khym chanur's New Writeups

Ranma 1/2 (thing)

2002-10-18T05:46:27Z

Ranma 1/2 starts out with Ranma Saotome and Akane Tendou being engaged to each other, against their wills, and only shortly after they find that the engagement exists at all. They get off to a bad start, which lasts through the rest of the series, with them bickering and insulting each other. But even though they fight, and claim they don't like, much less love, each other, let someone of the wrong sex get too close to one of them, and watch the other go into a fit of jealousy...

With this love/hate relationship established, various rivals and suitors for the two keep showing up, eventually creating a love polyhedron that, save for the absence of long lost twins and people coming back from the dead, is the rival of any to be found in an American soap opera. In addition to this silly love tangle, Ranma and company have to regularly deal with bizarre forms of martial arts and ridiculously powerful martial artists.…

Argument from Non-Belief (idea)

2002-10-18T01:29:57Z

First, it should be noted that this argument only applies to God as described in the New Testament. Second, the argument as described by Saige is missing a part. In full, it is:

God wants to save everyone from damnation.
The only way for a person to be saved from damnation is by believing in God/Jesus.
God is omnipotent.
Thus, God could make everyone believe.
But not everyone believes.
Therefore, God does not exist.

A solution to this is offered by Calvinist theology, although addressing this problem was not a motivation in the formation of their theology. The solution is to give a different interpretation to step #1. According to Calvinist theology, when the New Testament says that God wants to save everyone from damnation, it doesn't mean literally everyone, but rather everyone that God has already decided that he's…

Shroud of Turin (thing)

2002-01-07T09:38:32Z

According to enth's write-up, the carbon in the "bio-plastic coating" would have to contain twice as much carbon as the shroud itself to change the shroud's carbon dating date by 1300 years. However, according to my calculations, this is almost right: it coating would have to be about 1.83 times the mass of the shroud itself (or, more specifically, for every pound of carbon in the shroud, there would have to be 1.83 pounds of carbon in the coating). (NOTE: This is a lot more than the 0.14, or 14%, estimate that I originally gave; my original calculations were wrong).

Here is my calculation: carbon-14 has a half life of 5730 years. Assume that the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere is constant from century to century (which isn't exactly true), and that 1 pound of carbon has 1 unit of carbon-14 in it. The shroud was dated in 1988 to have an origin of 1350 A.D., a 638 year difference; given this amount of time to decay,…

Genome@home (thing)

2001-09-07T03:23:10Z

One of the @home projects which allows you to harvest otherwise unused CPU cycles, the most famous being SETI@home. Genome@home is a project at Stanford University to advance the amount knowledge in the field of genetics. In a nutshell this is what the project's program does:

DNA gets translated into protein. Genome@home take naturally existing protein sequences, makes alterations to them (that should be the same shape as the original protein, which is the most important thing about a protein), and then reverse translates these new proteins back into gene sequences; thus the project generates artificial genomes that, while not existing in the real world, should produce the same results as the existing genome (since they should produce proteins with the same shape).

The project hopes that by comparing these artificial genomes to natural ones, they will be able to gain a…

shared library (idea)

2001-09-07T00:45:21Z

A file containing compiled object code which can be shared between multiple programs. For example, there are lots of programs that connect to the Internet. The code for doing the connections is in only one shared library file, instead of being duplicated over and over in each program that needs it (thus saving hard drive space), and only one copy is loaded into active memory (thus saving RAM). This also has the advantage that if fixes or improvements are made to the Internet code, all you have to do is replace that one shared library file, and all the programs will get the benefits, rather than having to replace each individual program.

Under Windows, shared library files end in ."DLL", which stands for "Dynamically Linked Library". Under UNIX/Linux, such files almost always start with "lib", always end in ".so" (standing for "shared object"), which is followed by ".X.Y.Z", where…

ld.so (thing)

2001-09-06T23:30:02Z

ld.so is the UNIX/Linux helper program which loads the shared library files (.so files) needed by dynamically linked programs, and does all the fiddly stuff need to get them to work with the program. Ordinarily you don't have to care at all about ld.so, except that sometimes you want to tell it where to look for .so files, in what order to look for them, and extra libraries that you want to be forced to load.

These are the means of controlling ld.so, in the order that they are used (first to last):

The libraries listed in the file /etc/ld.so.preload are loaded first. These libraries can override the functions that are defined in libraries that are loaded later. This file affects every dynamically linked program that runs; ld.so has no affected on statically linked programs.
The

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