Stuff from 5 March, 2008
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on 5 March, 2008.
Partying Light
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on 5 March, 2008.
Ahh, where to start. Well, Netflix (your favorite place to rent movies online, receive them through your mail, then mail them back) has been hosting a competition for a while now. The object is to come up with an algorithm to make helpful suggestions for what a person should rent, based on their rental history. Think of it this way: teams are given access to 2+ gigabytes of data. Within this data are many anonymous movie rental histories. So, let’s say you have a history of 30 rentals from one person. The goal of the competition is to examine the first 15 rentals, then correctly predict a percentage of the next 15 rentals.
A Slashdot discussion titled Psychologist Beating Math Nerds in Race to Netflix Prize inevitably veered off course into a debate about scientific knowledge and the interplay between different academic fields. With regards to the history of science and the average level of scientific knowledge, there’s quite a comment (it is in response to this misguided comment):
What a bunch of drivel. Just because their level of knowledge isn’t what we have today, doesn’t make it any “easier.” Do you have any idea at all, or can you even comprehend, the kind of mathematics that were employed back in the day to solve anything? Take a look at the Principia for example. The geometry is insane. I’m a graduate student in Physics and I can’t really follow his proofs.
Furthermore, because early scientists did not have as much to build on, that makes it all the more difficult. Where was Faraday to get his inspiration on lines of force? What lead Maxwell in the right direction to unifying light with electromagnetism?
It’s great that 3rd graders know about electric circuits. That’s the point of scientific progress. That doesn’t make the original task trivial in any sense.
In other words, I hate you.
Whether or not you like the punchline at the end (it’s pretty much the reason I posted all this), that’s a pretty good point.
Whilst doing a bit of research for a project, I took the time to look through Wikipedia Statistics — the results were staggering. Consider this: Wikipedia averages 40 thousand (40 000) requests per second. Thus, in 3 seconds, Wikipedia receives more requests than tumbledry has in the past 5 years.
What’s even more staggering is the traffic: Wikipedia averages 500 megabytes per second in bandwidth. For reference, that’s equivalent to about 12 music albums per second.
Totals: over 100 billion requests per month for Wikipedia articles, with over 1.3 petabytes of data. Plugging those numbers into something like Mosso’s calculator shows that hosting a website with traffic similar to Wikipedia’s would cost over $3 million per month.
How does Wikipedia operate? How does it pay for its servers, bandwidth, etc? If its traffic is so staggering, how do they manage it? There certainly aren’t any advertisements on the site (thank god). Can anyone with a little more knowledge in website managing (Alex, Justin, Richard, John) throw me a bone here?
Maybe I could just wikipedia Wikipedia.
That original comment was pretty naive. Science is all about taking baby steps forward and building off of the discoveries that have preceded us. Given the little amount of knowledge that provided a foundation for early scientific study, progress must have been excruciatingly difficult. That’s my perception anyways. I hope I don’t come across as naive or simple-minded as that other guy did.
I wonder how many people read that first post and thought “he’s right, even I could have been an amazing scientist in the middle ages!” What I really find fascinating is that so much progress was made literally a thousand years (or more) before the renaissance and was promptly forgotten. It just goes to show that while humanity has the amazing ability to learn, create, and explore; the capacity to forget, destroy, and retreat is always a threat to the work of those who came before.
This Threadless T-Shirt by QuasiProto says “HONK if you’re about to run me over.” Too bad it’s sold out.
Kellie’s fire alarm goes off all the time when we are cooking. However, it will go off only with a minimal amount of “smoke.” In fact, I usually can’t even seen the gaseous culprit when it occurs. Fairly annoying.
It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’ve got “it” when you’re so busy that each day slides by in a swirl of homework and exams. When there’s a clear path laid before you, with structured credits and definite milestones, you can fool yourself into living and growing by the academic metric alone. Some are intelligent enough to see beyond the schedule and grow; others, such as myself, blindly follow the rigmarole.
So, blithely, I emerged from the snow-blindness of endless textbooks and assignments, thinking I had some grasp of things. The real world, without explicit benchmarks and frighteningly lacking in guideposts and waypoints, is a much much messier place than college.
This is not to say that 9 months out of college have helped me reach some epiphany. No, I make no such grand assertions. The time has, however, allowed the veil to lift and afforded me invaluable perspective. Diving back into the structure of professional school this coming August, I must realize I do not yet have an understanding of the world but of the world’s messiness.
After all, the fabric that weaves our lives in and out of people and places is not staid or predictable but a messy, complex, intricate, ethereal, transient, gossamer thing. A beautiful thing.