When reading and trying to understand some very old Fortran code I stumbled over an interesting solution to store character expressions in a time when PCs were only designed to deal with numeric types. If someone wanted to store the…
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Blog Archives
Hollerith constants
Posted in computer, programming
Central limit theorem
Today I had to recall some basic theorem which I learnt in one of the introduction courses on statistics at university – the “central limit theorem“. The central limit theorem states that, given certain conditions, … the mean of a…
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Personalized spam
I am receiving all kind of spam on my office address and via my private mail. But this morning I saw that some spam was sent to me via the contact form of this homepage. Well, as the form is…
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Posted in computer
Shake your plant
There is a lot of research going on in human-machine interaction, and there are really nice examples that show how the gap between a person and a computer can be bridged, letting them “talk” almost intuitively. However, researchers from Keio…
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Smartphones – 20 years anniversary
I am still not an owner of a smartphone, although I am basically curious about such a technology. Beside the high(er) monthly cost, the larger size of the device stops me from purchasing such a cell phone. However, for those…
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Posted in computer, handy phone
The birthday paradox
First the hard facts: In a room of just 23 people there’s a 50-50 chance of two people having the same birthday. In a room of 75 there’s a 99.9% chance of two people matching. Sounds crazy? Well at the…
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Stopping the sonic boom
Scientists have re-engineered a more than 50 year old concept which prevents the sonic boom. As this article summarizes, the concept bases on a biplane with wings connected at their tips. The original idea comes from the German engineer Adolf…
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Isochronous information based on Google Maps
Google Maps have many useful features and it seems that the whole application is turning more and more in a geographic information system (GIS) which makes use of both raster and vector data. Other than expensive and complicated to use…
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Two-line elements of current GLONASS satellites
The Celestrak page provides a variety of two-line elements (TLE) for different satellites, including orbit information for navigation satellite systems like the Russian GLONASS. Unfortunately, there are more satellites listed in the TLE data-set than are currently operational. E.g. today…
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The “broken link checker” for WordPress
Yesterday I added a very useful plug-in for this WordPress installation – the broken link checker. Once it is installed it searches all links in posts, pages, etc. and checks if they are still valid. By this nice little tool…
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