Friday, Debtember 19, 2014
Can't see the forest for the trees
While there are decorations about the Ft. Lauderdale Office of the Corporation, the only tree so far has been the one that somehow magically sprouted in my office:
![[The only thing missing are a bunch of kids and a dog singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”]](/2014/12/19/officetree.jpg "The only thing missing are a bunch of kids and a dog singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”")
But I would be remiss if I didn't also post pictures of the trees that have suddenly sprouted about Chez Boca. First, the main tree:
![[My God! It's full of lights!]](/2014/12/19/bigtree.jpg "My God! It's full of lights!")
And then, because it was so cute, a much smaller tree sitting on a side table in the family room:
![[Bet you didn't know pandas were also present in the manger.]](/2014/12/19/smalltree.jpg "Bet you didn't know pandas were also present in the manger.")
And, because Bunny knows I have an unhealthy fascination with aluminum Christmas trees, Bunny also decorated this aluminum tree in the front hall:
![[In the 19th Century, this would have been worth more than its weight in gold.]](/2014/12/19/aluminumtree.jpg "In the 19th Century, this would have been worth more than its weight in gold.")
Hmm … I guess this means The Season™ is among us.
Content Forever
racter: a History
The name of the program is short for raconteur. The sophistication claimed for the program was likely exaggerated, as could be seen by investigation of the template system of text generation.
Moreover, template processing is sometimes included as a sub-feature of software packages like text editors, IDEs and relational database management systems.
…
The observable universe is one causal patch of a much larger unobservable universe; there are parts of the universe that cannot communicate with us yet.
If the universe is finite but unbounded, it is also possible that the universe is smaller than the observable universe. In this case, what we take to be very distant galaxies may actually be duplicate images of nearby galaxies, formed by light that has circumnavigated the universe. It is difficult to test this hypothesis experimentally because different images of a galaxy would show different eras in its history, and consequently might appear quite different. Bielewicz et al. claims to establish a lower bound of 27.9 gigaparsecs (91 billion light-years) on the diameter of the last scattering surface (since this is only a lower bound, the paper leaves open the possibility that the whole universe is much larger, even infinite). This value is based on matching-circle analysis of the WMAP 7 year data.
…
The epitome of the “ooh—shiny” style of writing, Content, Forever (link via Hacker News) culls Wikipedia for articles starting with a given topic and just follows the links.
I may have to keep an idea like this in mind for next year's NaNoGenMo.
