Jon Abad asks:

From now on, i’m ranking my projects in Devil to Details ratio instead of “easy to hard”… what should the units be?

I love this.

Jon explains further:

I read somewhere “the devil to details ratio was all out of whack”
which is what made me think of it as a great measure of project or task complexity
i think ideally, you want to get to 0 devils
initially, you’ll have an unknown quantity of both
but you’ll say i have “10 devils in 20 details”

or if its really bad, 100 devils in 20 details

Anyone have any recommendations?

My weekend was decent. I got to spend some excellent time with my parents and with some college buddies at Kurt’s American cookfest 2010. Sadly, all this was dampened by a frustrating cold that I’ve been struggling to contain. Even after trying to rest up last week, my Sunday was spent mostly in bed, and Monday was spent within an arm’s reach of a tissue box.

But it’s now Tuesday and I’m mostly back in action.

I spent today’s lunch looking at state area. Recently I was talking to some friends and we were wondering how many states could fit into other states. For example, let’s say you took Maine and you started by putting the smallest state (Rhode Island) inside. Next up, Delaware. Then Connecticut. How many states could you fit? Answer: 5. What about some of the other states?

Well, here’s a chart for ya:

(it should be noted that this data includes water area and is just by area, not by Tetris.)

Now your first question is very likely: how is this information useful?

Well, it’s not really. Not one bit.

Inspired by this post I decided to ask a few folks what their earliest Amazon purchase was, and when was it purchased.

Add yours in the comments!

If you click “your account” on amazon.com and “your orders” you can see it there.

• I (Ben P.) bought the Royal Tenenbaums Soundtrack on 1/19/2002
• Shamus P. – State Variables for Engineers in October of 2002
• Kurt O. – Big Trouble in Little China in 2000
• William H. – 2 Christmas CDs and Lewis Black’s The White Album in November 2001
• Jon A. – Shakespeare in Love in 1999(!)

Add yours in the comments!

Wikipedia’s article on stainless steel includes a critical picture of a stainless steel chair in use in Rio de Janeiro.

When you look at that picture, I’m sure the first thing you think about is the importance of series 300 oxidation resistance stainless within marine applications.

Science. It’s everywhere.

Patrick here. You may remember back in 2008, I counted medals a bit differently. (initial post, final tally). We’re about 75% of the way through Vancouver, so let’s see where we stand with the population and GDP metrics.

Medals per Population
1) Norway (1 per 286K)
2) Austria (1 per 837K)
3) Switzerland (1 per 972K)
–
11) Canada (1 per 3.1M)
21) USA (1 per 11.8M)

Medals per GDP
1) Latvia (1 per $12.1B)
2) Estonia (1 per $18.1B)
3) Norway (1 per $21.7B)
–
16) Canada (1 per $120B)
23) USA (1 per $549B)

CT has a 30 Reflex AC*

This weekend’s snow storm.

*terminology bonus goes to Andy M.

Let’s find out how loud it would be if all the toddlers in China, localized to a single point, started screaming in unison.

China population: 1.3 billion
The age of toddling is roughly defined as 12-24 months
China Population, 0-4 years in age = 120 million
Assuming roughly equal distribution amongst that age bracket, that’s about 30 million toddlers.
According to this site, babies crying can reach about 115 decibels. Gah. that’s loud.

Now, let’s look at decibels.
While you can’t just add decibels together, you can use this handy equation:

10 * log((10^(a / 10)) + (10^(b / 10)))

Where (a) and (b) are two decibels that you are adding. To expand this to 30 million crying toddlers it’s best to use a program. I started with excel using a simple loop:

Sub Pop()

Dim i, limit As Integer
Dim multiplier As String

i = Cells(4, 5).Value
limit = Cells(3, 5).Value

Do
multiplier = Cells(6, 4).Value
Cells(5, 2) = multiplier
i = (i + 1)
Cells(4, 7) = i

Loop Until i = (limit + 1)

End Sub

This macro loops through the equation substituting in the current sound level and adding one baby at a time until we reach the limit set by the user. Ideally, the culmination of 30 million babies.

The problem here is that I’m not a very efficient programmer and this program runs excel’s memory dry after a mere 25,000 babies. After four times through the program, I was getting decibel levels of about 165 for 100,000 screaming toddlers. But, since we need 30 million, and I didn’t want to have to click through the program twelve hundred times, I had to call in the big guns. Enter Ryan Schenk.

Ryan Schenk took my code and re-implemented it as a ruby program. Take a look here:

unless (NUM_BABIES = ARGV.first.to_i) > 0
abort(“You need to tell me how many babies are crying\n” +
“\nUSAGE:”+
“\nruby cry_baby.rb 1234 # Where 1234 is the number of babies”)
end

SINGLE_CRY_VOLUME = 115.0
current_decibel_level = 0.0

NUM_BABIES.times do
current_decibel_level = 10.0 * Math.log10( (10.0 ** (current_decibel_level/10.0)) + (10.0 ** (SINGLE_CRY_VOLUME/10.0)))
end

puts current_decibel_level

He has 8 cpus on his computer so he can run 8 of these scripts in parallel, each computing the volume of 30m/8 babies. Ryan deems this the most efficient way to do it, one process per cpu core.

THE GRAND TOTAL:

189.771212549937 db

OH MAN.

Let’s compare our result with other sounds (source 1, source 2)

You’ll note that all the toddlers in China, operating as a singularity, screaming in unison is almost as loud as a Saturn rocket.

Dang.

Fun side notes:
This analysis looks at pure decibels and as such acts as a very rough estimation. If somehow the babies were screaming in different phases there would be the possibility that the babies crying would cancel each other out resulting in zero sound.

Hmm. this makes me wonder if you could build a speaker to read the sound wave of a crying baby and immediately respond with the inverse wave canceling out the cry.

We could call it Dr. ShutUp.

When you’re a kid, those forty-five minutes of playtime before dinner feels like 15 years. Similarly, the 15 years between 30 and 45 feel like forty-five minutes.

It seems somewhat intuitive that since we have less experiences as youth that maybe time feels slower, decades later the information isn’t as new and exciting so perhaps life feels faster.

Jesse took this concept one step further. Assuming a 100 year life, he drew a curve 1/X where X is number of years old. While nothing fancy, the graph can be integrated to show the percentage of your life your next year is. For example, at birth 100% of your experiences are new, fresh data. Year two, the newness has a potency of 50%. By year fifty, your new experiences are dwarfed by the previous 49 and your life experiences account for only 2% of your knowledge base.

Jesse integrated under the curve for blocks of time representing 25 years. Here are his results! (click on the graph for full size)

How curiously depressing!