VaxCave

I was watching a comedian on Comedy Central and she posed the question, “What happened to the Emergency Broadcast System on September 11th?” To which I say, what DID happen to the Emergency Broadcast System on September 11th? I’ve gone ahead and amassed some information on the EBS that we all should know. First off, it was introduced in 1963 to allow the President (Kennedy) to address the nation in the event of an emergency. Later, the EBS was expanded to allow it to be used for state and local emergencies. You actually HAVE heard the EBS in action. When the local weather advisory comes on saying that there is going to be 6 feet of snow; that’s the EBS. It’s normally three irritating tones, then a scrolling message that informs you of the problem. Although the EBS system was established for national messages, many broadcasters and local officials recognized that the system could be used to notify listeners about local emergency situations. As of the beginning of 1996 the FCC had received 20,341 reported activations of EBS (since 1976). Approximately 85% of these activations were for weather related emergencies. The number of activations was most assuredly higher as stations were not required to report their usage of the system (source).

Bridget is gone for a few days and I’m finding that I’m completely useless. I’m lucky I even found my glasses this morning. I tried to make brownies this afternoon. Here’s a tip: if the box says cook for 40 minutes, and your oven is from 1965, don’t assume it’s going to work out correctly. Honestly, the box said 40 minutes at 350. i ended up cooking at 350 for an h our and 10 minutes. They turned out just fine. But they were still liquid at 40 minutes. Either way, I’m looking forward to her return on Sunday.

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p>Simon Corby and I had a conversation once in which he described an idea he had. He wanted to setup a random generator for Ph.D. thesis titles. If you’ve ever read thesis titles, you’ll know how convoluted they are. Well, i’ve devised a first draft of the Thesis Title Generator. check it out and tell me what you think.

Thanks to my old friend / arch-nemesis, we have a new book review. Check it out in the reviews section. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get carpal tunnel.

Today’s exciting math lesson comes to us from the land of I-Forgot-How-To-Do-Standard-Deviation:

Calculating Mean: The Arithmetic Mean is obtained by summing all elements of the data set and dividing by the number of elements.

Calculating Median: The Median is the middle element when the data set is arranged in order of magnitude. If there are an odd number of data elements, the median is a member of the data set. If there are an even number of data elements, the median is computed as the arithmetic mean of the middle two.

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p>Calculating Standard Deviation: The variance and standard deviation of a data set measures the spread of the data about the mean of the data set.

The variance of a sample of size n represented by s² is given by:

The standard deviation can be calculated by taking the square root of the variance.

I’ve created an archives page for all the past stories. It will probably change a bit in look and feel, but it will remain a listing of all the stories I’ve posted. I’ve done this to circumvent some of the issues I’ve been having with Google indexing the rotating ‘view’ pages. The archive link will appear at the bottom of the page for now. I may move it to main nav at some point, but not right now. We’ll see how it goes. Take a look at the archive page and let me know what changes you would like to see. Comments? Suggestions? Nasty Remarks?

This has been verified as a fact.

I HOPE you have all seen the reports about how Sears is treating its reservist employees who are called up. By law, they are required to hold their jobs open and available, but nothing more. Usually, people take a big pay cut and lose benefits as a result of being called up.

Sears is voluntarily paying the difference in salaries and maintaining all benefits, including medical insurance and bonus programs, for all called up reservist employees for up to two years. I submit that Sears is an exemplary corporate citizen and should be recognized for its contribution.

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p> I suggest we all shop at Sears, and be sure to find a manager to tell them why we are there so the company gets the positive reinforcement it well deserves.