Wow good thing I don't manage the Thunder

Clearly they're doing better than the course I plotted:

1) Russell Westbrook takes regular season off
2) Kevin Durant goes HAM
3) ???
4) Championship

Moer like ASS of angels

I've decided that now AoA is basically the most lascivious kpop band ever.





Also, there's a cat.

Something gonna blow up..

I found out recently that common practice with onshore facilities is that if an equipment is provided with a pressure safety valve, then a high pressure interlock¹ is not needed. This sounds like such a bad idea.

On it's face it sounds okay.

Except experienced process designers don't do this work, these kind of tasks get passed down the chain.

So I sure hope my classmates did a good job with their PSV sizing calculations back in their second year work terms...


1) A high pressure interlock would be a controller that acts automatically to isolate the vessel from the source of high pressure, e.g. closing inlet shutdown valves

Interesting how different people mark their drawings

And my own:

Kind of safety critical

I think there was a study by DNV that was like, 25% of all PSVs are improperly sized.

How could this be?

Oh wait, the PSV calculations were probably all done by interns!

Well no shit then.

International Airport Reviews

YYZ - Quite good actually, the T1 waiting areas are comparable to what you'd find in airport lounges, minus the wait staff and free buffet. Unfortunately, Canadian weather always delays everything.

HKG - Also quite good, automated immigration lines (insert your card and swipe your finger print) and basically no tariffs mean getting through customs is a snap.

NRT - Official airport of "sorry, we can't get any flights to Haneda, is Narita okay?"

CGK - Worst airport ever says everyone I've come across, how fitting for the worst city ever.

I know how to improve Exid

Throw away everything except the house beats and the chick that raps.

How I would manage the Thunder

Russell Westbrook takes season off to recover, comes back in 2014 with a 5" higher vertical.

Kevin Durant gets Lasik, comes back with an 8% increase in efficiency.

OKC tanks this season without KevBrook for the 2014 draft.

CAN'T FAIL

I would say yes to that dress

Fair Point

"One technical thing - the Eastern Med is pretty crowded, will the USN want to take an Ohio that close to a Udaloy on patrol, then use 154 Tomahawk launches to provide a datum in a confined area?" 

People might be taking for granted an appearance by the USS Break Shit - Get Out herself.

That's the money shot

The Red Comet Kick:



Char Aznable's most famous attack in Gundam history

Profound

Excerpt from Scott Aaronson's Who Can Name the Biggest Number?

Turing continued to explicate his machine using ingenious reasoning from first principles. [A paper tape], said Turing, extends infinitely in both directions, since a theoretical machine ought not be constrained by physical limits on resources. Furthermore, there’s a symbol written on each square of the tape, like the ‘1’s and ‘0’s in a modern computer’s memory. But how are the symbols manipulated? Well, there’s a ‘tape head’ moving back and forth along the tape, examining one square at a time, writing and erasing symbols according to definite rules. The rules are the tape head’s program: change them, and you change what the tape head does. 

Turing’s august insight was that we can program the tape head to carry out any computation. 

Just as we can classify words by how many letters they contain, we can classify Turing machines by how many rules they have in the tape head. Some machines have only one rule, others have two rules, still others have three rules, and so on. But for each fixed whole number N, just as there are only finitely many distinct words with N letters, so too are there only finitely many distinct machines with N rules. Among these machines, some halt and others run forever when started on a blank tape. Of the ones that halt, asked Rado, what’s the maximum number of steps that any machine takes before it halts?

Conclusion? The sequence of Busy Beaver numbers, BB(1), BB(2), and so on, grows faster than any computable sequence. Faster than exponentials, stacked exponentials, the Ackermann sequence, you name it. Because if a Turing machine could compute a sequence that grows faster than Busy Beaver, then it could use that sequence...The Busy Beaver sequence is non-computable, solely because it grows stupendously fast—too fast for any computer to keep up with it, even in principle.

In 1984, A.K. Dewdney devoted a Scientific American column to Busy Beavers, which inspired amateur mathematician George Uhing to build a special-purpose device for simulating Turing machines. The device, which cost Uhing less than $100, found a five-rule machine that runs for 2,133,492 steps before halting—establishing that BB(5) must be at least as high. Then, in 1989, Heiner Marxen and Jürgen Buntrock discovered that BB(5) is at least 47,176,870. To this day, BB(5) hasn’t been pinned down precisely, and it could turn out to be much higher still. As for BB(6), Marxen and Buntrock set another record in 1997 by proving that it’s at least 8,690,333,381,690,951. A formidable accomplishment, yet Marxen, Buntrock, and the other Busy Beaver hunters are merely wading along the shores of the unknowable. Humanity may never know the value of BB(6) for certain, let alone that of BB(7) or any higher number in the sequence.

We’ve seen that progress in notational systems for big numbers mirrors progress in broader realms: mathematics, logic, computer science. And yet, though a mirror reflects reality, it doesn’t necessarily influence it. Even within mathematics, big numbers are often considered trivialities, their study an idle amusement with no broader implications. I want to argue a contrary view: that understanding big numbers is a key to understanding the world. Imagine trying to explain the Turing machine to Archimedes. The genius of Syracuse listens patiently as you discuss the papyrus tape extending infinitely in both directions, the time steps, states, input and output sequences.

At last he explodes. "Foolishness!" he declares (or the ancient Greek equivalent). "All you’ve given me is an elaborate definition, with no value outside of itself." How do you respond? Archimedes has never heard of computers, those cantankerous devices that, twenty-three centuries from his time, will transact the world’s affairs. So you can’t claim practical application. Nor can you appeal to Hilbert and the formalist program, since Archimedes hasn’t heard of those either. But then it hits you: the Busy Beaver sequence.

You define the sequence for Archimedes, convince him that BB(1000) is more than his 10^63 grains of sand filling the universe, more even than 10^63 raised to its own power 10^63 times. You defy him to name a bigger number without invoking Turing machines or some equivalent. And as he ponders this challenge, the power of the Turing machine concept dawns on him. Though his intuition may never apprehend the Busy Beaver numbers, his reason compels him to acknowledge their immensity. Big numbers have a way of imbuing abstract notions with reality.

Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense.

Who can name the bigger number? Whoever has the deeper paradigm. Are you ready? Get set. Go.

Omgomgomg

TTS is back with new costumes!

So the main character in Slam Dunk

He's a 6'3" center.

This is what he looks like (#10) standing with the cast:

Hey, that's pretty similar in height to Russell Westbrook, OKC's 6'3" PG.

This is what he looks like (#0) standing with the cast:

What am I doing?

Girl.

You doin' too much makeup.

You went right past Vogue territory and straight into Trailer Trash.

To whoever made this..

You suck, and all your explanations are wrong.

For fucks sake, the gravitational equation (eqn 2) and charge equation (eqn 4) are of the exact same form, you're not even internally consistent in your shittiness.

So I've been playing Sim City 4 a lot

I think I would avoid committing crimes there too.

I hope it doesn't snow a lot here.

All in all a good use of $5

Series 1: Houston vs OKC

NBA Playoffs are about to start and 8th seed Houston and 1st seed OKC are matched up in the first round, which is expected to be a great series.

The Houston Rockets are a rising star in the West, they are the youngest and least experienced team in the league. Everyone was expecting a rebuild year, but they've managed to pull through to the playoffs and exceed the performance of every team in history with comparable ages and experience.

Oh yeah, and captain James Harden was traded to Houston at the beginning of this season from OKC because they didn't want to pay out a max contract for him. So he's got a chip on his shoulder and something to prove.

The Rockets play a game reminiscent of D'Antoni's offense, a system that famously brought the Steve Nash captained Suns into the conference finals in 2004-2006. Also there was something called Linsanity, you may have heard of it.

It's a tempo based offense where they won't shoot with great efficiency or make good ball stops, but other teams that aren't used to the same high paced play won't be able to keep up..and older teams might just collapse from all the running.

Problem: OKC is also a team of young players and they'll be perfectly happy to match Houston possession for possession.

Contrast to Houston, OKC is actually a defensive minded team with the (sometimes) elite defender Perkins being virtually a zero on offense and elite defender Sefelosha being able to score spot up 3s at a decent percentage but otherwise also a nil on offense.

So it is scary that in the regular season OKC was consistently ranked up top in offense. OKC's offense revolves around the Westbrook-Durant Iso System. Westbrook is ludicrously fast while also being able to hit bad shots at a respectable percentage. Unguardable Kevin Durant and his lanky frame is faster than anyone who's bigger than himself while being able to shoot around anyone faster than himself at a deadly efficiency. That makes them a mismatch in more than 90% of all one-on-one situations and carried them to 1st seed in the West.

As for the coaches, Scott Brooks is a coach who commands great respect from his players but doesn't know how to run plays and makes stupid rotations, compared to Houston's McHale who commands great respect from his players but doesn't know how to run plays and makes stupid rotations = EVEN MATCH.

Houston actually has a decent chance at pulling through in a 7 game series, but in the first game they were outscored 120 - 91. That's very troubling not only because of the point delta but because for such an offensive minded team, 91 points is a pittance. If OKC defenders have their offense solved, then there isn't much else going for the Houston team. The only thing to do now is wait and watch and see how they adapt.