A friend in law school was asking me if I knew what the word “eautionary” meant. She was unable to find any definition for it in the common places, so I went to go look it up online in the Oxford English Dictionary. And to my surprise, it wasn’t in there either.
It took several minutes to figure out, but imagine this scenario:
You have an old document and you want to reprint it. You could either type it in by hand or scan it in and run optical character recognition. The problem with OCR is that sometimes it’s wrong. And it could have easily mistaken a stylized or script “c” for an “e” . Furthermore, I bet there are a lot of words in legal papers that aren’t in a standard spell checker, so it could have easily been skipped on accident during the proofing process.
Voila: eautionary…a misrecognized version of “cautionary.”
A better question is how could you prevent this from happening. I’d first run a spell check to see if the word is misspelled; if it is, I would perform a Hamming distance calculation. Then based on the Hamming distance and the number of times the word appears in within a specific region of text, I would flag it for further review.
A friend of my had a concern as to the cost to keep the Christmas lights on during this holiday season. As it so happens, I have a specialty in electrical systems. So, how much does it cost?
Let’s assume 5 strands of 150 lights each, for a total of 750 lights. We’re going to be old school and use the regular “white” Christmas lights, not LED’s. Christmas lights use “about 25 watts per 50-bulb strand”12. 750 lights is electrically equivalent to 15 50-bulb strands, or . The base rate for electricity in Seattle3 is 3.86¢4 per kWh5.
Thus,
Remember, that’s if you left the lights on all the time for two straight months. If you left them on for 8 hours a day instead of 24 hours, that would be $6.48.
Similarly, if you only used 2 strands of 150-bulbs each for 8 hours a day, that would be $2.59.
Or, if you used 2 strands of 50-bulbs each for 8 hours a days, that would also be grand total of 86.4 cents.
Point being, it doesn’t cost all that much to run your Christmas lights. It costs an order of magnitude less if you use LEDs, which use about 0.05 to 0.07 watts per a bulb. Move the decimal one place to the left on the above costs and you have a pretty good idea of what it costs to run an equivalent6 LED string of lights.
And that’s how engineering works, folks.
NB: I’m experimenting with using to display equations. It’s really quite spiffy.
assuming you’re a residential user and use less than 16kWh/month ↩
kWh is a funny measurement and is actually not time based. For example, a 100 watt bulb that is on for one hour uses 100 watt-hours of energy. Similarly, a 100 watt bulb that is on for 30 minutes uses 50 watt-hours of energy. ↩
Sweet merciful days of awesome! Vacation is here! This is my first official vacation since starting work (I’ve had a couple of sick days, but no fun days off as of yet). I can’t help but chuckle that as my first vacation destination, I’ve chosen to return to the scene of the crime my alma mater. I worked so hard to get away and now I can’t help but return, must be some form of Stockholm Syndrome.
I touched down tonight in Denver at 8pm. I don’t really have plans for Thursday, so who wants to hang out?
Friday is an awesome episode of The Feed, but I’m free in morning and early afternoon.
Saturday is pretty open, except for around dinner time.
Sunday is open except for after 7pm when I’m hoping to head over to Merge.
I’ll be around Monday, but I’m hoping to hang out with Brother if he’ll let me.
is learning #Perl….yea, I know I'm about 20 years behind the game. #fb#
@TrinitronX saying, "use ruby" is like saying, "drive American." unless you back it up with facts about *why*, i will just ignore you in reply to TrinitronX#
I think I would categorize this under “Creative Commons Success Stories.”
I was contacted a few months ago by publication company, Alter Communications, inquiring if they could use some of my photos in an upcoming issue of BOSS magazine, a quarterly publication for Dixon Valve & Coupling Company. This was during my Europe trip and I happened to be in Turkey at the time; but I was able to work everything out over email with Kim, the senior graphic designer, in just a few hours – which I think is quite amazing. All I really wanted was a byline credit and some copies of the magazine when it came out, and Kim was happy to provide both.
Fast forward to about a week ago, a flat package arrived for me at home. Inside were a couple copies of BOSS magazine, with a personal note (hand written, none the less) thanking me for the use of my pictures. I was pretty stoked. You can see the online version here: BOSS Magazine Fall 2009, or swing by my place if you want to see the hard copy.
Boss Magazine/Fall 2009 – Pages 12-13:
Boss Magazine/Fall 2009 – Page 14:
As a side note, these were the still in the days1 I was shooting JPG2. To be honest, the photos weren’t that good, at least in my opinion. Had they been RAW, I would have been able to do quite a bit to pretty them up. But hey, if it works: it works!
. The base rate for electricity in Seattle
