1. No known species of reindeer can fly, but there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified. While most of these are insects and germs, this does not COMPLETELY rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2. There are 2 billion children in the world (persons under 18), but since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children, that reduces the workload by 85% of the total – leaving 378 million according to the Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that’s 91.8 million homes. One presumes there is at least one good child per house.
3. Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different times zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000 th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stocking, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding, etc. That means that Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second – a conventional reindeer can run, at tops, 15 miles per hour.
4. The payload on the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming each child get nothing more than a medium-sized Lego set (2 pounds), the sleigh is carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight. On land, conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting the “flying reindeer” can pull TEN TIMES that normal amount, we cannot do the job with eight, or even nine. We need 214,200 reindeer. This increases payload – not even counting the weight of the sleigh to 353,430 tons.
5. 353,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance. This will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair will absorb 14.3 QUINTILLION joules of energy per second, each. In short, they will burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and creating a deafening sonic boom in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporized in 4.26 thousandths of a second. Santa meanwhile, will be subject to centrifugal forces 17,500.06 times greater than gravity. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by a 4,315,015 pound force.
6. In conclusion, if Santa ever DID deliver presents of Christmas Eve, he’s now dead. (This will be something you can tell your kids someday!)

In diesem Sinne: Frohe Weihnachten

iTunes unterstützt seit jeher das Überblenden von Titel (engl. “cross-fade”). Während ein solches Feature bei einer zufälligen Wiedergabeliste sicherlich sinnvoll ist, gibt es bestimmte CDs (meistens Live-Aufnahmen), bei denen eine solche Überblendung nicht so toll ist.

Heute bin ich nun über einen Tipp gestoßen, dass die Titelüberblendung in iTunes tatsächlich ziemlich “intelligent” ist. Denn sie beachtet die Option Unterbrechungsfreies Album, die für jeden Titel angegeben werden kann.

Ist Titel überblenden in den Optionen von iTunes aktiviert und wird nun ein Titel abgespielt, bei dem Unterbrechungsfreies Album auf Ja gesetzt ist, dann verzichtet iTunes bei diesem Titel auf die Titelüberblendung – es sei denn, die Option Zufällige Wiedergabe ist aktiviert. In diesem Fall werden auch Titel “übergeblendet”, die Teil eines unterbrechungsfreien Albums sind.

Zusammenfassung (bei aktivierter Titelüberblendung):

• Titel wird übergeblendet:

  • Bei Titeln mit Unterbrechungsfreies Album auf Nein gesetzt
  • Wenn Zufällige Wiedergabe aktiviert ist

• Titel wird nicht übergeblendet:

  • Bei Titeln mit Unterbrechungsfreies Album auf Ja gesetzt und wenn gleichzeitig Zufällige Wiedergabe nicht aktiv ist

(via Mac OS X Hints)

Today I did some testing on the performance of VMWare Fusion 3.1 regarding whether to use a 32-bit or a 64-bit guest system on a 64-bit host system. For the test I used:

• Machine: MacBook Pro 15” early 2010
• CPU: Intel Cor i5 2.4 GHz (Dual Core; 64-bit CPU)
• RAM: 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
• OS: Mac OS X 10.6.5 (with all updates)
• VMWare: VMWare Fusion 3.1.2 (332101)

For the testing I shut down all applications (that could be shut down) except for:

• VMWare Fusion (of course)
• Terminal
• TextWrangler

I also disabled Spotlight indexing for the duration of the test using (in Terminal):

$ mdutil -a -i off  # use "-i on" to reenable indexing

For testing I used an Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition Linux either in the x86 (32-bit) and in the x64 (64-bit) version. Each version got one CPU and 512 MB RAM assigned (default values). I installed all updates (as of 2010-12-17) and also installed the packages “psmisc” and “bc”. The kernel version was 2.6.32-26. The VMWare Tools were not installed.

I then started VMWare Fusion (Virtual Machine Library only for now), and then called “purge” in the Terminal to free all inactive, unused memory for more correct information on how much memory is actually free. I then ran “vm_stat” (in Terminal), started the virtual machine, and ran “vm_stat” again to get the amount of memory actually used by the virtual machine.

Inside the virtual machine (i.e. in Ubuntu) I stopped cron and rsyslog to prevent them from interrupting the test, determined the free disk space (df -h) and the free memory (free -ok), and then calculated Pi with 3000 digits:

$ time echo "scale=3000; 4*a(1)" | (bc -l >/dev/null)

The results of the comparison can be found in the table below:

Observations:

• CPU speed: A 32-bit guest system on a 64-bit host system runs slower than a 64-bit guest system.
• Memory consumption: 64-bit guest systems require significantly more memory on the host system and on the guest system. In fact on the guest system the memory consumption seem to tripple (for some unknown reasons).
• Disk usage: As expected, disk usage is higher on a 64-bit system , but only slightly.

Conclusions: If memory consumption is an issue on your system (i.e. if you have not so much memory), then select a 32-bit guest system. It’ll be slightly slower but also consume less memory. If memory consumption is not an issue, select a 64-bit guest system.

Hint

And “Still Alive”

This was a triumph
I’m making a note here
HUGE SUCCESS
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction

Aperture Science
we do what we must because we can
for the good of all of us except for the ones who are dead.

but there’s no sense crying over every mistake
you just keep on trying until you run out of cake
and the science gets done and you make a neat gun
for the people who are still alive

I’m not even angry.
I’m being so sincere right now -
even though you broke my heart and killed me.
And torn into pieces
and threw every piece into a fire.
as they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you!

Now these points of data make a wonderful line
and we’re out of beta, we’re releasing on time
so I’m glad I got burned
Think of all the things we learned
for the people that are still alive

Go ahead and leave me
I think I prefer to stay inside
maybe you’ll find someone else to help you.

Maybe Black Mesa.
That was a joke, haha, fat chance
anyway this cake is great, it’s so delicious and moist.

Look at me still talking, when there’s science to do
when I look out there it makes me glad I’m not you
I’ve experiments to run, there is research to be done
on the people who are still alive.

And believe me I am still alive
I’m doing science and I’m still alive
I feel FANTASTIC and I’m still alive
And when you’re dying I’ll be still alive
and when you’re dead I’ll be still alive
STILL ALIVE, still alive.

PS: Nein, ich bekomme kein Geld dafür

Nachdem die letzte Apple-Keynote ja schon äußerst interessant war, konnte ich es mir nicht verkneifen, die neue auch wieder anzuschauen. Nicht ganz so lustig wie die letzte, aber trotzdem sehr informativ.

Insbesondere möchte ich auf den Abschnitt 1:02 bis 1:08 aufmerksam machen!

Dass die Japaner ja viel im Bereich Robotik unternehmen, ist seit dem Toiletten-Roboter sicherlich hinlänglich bekannt. Viel interessanter ist aber der Bereich der menschenähnlichen Roboter.

Als erstes Beispiel (Designation: Actroid) sei hier die Imitation menschlicher Mimik genannt, die in folgendem Video eindrucksvoll zu bestaunen ist (Mr. Data lässt grüßen):

Der zweite Fortschritt ist die Interaktion mit Gruppen. Der Roboter im folgenden Video (Designation: SCHEMA) kann selbstständig eine Konversation folgen und auch verschiedene Konversationen auseinander halten:

I’ve been working for quite some time now with Subversion but recently fell in love with Mercurial. Mercurial (like GIT or Bazaar) is a distributed version control system (DVCS). Coming from Subversion, it’s sometimes necessary to convert an existing Subversion repository to Mercurial. And that’s what this post is about.

Die neuste Innovation von Apple

Für alle, die nicht Zeit haben, sich die ganze Keynote anzusehen, gibt es hier die Zusammenfassung in 110 Sekunden.

Update: Tipp für alle, die es nicht verstehen

(via 9to5mac)

Bei Plus gibt es momentan ein Flugzeug zu kaufen. Auf Wunsch auch im 4er-Pack.