Times Higher World University Rankings 2007

The Times Higher World University Rankings for 2007 just came a few days ago and we provide you the file without having to sign up at the website. Also, provided are the files from 2005 and 2006 for comparison.

As one can see, this year's results may dwell on the side of bewilderment, but as usual, such rankings should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Not to be missed, there is also the ranking by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Inside Out

How to turn a sphere inside out. (21:23, with voice-overs)

GOOG 700++

Beyond belief.

Flickr Photo of the Day: Morning Launch

'Morning Launch' Large On Black

A portion of the wintering population of Sandhill Cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. I love the running crane with the bit of splash.

Morning Launch, originally uploaded by Fort Photo

The Kaye Effect

It's time for a science lesson.

Making sense of 9s

A recent article on TechCrunch featured the uptime of Google for different countries around the World.

The table looked like this:




Hm... sometimes we take a glance at these digits, but we don't notice the difference between uptime and availability, which can lead to misleading impressions.

As usual, Wikipedia provides the answer:

Availability is usually expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year. In a given year, the number of minutes of unplanned downtime are tallied for a system; the aggregate unplanned downtime is divided by the total number of minutes in a year (approximately 525,600), producing a percentage of downtime; the complement is the percentage of uptime, which is what is typically referred to as the availability of the system. Common values of availability, typically stated as a number of "nines", for highly available systems are:

• 99.9% ≡ 43.8 minutes/month or 8.76 hours/year ("three nines")
• 99.99% ≡ 4.38 minutes/month or 52.6 minutes/year ("four nines")
• 99.999% ≡ 0.44 minutes/month or 5.26 minutes/year ("five nines")

It should be noted that uptime and availability are not synonymous. A system can be up, but not available, as in the case of a network outage.

Anyway, here are some tidbits for regular readers:
- Mac Leopard Wallpapers
- Mac Tiger Wallpapers
- The 5th Wave RSS Feed

Windows Vista Sample Videos

Just as we brought you the wallpapers and the music, here's the sample videos from Windows Vista.

They are decent enough, but not as high res as I had hoped they would be.

Mehran Sahami Inspirational Speech

He actually said, "Think about the time you are living in. Like Donald Knuth is considered the father of computer science. He is still alive and he is still in this department. Its sort of like... you are living in the time of Euclid."

Flickr Photo of the Day: What’s That?

A superparamagnetic fluid, otherwise known as a ferrofluid, in a dish over a neodymium magnet.

What's That (64) originally uploaded by jurvetson

Windows Keyboard Shortcuts

I just discovered some useful Windows keyboard shortcuts, besides the standard ones I use frequently (like win+d [minimize all], win+r [run dialog], ctrl-b [bold text], ctrl-x/c/v).

F2: Rename the selected item
CTRL+SHIFT+ESC: Opens task manager
ALT-ENTER: Open the property dialog for the selected file

And for Internet Explorer:

F4: Display a list of addresses you've typed
CTRL+ENTER: Add "www." to the beginning and ".com" to the end of the text typed in the Address bar
CTRL+LEFT ARROW: When in the Address bar, move the cursor left to the next logical break in the address (period or slash) (update: my friend was kind enough to point out that this also works for most input boxes; ctrl-home works too; you can combine this with shift to select words too)

Oh... and check out this cool Free Software Sticker Book.