Over many centuries, man’s obsession with time has led to increasing accurate ways to measure it. As the precision of techniques and instruments has increased over the years, so the units used to define time have become ever smaller.
The minute and the second have given way to the SI units of the millisecond, the microsecond, the nanosecond, the picosecond, and the femtosecond, which is the the length of time that light takes to travel the diameter of a virus.
[circolato su facebook, quasi sicuramente inventato, cionondimeno geniale; finale eccezionale :-)]
Un professore di termodinamica ha assegnato un'esercitazione a casa agli studenti del suo corso di laurea.
Il compito consisteva in una domanda: "L'inferno è esotermico (libera calore) o endotermico (assorbe calore)? Sostenete la risposta con delle prove".
La maggior parte degli studenti ha cercato di dimostrare le proprie convinzioni citando la legge di Boyle (un gas si raffredda quando si espande e si riscalda quando viene compresso), o alcune sue varianti.
Uno di loro, tuttavia, ha scritto quanto segue.
"Innanzitutto, dobbiamo sapere come cambia nel tempo la massa dell'inferno, quindi abbiamo bisogno di stabilire i tassi di entrata e uscita all'inferno delle anime.
Credo che possiamo tranquillamente assumere che, quando un'anima entra all'inferno, non è destinata a uscirne. Quindi, nessun'anima esce.
Per quanto riguarda il numero di anime che fanno il loro ingresso all'inferno, prendiamo in considerazione le diverse religioni attualmente esistenti al mondo. Un numero significativo di esse sostiene che se non sei un membro di quella stessa religione andrai all'inferno. Siccome di queste religioni ce n'è più di una ed abbracciano una sola fede per volta, possiamo dedurne che tutte le persone e tutte le anime finiscono all'inferno.
Dunque, stanti gli attuali tassi di natalità e mortalità della popolazione mondiale, possiamo attenderci una crescita esponenziale del numero di anime presenti all'inferno.
Ora rivolgiamo l'attenzione al tasso di espansione dell'inferno, poiché la legge di Boyle afferma che, per mantenere stabile la temperatura e la pressione dentro l'inferno, il volume dello stesso deve crescere proporzionalmente all'ingresso delle anime. Questo ci dà due possibilità:
1) Se l'inferno si espande ad una velocità minore di quella dell'ingresso delle anime, allora temperatura e pressione dell'inferno saranno destinate a crescere, fino a farlo esplodere.
2) Se l'inferno si espande più velocemente del tasso d'ingresso delle anime, allora temperatura e pressione scenderanno fino a quando l’inferno non si congelerà.
Dunque, quale delle due è l'ipotesi corretta? Se accettiamo il postulato comunicatomi dalla signorina Teresa Baghini durante il mio primo anno all'università, secondo il quale "Nevicherà all'inferno prima che io te la dia", e considerando che ancora non ho avuto successo nel tentativo di avere una relazione sessuale con lei, allora l'ipotesi 2 non può essere vera.
Quindi l'inferno è esotermico".
Lo studente ha preso l'unico 30.
Linux/Unix desktop fun - Learn how to draw text mode ASCII-art box around text or code/scripts in vim / vi under for fun and profit.
About 15 years ago, I mused about the idea of having a "desert island machine". This is where I'd put someone in a room with a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has a few scraps of a (Linux) OS on it: bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it.
Now you see things like people managing to do the original Super Mario Bros game from the 80s in under five minutes, and I do mean people. There are actual humans frobbing plastic controllers doing this! Just dig around on your favorite giant video-streaming site if you need evidence of this happening.
So here's the pitch: Linux speedruns. By that, I don't mean "speedrunning a game on a Linux box" (like emulation, or something). Nope.
A few ones:
A funny checklist to understand the common errors from all the persons/companies wishing to propose their own "brand new programming language".
A list
of things (not only) computer science students tend to
erroneously and at times surprisingly believe even
though they (probably) should know better.
As demonstrated by Casey Reas at the Eyeo Festival, June 2011, Minneapolis, Minnesota, a random maze generation program in one line of Commodore 64 Basic.
As developers, our jobs are very stressful, jumping from deadline to deadline, solving difficult problems on a daily basis, and handling…
Somewhere around 2014 I found an /etc/passwd file in some dumps of the BSD 3 source tree, containing passwords of all the old timers such as Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan, Steve Bourne and Bill Joy.
A simulated Enigma machine, where the different parts of the machine are beautifully represented with graphics.
The notebook simulates an Enigma Machine and visualizes how it works. The Enigma Machine is an especially neat thing to visualize because it was electromechanical. As you used it, it moved. Instead of circuit traces, it had beautiful real wires connecting its pieces.
Image source: Wikipedia.
ASCIIQuarium is a short Perl script that lets you embrace aquatic nature from your terminal. It's an aquarium/sea animation in ASCII art.
Generate HQ poly wallpapers.
Example with fixed color/gradient:
See Star Wars in ASCII with telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
.
A steam locomotive traverses the screen from right to left if sl
is typed instead of ls
.
Generates random messages fetched from a quotation database.
A program that generates a ASCII art of a cow with a bubble containing the specified message. I provide the Wikipedia link since at the moment the link to the author's homepage results to be unreachable).
ncurses program that displays the scrolling lines found in the movie The matrix
.
Enjoy the mysteries of the sea from the safety of your own terminal!
Don’t stop typing, or all progress will be lost.
👾 Pokemon version of cowsay with CLI and API.
It will make your productivity plummet
I marker this article as "funny" since I can not believe it is serious. Or at least I'm missing something...
VIM Adventures is an online game based on VIM's keyboard shortcuts. It's the "Zelda meets text editing" game. So come have some fun and learn some VIM!
A command line tool that recreates the famous data decryption effect seen in the 1992 movie Sneakers.
The game generates a maze that can be solved by the human.
The motion is based on the keyboard.
Despite I like this arrangement, I could not play from the smartphone, which is annoying.
I guess that nobody who developed the game has never tried the combination of keys for controlling the motion, which is so bad...
The most appreciable feature of the game is the maze generation, which is very nice.
A video registration of a presentation at the Linux Fest NW.
Pretty ironic and funny.
🙀 A cat explains how HTTPS works...in a comic! 😻
The worlds most secure password for websites, games and private data. Researched and developed by leading encryption specialists in Europe
http://tholman.com/css-conf-party-pack
Cat-like program with glitch animation.
It’s nearly impossible to break a dry spaghetti noodle into only two pieces. A new MIT study shows how and why it can be done.
Spaghetti braking into multiple parts:
Spaghetti braking into 2 parts:
glitchcat
is a cat-like program with glitch animation.
Tired of rejections? Cath Chapman and Tim Slade offer a simple way to fight back
All academics aim to publish in high impact journals. However, many leading scientific and medical journals reject more than 80% of the manuscripts they receive, making rejection the biggest barrier to publication in high quality journals. We propose a novel solution to this problem. It involves very little extra work by submitting authors, is applicable to a wide range of circumstances (such as flawed study, lack of broad interest to the field, or highly critical assessors), and is scalable to meet the needs of academics from various disciplines. To be submitted on receipt of a manuscript rejection, the rejection of rejection letter (box) aims to significantly improve the publication rates of participating academics by overcoming the leading barrier to publication—manuscript rejection. An electronic copy of the letter is available from the authors on request.
In 2005, two scientists, David Mazières and Eddie Kohler, wrote a paper titled Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List and submitted it to WMSCI 2005 (the 9th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics), a conference then notorious for its spamming and lax standards for paper acceptance, in protest of same. The paper consisted essentially only of the sentence "Get me off your fucking mailing list" repeated many times.
A site reporting dialects from all over the world.
Especially funny the situation in the South of Italy.
Nice robot for the everyone from Sharp.
Several interesting applications for the everyday life depicted in this video.
Zachary "Zach" King is an American Vine star, filmmaker and YouTube personality based in Los Angeles.
He is most known for his "magic vines" - six-second videos digitally edited to look as if he is doing magic. He calls his videos "digital sleight of hand".