random

Meh.

Apparently today is Ada Lovelace Day. I guess this makes it an ideal time to remember some of the women who have made enormous contributions to the IT industry.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper immediately springs to mind as inventor of the compiler and the COBOL programming language. Rear Admiral Hopper was one of the original programmer of the Harvard Mark I in 1944. She continued contributing to the industry until her death in 1992 at the age of 85.

Another of my heroines of the computing era is Jeri Ellsworth a young and brilliant hardware hacker who created, amongst other things, the C-One reconfigurable computer and the C64 DTV TV Game. LifeHacker recently ran a series which included Jeri Ellsworth as "MacGyver of the day". Go read it and be amazed.

Final, defining proof that Holden drivers can't park, not even the ones in classic Holden utes. If any Holden can be considered classic, that is.
 
 
 
 
 
 

These days we're all familiar with the concept of an Internet meme, whether it has amusing felines, revives hits of the 80s, or has stolen all our bases. One of the older Internet memes, having its origins from the mid 1990s, is the l33t term w00t!, which once graced the screens of many FPS Deathmatch players and IRC weenies with alarming regularity.
In “W00T” Population Statistics and Empirical Fit Ryan Hamerly performs an analysis of the distribution of the number of zeros in incidents of the word w00t as found through exhaustive Google search. He concludes the zero usage fits "a power law with an exponential cutoff", and furthermore debunks the widely debated "w00t paradox":

The so-called “w00t paradox” is the fact that there appear to be a finite, but nonzero, number of pages with w00t analogues for arbitrarily large Z.6 There are two reasons this does not qualify as a paradox: First, it is clear that there must exist some cutoff beyond the Google-imposed limit of Z = 126. Second, even if the distribution extended to infinity as the authors of the paradox suggest, its density is exponentially attenuated beyond Z = 30, and thus the distribution itself, along with all of its moments, is finite and well-behaved.

Thanks Ryan, you've really settled this one for me!

According at an article on Stuff, Canterbury health workers have described the health system as "sexist", saying that despite men sufferring poorer helth and having a higher mortality rate, "...there appears to be significantly more health promotion targeted at women."

Report co-author and Sport Canterbury events and marketing manager Jonny Kirkpatrick said it was difficult to attract funding for male-focused health projects.

"Men are partly to blame themselves because of the `she'll be right attitude', but it starts at the top," he said.

"The awareness around women's health is fantastic, but men get breast cancer too and as many men die from prostate cancer as women of breast cancer."

The report's main recommendations were raising awareness around men's health and making services gender appropriate.

I remember discussing this issue with friends over 20 years ago, when I was told that a group doing a prostate cancer awareness leaflet drop had been warned by Police to stop for "indecency" or somesuch thing. This isn't a new problem, but it is a largely ignored one. The Movember team deserves huge recognition for the efforts they've made raising both awareness and funding for men's health issues. Cheers guys!