From Ask Metafilter: Did Pythagoras actually exist? It seems that a number of historians and mathematicians have argued that he was more of a mythological figure that led a cult of people, rather than an actual mathematician.

Also, while learning that a² + b² = c², we definitely never learned that he founded a religion based on reincarnation and not eating beans. There’s an interesting mix of brilliance and lunacy with Pythagoras. From Wikipedia: “He was one of the first to propose that the thought processes and the soul were located in the brain and not the heart. He himself claimed to have lived four lives that he could remember in detail, and heard the cry of his dead friend in the bark of a dog.”

He also, perhaps, inspired Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “One of Pythagoras’ beliefs was that the essence of being is number.”

Math class would have been much more interesting if we discussed Pythagoras as a religious leader, ate some beans, watched HG2G, and then argued that Pythagoras never actually existed.

I’m still conflicted as to what I want for a machine; I sort of want a desktop, sort of a laptop, sort of a Mac, sort of not… But as I was checking out FatWallet and Slick Deals, I wanted to point out some highlights:

• ZipZoomFly has a 320GB, 7200 RPM SATA laptop drive, $75; $55 after rebate.
• Sam’s Club has the Dell Mini (9″), 1 GB RAM, 8 GB SSD, for $245 shipped. Non-members pay 10% extra. This isn’t in stores; I checked. Word on the street is that this model does an excellent job of running OSx86.
• Buy.com has a de-badged, recertified 24″ (1920×1200) LCD, for $210 shipped. I’m very tempted.
• NewEgg has an 800×600 projector for $420, or $370 after rebate.
• Amazon has a 5-port Gigabit switch for $15. Description mentioned jumbo frame support. NewEgg matches.
• No link, but 550VA UPS (APC) at Staples for $40, before $10 rebate.
• 21.5″ Asus LCD (1920×1080) at NewEgg, $170 shipped. This thing has excellent reviews, too. I think this might be more tempting than the 24″ ‘recertified’ one.
• $50 each buys a Visiontek ATI Radeon HD3650 or Sparkle GeForce 9400GT. Both are 1GB graphics cards, which is twice what one of my laptops has…

I’m having a hard time not buying that Asus LCD. DVI, HDMI, and VGA inputs. And it’s got nothing but good reviews. But it’s also tempting to upgrade my laptop to a 320 GB hard drive.

Oh, fellow T60 owners: in addition to the spiffy 320GB SATA disk for notebooks, I’ve been thinking of upgrading to 3GB RAM. The Bentley-issued T60s have two slots but a single 1GB stick. Looks like we want 200-pin, PC2-5300 memory. Most reviews say that a limitation in some low-level hardware (descriptions vary?), the Thinkpad is incapable of seeing more than 3GB RAM, so a single 2GB DIMM is in order. We can Upgrade to 3GB RAM and a 320GB disk for under $100? Still thinking I might sink my money into a desktop instead.

It’s Friday night. What am I doing? Watching the epoch.

n1zyy@t60:~$ date +%s
1234567890

Kind of like New Year’s. Only more epic epoch.

I’ve been wrong before, but my gut is telling me that Microsoft’s physical stores are going to end badly. Though I confess to being somewhat ignorant here: I’m not sure why it’s being done at all, but now seems like a pretty bad time to launch a brick-and-mortar store, particularly when you’re selling things found in every computer store in the country.

I was disappointed to hear that Judd Gregg had withdrawn from consideration as Secretary of Commerce. (The position is cursed?)

Even though I typically vote blue, I’m a big believer in ensuring that the minority party still has an active role, and really liked the idea of a fairly fiscally-conservative Secretary of Commerce. (And a New Hampshire resident!) Having him on a Democrat’s Cabinet would have forced something rare to happen: the two sides would have to to work with each instead of working against each other.

I’m curious what’s next, though. I can’t help but read between the lines and suspect that the RNC was privy to the decision, which makes me doubt that any Republicans are going to jump up for consideration. Which is a shame, really: now more than ever, we need to stop worrying so much about party lines.

Now here’s an interesting idea for a book: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The Amazon summary is pretty apt in its description:

Product Description “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action. About the Author JANE AUSTEN is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature. SETH GRAHAME-SMITH is the author of How to Survive a Horror Movie and The Big Book of Porn. He lives in Los Angeles.

How has no one thought of writing this before? (Found via Uncrate.)

I usually try to ensure that my posts here have at least some value, but here goes…

I’m pretty easy-going when it comes to music. I’ll be listening to NPR and switch stations when they go to a commercial, and find myself listening to gangster rap. Then they go to a commercial, and I change stations back to NPR and it’s some jazz. Then they do a fundraiser and I’m listening to classic rock.

I can think of only three songs that I absolutely refuse to listen to. I’ll turn the radio off or listen to a commercial before I listen to the song:

• Redneck Woman. I hate country music, but that’s not why. It’s that her voice is worse than nails on a chalkboard.
• That “Don’t Stress” McCartney song. I have absolutely no idea why. It is ironic that a song called “Don’t Stress” raises my blood pressure, though.
• That horrible, horrible song that has the line, “If you like it, then you should have put a ring on it.” I never got much further, despite the ~50 times I’ve bumped heads with it. I have no idea why, but this song makes me downright angry every time I hear it. (I’m well-adjusted and mentally stable. Really!) The music would be appropriate if you had snorted crack and were literally bouncing off the walls.

For months there was a really thin, really-light-grey line running down the middle of the page. I was finally able to figure out where it was coming from and get rid of it. (It was a background image, ~1200 pixels wide, with a single grey dot at the right to give the thin line… It was all well and good until I dropped one of the two columns, but I never could trace it down.)

I still consider the main page half-finished; I’d like to get the ‘table of contents’ thing back up and running, as well as make the bottom of the page actually function like I’ve always hoped it would. (Although it’s really not handy to have these things at the very bottom?) And it’s a behind-the-scene thing, but it’s what I do for a living: I want to rework the main page’s code to not rely on memcache. It’s served its role well, but I have 1 MB of RAM (down from 16MB!) devoted to caching about 1KB worth of configuration and cached elements that really don’t need to be forcibly held in RAM anyway. I’m already running APC (which already has a hitrate in the high 90s), so I can just make use of that. (Really, the code for the main page is a set of hacks built upon other hacks, and then I went in and hacked those hacked-hacks to behave differently… For what’s really a simple function, I think it’s time for a rewrite.)

I just logged into Facebook and realized that Facebook is a lot like my work e-mail and Twitter: 95% of the stuff that shows up there is noise that doesn’t concern me at all. Some girl who worked on a group project with me freshman year updated her photo album and then a total stranger that I foolishly accepted as a friend posts some introspective ramblings. And then I turn to Twitter, where very few posts interest me at all. Part of the problem is that I often start following strangers who post something interesting, only to realize that them being interesting was a rare occasion.

I’ve been toying for a while with purging the names I don’t recognize from Facebook and leaving Twitter. But I think, for now, I’ll stick with status quo: checking Facebook once every couple weeks and looking at Twitter every few days.

XKCD is an amazing comic. Sometimes it’s drop-dead hilarious. Sometimes I don’t quite get it. But with frightening accuracy, it’s either an astonishingly accurate picture of me, or it uses a crude-drawn diagram of stick figures to say something I’ve thought for a long time much more eloquently than I could. A recent comic does just that:

>

I think it’s valuable both on its surface and a bit metaphorically. Encryption’s a pretty neat field, with all sorts of applications. And even more mainstream operating systems like RHEL and CentOS are making it easy to encrypt not only your filesystem, but swap. But I think a lot of people hang their hats on technical solutions, where it’s only half the battle. 4096-bit RSA is no good when your passphrase is “passphrase,” though I have to think that crypto-geeks might know better.

The same is true for home security. I really wish I had the link for the article I read in which some ex-burglars were interviewed. They pointed out that those hollowed-out soup can “safes” are a great idea, except that when you have a can of soup on your dresser, it’s going to get stolen. Those hollowed-out book safes are ingenious, except that savvy burglars just knock over you bookshelf. And that having a safe is really pretty foolish, because they’ll just take the whole thing. Or the story about the people who hid hundreds of dollars of cash inside their DVD player for safekeeping. But the burglars weren’t looking for cash, they were looking for electronics they could pawn, so they stole the DVD player.

And how about SSL? I think there are a sizable number of people who know that the ‘lock icon’ of SSL means that their connection to the webserver is encrypted, and therefore it’s safe to give out their credit card number. But they don’t realize that their encrypted connection is to “https://paypal.com:homepage@scammer.example.com” and that they just gave the badguys their information.

In all our time guarding against the million-dollar supercomputer, we forget to guard against the $5 wrench.