistic velocities the energy of a particle is equal to mc^2/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2).

BTW, it's any kinetic energy that contributes to the temperature, not necessarily vibrational.