-PCI Express
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-Pentium 4 Extreme Edition
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-Processor Performance
-ASCII Q
-Marcus Tullius Cicero
"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks, and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is dissolving our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." -Neil Gaiman American Gods
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim. -Edsger W. Dijkstra
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness. - Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso
You are not your job.
You are not the money in your bank account.
You are not the car you drive.
You are not how much money is in your wallet.
You are not your fucking khakis.
You are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
We are Zen Masters and we KNOW what the fuck we are talking about.
Once, I met some kids who knew Everything. But it's what they did that truly amazed me.
"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear."
--Thomas Jefferson
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy". --Benjamin Franklin
He who sacrifices liberty for security deserves neither., Benjamin Franklin
"When one looks into the abyss, the abyss looks into you."
To quote Psuedo_intellectual's homenode :
"WHAT I WANT is for you to help me, through some creative undertaking, understand (and through understanding, to respect) who you are, and why you are the way you are - coming to appreciate the things that make us different, precisely how and in what ways your life lived is dissimilar to my own. Draw me a comic book with your creation of my gift on the front page and your projection of my response to it on the back, with all the package's travels between. Send me the lucky piece of gum you were chewing the night you lost your virginity, since having dried out and lived out its span on the back of your corner bedpost. Allow me to listen to a recording of you singing a song about me. Finger-paint me a mural fully exploring the frustration my irrational demands on your gift-giving have fuelled. Write me a script where we meet for the first time on a Left Bank café, conversing with ease, all the time unaware (until the last page) that one of us is drinking from the poisoned cup. Collage my own words, scrambled through Markov chains, into a manifesto directly challenging my stated beliefs and boldly confronting my conception of the universe as it stands. I ask only for your time and a modicum of inspiration. One of these is not an unreasonable request. Show me something about yourself, from yourself, that reveals to me (directly or not, intentionally or not) something about myself I did not know before. It doesn't have to be true. It doesn't even have to be any good. The trick is that I make you start dancing, and the catch is that you realise how much you enjoy these unaccustomed and nearly-forgotten movements and continue the old soft-shoe all through the year." (Pseudo_Intellectual).
Sunday December 15th - EPIC powder day at Kirkwood. Snowed all Saturday night, heavy snows and I drove up with Jon (The brittish fellow). Somehow my legs were great despite how out of shape I am. It was only my 5th time up the mountain and my legs burned slightly all day, but it was more of a general aching instead of the typical unbearable burn. The preseason skiing paid off.
We skied primarily in the big bowls off of chair 6. Long sweeping weightless turns across light powder. My body would sink in and out of the snow as I charged down the hill cutting up turns. For some reason the weightlessness and lateral g-forces from the turns is extremely memorable.
Quite possibly my best skiing experience ever.
Books I have been Recommended
The Meeting of East and West by F.S.C. Northropanything by Ayn Rand. George Monbiot.
The Berkut - TerribleAspect
I liked Speaker for the Dead - Oolong
Nagel's Mortal Questions
Daniel Dennett's stuff... - Oolong
finite and infinite games\ - Raspy
\The Redemption of Christopher Columbus
The Alexandria Quartet
Books I am Reading (or will read soon)
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - kozmundDante's Inferno
Cicero
The Walking Drum - Louis L'Amour
Completed
The Pillars of Creation - Terry Goodkind (his other books are much better).Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson (Hilarious).
A Sea of Swords - George R.R. Martin (Good).
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maitenence (Lots of good ideas but a little slow).
I quote the immortal words of Socrates, who said "I drank what?!"
Sometimes, when I'm alone,
I think about Ketchup,
Because I know that the truth is that
Its just sitting there in a bottle, by itself.
I'm pretty sure it's red.
Sometimes when I'm with Ketchup,
I think about being alone,
In a bottle.
Standing next to the mustard all day.
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
From every tree in the garden did he grant them to eat, save but one. And that tree, in the centre of the garden, was called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And the Snake said to Eve, 'Eat of this fruit and you will become as God.'
-- Book of Genesis, Chapter 3, Verse 4
Do not worry about your life, what you are to eat or what you are to drink, nor about your body, what you are to wear. Is not the life more than food and the body more than clothing? Consider the birds of heaven, for they do not sow nor reap nor gather into storehouses, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? Which of you by worry can add one cubit to his lifespan? And why do you worry about clothing? Observe the wild lilies how they grow; they do not labor or spin cloth, but I tell you that even Solomon in all his splendor did not dress as well as one of them. Now if God so clothes the wild grass, which is here today but tomorrow is thrown into an oven, will he not much more surely clothe you, you men of little faith?
5 Most Voted-Upon Writeups
4C! AMD (tied) 1
1C! Dark matter (tied) 1
2C! Intel 3
4C! Quantum honeybees 4
1C! paintball (tied) 5
1C! Tombstone (tied) 5
5 Least Voted-Upon Writeups
1 Credat Judaeus Apella, non ego
2 (tied) Itanic
2 (tied) Tamburin High-Low
2 (tied) One Case One Kill
5 (tied) Warren Miller
5 (tied) data hazard
5 (tied) TeraGrid
5 Highest Goodness Writeups
4C! AMD (tied) 1
1C! finite monkeys theorem (tied) 1
2C! band gap (tied) 1
1C! flash memory (tied) 1
1C! p-type semiconductor (tied) 1
2C! p-n junction (tied) 1
3C! Ugolino della Gherardesca (tied) 1
2C! Trace Cache (tied) 1
2C! n-type semiconductor (tied) 1
2C! Fermi Level (tied) 1
1C! Instruction Level Parallelism (tied) 1
1C! Intel Hub Architecture (tied) 1
1C! paintball rules (tied) 1
1C! query optimization (tied) 1
2C! MESI protocol (tied) 1
1C! Musée Rodin (tied) 1
1C! Armstrong's Axioms (tied) 1
1C! Body-Centered Cubic (tied) 1
1C! OpenMP (tied) 1
1C! carnivorous bromeliads (tied) 1
1C! Register Bypassing (tied) 1
code review (tied) 1
2C! cache coherence (tied) 1
Omaha Hold-em (tied) 1
Zen Story: The Invading Marauders (tied) 1
God's Debris (tied) 1
McKinley (tied) 1
2-bit predictor (tied) 1
Argentinosaurus (tied) 1
functional dependency (tied) 1
Obreption (tied) 1
1C! Glen Plake (tied) 1
antibaryon (tied) 1
1C! data dependency (tied) 1
8 Mile (tied) 1
baryon number (tied) 1
Itanium 2 (tied) 1
data hazard (tied) 1
Warren Miller (tied) 1
TeraGrid (tied) 1
Itanic (tied) 1
One Case One Kill (tied) 1
Tamburin High-Low (tied) 1
Credat Judaeus Apella, non ego (tied) 1
5 Lowest Goodness Writeups
1 Juventus stultorum magister
2 April 25, 2002
3 You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you
4 (tied) WarCraft III
4 (tied) ski bum
5 Most Reputable Writeups
4C! AMD 1
1C! Dark matter (tied) 2
4C! Quantum honeybees (tied) 2
2C! Intel 4
1C! Tombstone 5
5 Least Reputable Writeups
1 Juventus stultorum magister
2 (tied) ski bum
2 (tied) Credat Judaeus Apella, non ego
4 (tied) WarCraft III
4 (tied) Project Entropia
4 (tied) One Case One Kill
4 (tied) Itanic
4 (tied) Tamburin High-Low
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