Sez Mr. Griffin, the math PhD student:

MATLAB is better for numerical analysis and large data sets. Mathematica is better for symbolic manipulation and visual representations in calculus and analysis.

So, it depends on what you want to do. He says it's worthwhile to learn both programs.

Mathematica lets you do stuff like this, too, if you're into that.

The important distinction here to make is that the retrofitting of your older brick building has been done to ensure the survivability of the residents not that the structure itself is going to be undamaged. That is, that the building will maintain enough structural integrity to not collapse in the event of a seismic event. Prior to the retrofit your building would have been termed an "unreinforced masonry building" (URM). These structures tend to crumble and fall apart with seismic shaking. With those fittings and cables providing tension and forces to keep the structure together during an earthquake the living spaces have a much better chance of maintaining integrity for the survivability of the people within. I would suggest your term of being "earthquake proof" is only applicable for minor to maybe some medium level events (some that would have taken the building down before retrofit). The very high scale of the possible events for this area are going to cause significant damage to many if not most structures that are of significant age.

Reutte covers the points about the strength and depth issues of quakes and how that affects movment. The point missing was that the Nisqually quake was centered some 40 or more miles away from Seattle. Liquefaction not only might cause some sinking but more importantly can magnify movement at the surface. There are many areas of Seattle built on filled areas that can experience this other significant effect of ground movement.

I assume you understand the how the magnitude moment numbers work, but for those who don't that magnitude 9.0 event will be 1000 times greater than a 7.0 event. (The 2001 Nisqually earthquake was eventually rated at 6.8.)
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale

This document is the report of a 2007 survey of URM buildings:
http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/news/URMfinalreport.pdf
It will not answer your question per se but you can get the scale of what possible damage is likely to be the result of a big event.

I assume that the specifications of the retrofit done on your building would be the best information to consult and should be available with some research. I would suggest contacting the Seattle Department of Planning and Development to start and see what you can find out about your building.

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/

If you can wait, feel free to, but it won't change the hardware compatibility greatly. While I can't *absolutely* guarantee Win8 compatibility, chances are the Win7 drivers will work just fine when you upgrade.

I'd at least make sure that the system is compatible with (and comes with) a 64 bit version of 7.

In the strictest sense they are biodegradable, that is that given time and exposure to bacteria and micro-organisms and the action of other processes that degrade molecular bonds (UV light exposure) they will break down.

Putting them in a compost pile would not be an effective way of recycling their materials and would probably introduce numerous chemical dyes and other compounds into the product obtained (as explained by others here).

Cotton fabric and wool sweaters can be recycled into other economically productive industries by donation to Goodwill or other agencies that clean and separate material like this for resale to secondary product manufacturing concerns.

You're using Word 2007 or 2010, right? If you look at the Font pulldown menu on the Home tab, you'll see Calibri (Body) under Theme Fonts at the top; if you scroll down past All Fonts, you'll see Calibri listed. I don't know why they are different, but I think the Calibri (Body) selection has some different spacing included in the style that's not easy to find.

If you select the Calibri (Body) text and change it to the Calibri listed under All Fonts, it should match the rest of your document. Or you could select a paragraph that is formatted the way you want, click the Format Painter (the little paintbrush in the Clipboard section on the Home tab) and select the paragraph you want to change.

Another option is to clear formatting - the easiest way is to select the whole paragraph (or whatever text is showing up as +body) and press Ctrl+Spacebar. That paragraph will be reformatted to whatever the default text setting is for your document, but you will lose any bolding, italicizing, hyperlinks, etc. Clear Formatting is also a button in the Font section.

When I'm pasting text, I right click first and select Keep Text Only or Match Destination Styles from the Paste Options so it doesn't mess up the formatting. Or paste as usual, and a little clipboard shows up at the end of the pasted text; click the little arrow to see the Paste Options. You don't need a separate program to paste unformatted text.

I don't know, but since YouTube is a Google company I can take a pretty good guess:

1. Google's search algorithms are extremely complex and sophisticated. Furthermore they are designed to try and ensure that no one can figure them out easily enough to game them.

2. Google typically ranks results based on the behavior of viewers and site owners. So if a lot of people link to a given video or embed it then each of those instances is considered a "vote" for that video.

3. They will also incorporate things like actual votes, views, keywords/tags, etc.

4. I'm sure they also rank videos based on how much of the video was watched. Did people abandon it after a 30 seconds or watch the whole thing.

So the short answer is that it is designed so that you cannot easily figure it out and it incorporates every bit of data about the video that is available - esp. the behavior of other sites and people watching.

Hope that helps a little.

You say you've done system restores but have you simply formatted the disk and installed a fresh OS? That is the next thing you need to do if it is an option for you. Remember formatting deletes ALL data so make a backup of the files you care about.

Make sure you've got a good view of what is actually using your CPU. Open the Task Manager and try to account for all % used and have a valid explanation for each process running. Take this information with a huge grain of salt because viruses can hide themselves from this list and appear to be legitimate processes when they aren't.

High CPU can be caused by a lot of things (viruses included), but it can also be caused by hardware problems. If you format/install and still have 90% CPU usage on your first boot of a fresh install of Windows, I'd start leaning towards hardware problems (and would be surprised it even made it through an install).

How's your memory usage look in Task Manager? I wouldn't expect it to cause high CPU usage, but your memory could be having issues which has caused some of it to not be used, which is causing the computer to use the hard drive for memory (aka swapping), which is extremely slow and will bog down your computer immensely. You should see 90%+ memory usage if this is happening. Memtest86 is a great (free) program that searches out buggy RAM in your computer; let it run overnight.

Finally, going after things that bog down entire computers quickly, it could be the thing most likely to fail in your laptop (IMO): your hard drive. The easiest way to diagnose a bad drive is to remove it and test it in a known-good computer.

Anyway, definitely FORMAT and reinstall (if you can handle a format without losing anything).

And degragging is the most overrated fix to anything in the history of computing. Hard drive fragmentation is not causing your problem, nor will it ever in home computing. I don't remember the last time I defragged anything, and I've never seen defragging fix anything.

Defragging's main purpose is to get users like yourself off of the phone for a few hours when you're out of troubleshooting ideas. Linux/Unix doesn't even have a concept of defragging in the majority of their native filesystems.

Install both a flash and ad-blocker plugin for Chrome (and Firefox while you're at it).

I'm assuming this is an old Windows machine (like Win 98 or something); if it's an old Mac running OS 9 or earlier, you can put together a custom set of startup extensions which are limited to what you need to get online.

If it's a Windows machine, you can find out what everything you see in the Taskmanager actually does, and whether it's something you can kill. Just plug "what is " into Google (no quotes needed, usually) and you'll get websites that describe all the weirdly named processes do.

Depends on the battery technology (chemical makeup) being used. With a fairly new laptop you must be using a Lithium-ion battery.

In general you can recharge a Lithium-ion battery whenever you want in the battery discharge cycle without causing any problems with ability to hold a charge or the battery's depth of charge, that is there is no such thing as "memory effect".

Here is some text from Apple that explains the versatility of this type of battery.

Of course, what you want is to not run out of power when you are working, so in any case, be sure to have some type of battery monitor installed that gives you plenty of warning if you are running low so you can get it plugged in or save your work and close it down in time.

If you are using some other type of battery this story will be different.

May I recommend www.spaceweather.com

This daily news magazine not only covers celestial events, but all things space, astronomy and NASA related.

They can send you alerts...for events, sightings, and meteor showers, as well as other events of interest.

Or, you can just check regularly for the latest.

Nice photos, great graphics, and simple language for the layman.

Extra feature: The wayback device lets you go back in time to read ealier editions.

I actually thought the time limit for non-"Directors" was 10 minutes and they would let you get away with a few seconds more. They used to give people "Directors" accounts back in the day for people who made longer vids. I upload to YouTube all the time and I'm fairly certain the time limit is 10 minutes though. If you don't mind waiting around while it loads, you could always try to upload your video, but you will likely get an error message.

Pink -- with red and dark parts.

kind of like General Tso's chicken.

yum -- http://www.nick-ramsey.eu/pages/bci.html NSFW/NSFnausea

I suck at web development but I'll throw some basics out.

There are a lot of ways to tell something to be centered in HTML, and a lot of reasons why these ways won't work under various circumstances. It's hard to say exactly what your HTML needs to look like without a link to the page in question.

IMO the easiest and most generic way to center something is by putting <center> tags around it.

Something like this for a Youtube video:

<center>
<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dQw4w9WgXcQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</center>

But that might not work for a lot of reasons, top of which is that <center> is not even a standard HTML tag, but a relic from the olden days. It just happens to still work in pretty much every browser.

Other tags that may put you in the right direction:
<div align="center">
<table width="100%" align="center"> (or possibly <td align="center">)

Additionally, this is a super common problem, so I bet if you put "how to center an image in wordpress" (or whatever) into Google you can figure it out. I suggest figuring it out with images before videos just to make it easier to Google, but it shouldn't matter in the end.

This page is awesome for learning HTML/general web development: http://www.w3schools.com/

PS: if you need to post literal tags in a QL post like I did above, you need to use the "entity" codes from this chart in place of the < and > symbols - http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/special.html (specifically the less-than and greater-than codes)

Siri is still in beta, and that may be coming down the pipeline in the future...right now though, it's just Siri.

To confirm, though, you could always ask Siri if it can be renamed. :-)

It's 'okay', they have had a few sales during which you got the testing for free with a $9.00/month subscription to their updating. They come out with newer tests results periodically. I assume the $9 goes towards running your DNA through the new test.

It only finds your maternal relations because they can only test mitochondria DNA.

II don't know if anyone can test patrilineal genetic info. ...Or if that info even exists, any geneticists out there?

I love "My Passport" portable hard drive. I moved my iPhoto library and a bunch of other stuff onto it. Here they are on amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_box_?k=Passport+hard+drive

According to General Relatively, there would be no problem swinging such a pole at extremely slow speeds. by which I mean speeds such that the tip stayed well below relavistic velocities.

However, there is a huge problem as soon as you start trying to move the pole at anything above this incredibly slow rotational speed. Such a speed would be in the order of one rotation every century.

Say you start swinging it very slowly and then accelerate linearly. As the tip enters relavistic velocities, it will start increasing in mass. Assuming you can continue to accelerate the pole, the proportion of the pole at relavistic velocities will increase, so more and more of the pole will be increasing in mass. In addition, those portions that were already at relavistic velocities will accelerate towards c linearly, which means their masses will be increasing exponentially. So basically it will quickly take an insanely exponentially increasing amount of energy to keep accelerating the pole, as its mass would be increasing at an insanely exponential rate. Assuming no friction in the system, once you got it to a given speed, it would continue indefinitely (containing that huge amount of energy in the system), but the practical constraints on getting the pole moving at anything beyond that very slow rate mentioned above would be difficult.

As far as maximum speed, assuming an infinite amount of available energy, of course you couldn't get the tip to move faster than 1.0c, or even to 1.0c, but you could get it asymptoticly close. The reason you couldn't actually get the tip to c is that an object's mass approaches infinity as its velocity approaches c, so even with an infinite amount of energy you could only get asymptotically close to c, not actually to c.

More practically speaking, as there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum, you'd always have some friction in such a system, but that would only serve to further increase the amount of energy needed.

Not a stupid question at all.

You should check out this spiffy and free Windows utility called WinDirStat: http://windirstat.info/

It gives you a visual overview of your disk space usage. I've found it really useful before to track down where all my disk space went.

What you really need is to get the drive mounted in a Linux environment and go to town with your favorite scripting language. I'd start with a perl script that builds a list of files and their md5sums, then starts looking for duplicate md5sums.

A quick Google for "windows 7 find duplicate files" shows some promise too, but I can't say I've used any of the utilities that come up.

I have this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Brother-Printer-HL2270DW-Wireless-Monochrome/dp/B00450DVDY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322980269&sr=8-1

and I really really like it. I don't print frequently (a few pages a week? Maybe?) and it works well for me. It took us maybe 6 months to use up the initial starter cartridge, and then we bought a super-huge cartridge that claims it will print something like 2000 pages or 5000 pages. We've been using it for the last 6-9 months (I really don't remember) and it's still going strong.

I'd also give it a little time. Google doesn't re-index every site at every moment (so changing your keywords won't bring about instantaneous results). If you've got other blogger friends, outside links to your site will push you up in the rankings. Suggest a link swap.

Check out Lojack for Laptops.

http://www.absolute.com/en/lojackforlaptops/home.aspx

Planet X was a name for what became identified as "Pluto" ...but it also has been used at various times to identify any unknown, or suspected planet...

In the awful 1960s sci-fi flick "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun", an astronaut who is lost in space, returns to the earth and discovers that he's on a duplicate of Earth that orbits exactly opposite the sun from us, in a place we can never see...and gets confirmation when the polarity of the electricity in the capsule is reversed...unfortunately, dooming him to crash land and never getting the story out.

There's also been a theory that a rouge planet will sweep in and either: 1) Collide with Earth, 2)Collide with the Moon 3) Near miss, causing tidal forces and disaster, 4) take up orbit with us, etc. 5) rip us away from the sun,etc.

Take your pick of which theory you want. Why? What did you hear?

Probably just need to recycle it. Here's some info:
http://blog.questionland.com/free-recycling-computer-parts-in-seattle-wa

As far as the hard drive is concerned, the safest thing to do is just take it out and destroy it. If you have a very strong magnet then you can use that to wipe anything off the drive permanently.

Yes, it's possible and very easy if you do it the proper way. Just go into Settings -> General -> Network -> Set up Personal Hotspot. The phone will prompt you to call AT&T or Verizon to set up a tethering plan, which runs around $30 a month.

Doing it without paying for it is not terribly hard, but it is getting more and more difficult to get around the carriers themselves. You'll need to jailbreak your phone, which, if you're not running anything before iOS 5 is easy (the iOS 5 jailbreak isn't out yet if you upgraded with a non-hacked firmware package). Then you just buy a jailbreak tethering app.

However, AT&T and Verizon have both started cracking down on unauthorized tethering, and if you do tether they'll just sign you up for a tethering plan. There is one jailbreak tethering app that claims to get around this (http://junefabrics.com/iphone/index.php) but I haven't looked into it that much as I de-jailbroke my iPhone with iOS 5.

Well, if the desktop is connected via wireless you might find the password in the control panel. It's Windows 7, right? Click on the Start menu icon, then type "manage wireless networks" in the search bar on the start menu. It might take a second or two, but the link to that control panel will show up. Click on it - if it's connected via wireless you should see the name of the wireless network. Right click on that, then go to properties, then click on the security tab. You might have to click the box for "show characters", but you should be able to find the password there.

If the desktop is not connected via wireless you can sometimes find the default password by searching online for the router name and model number. It's also possible that the wireless router has a guest network, which is why it looks like you can connect - those types usually take you to what looks like a website to enter the password. If you wind up searching online for the default password check for this option too.

I have watched someone crack their windshield with this method. Last winter a friend of mine tried it, and I watched a giant crack appear. The windshield replacement company told him he probably had an imperceptibly small ding on his windshield that, along with the water, caused it.

Would it have happened if he had a brand new, completely un-flawed windshield? Possibly not, but how can you ever tell?

Go to a hardware store or auto supply store and buy a can of the chemical defroster. That stuff works great on mornings you're in a hurry.

Sprint is consistently rate the worst for coverage in the Seattle area and will be even worse in the outskirts.

I'd love to switch too, but I think you'd regret it unless you happened to spending your time around a Sprint tower all the time.

Here's a map of towers in Seattle:
http://www.cellreception.com/towers/towers.php?city=seattle&state_abr=wa

If you mean an ad inside a video, that has to play before you can watch the video you want, I don't know how, but if you're just talking about ads elsewhere on the page, you want Adblock.

http://adblockplus.org/en/chrome

You can also block videos that start with Flash (almost all of them) with Flashblock. It allows you to start the Flash items you want (say, a menu or something) while leaving blocked the ones you don't (Ford ad, autostarting video, etc.)

Sorta. I'm more upset that we're so flippant about uncontrolled littering of a bus sized piece of junk. The fact it could kill people sucks too.

Also, doesn't it take considerable expense and technology to PREVENT the space shuttle and capsules from burning up? Why doesn't this thing burn up -- did we accidently make it out of ceramic re-entry tiles?

First I would get a google voice number in the area code you would be using the most when you do use a phone - that way you have a permanent number to accept voice mails and/or text messages when you're not in call range, and you can access your messages from the web.

Then I would get a prepaid phone with a per-minute plan - you don't need a monthly package. Just put enough money on your prepaid account so you can make calls when you're in cell range, then reactivate next time. I'm pretty sure most prepaid carriers let you do this and keep the same number - you will lose any unused minutes, but it's still way cheaper than any monthly plan. You should ask just to make sure. Also a lot of drug and grocery stores cell prepaid phones & cards, so you don't need to give the cell company your credit card and worry about them charging you. Bartell's usually has good basic prepaid phones on sale.

The best per minute plan I've seen is T-mobile's - if you put $100 on your account you get 1000 minutes and 1 year to use them. But I don't know what's going to happen when the AT&T buyout goes through, or when that will happen.