My post Reinstalling Windows concluded with “Right now the laptop is just a Windows system. I suppose I will turn it into a dual-boot system by adding some flavor of Linux, probably Debian or Ubuntu.”
Dual Boot Failure
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Author Archives: gmcdavid
A note on central forces
Only harmonic spring and gravity central forces produce periodic motions.
Bertrand’s Theorem. I had to prove this as a homework problem in the fall of 1972, while taking a course in classical mechanics at Stanford. That was very satisfying.
Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao
Indian-American mathematician C R Rao awarded Nobel Prize equivalent in Statistics at 102
Rao was already famous among statisticians when I was working for my M.S. in that field back in 1975-76. Nice to see that he is getting the recognition he deserves, and that he is still around to enjoy it.
GPT-4 and similar systems
Elon Musk and other tech leaders call for pause on ‘dangerous race’ to make A.I. as advanced as humans. This has gotten a lot of attention. I found it from a link in TLDR.
The next link in that issue of the newsletter was about $335,000 Pay for ‘AI Whisperer’ Jobs Appears in Red-Hot Market
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Reinstalling Windows
I have an old (2011) Lenovo ThinkPad which I used for various tests that I have documented in these pages. At some point the Windows installation on it got corrupted. I tried reinstalling Windows from the recovery drive that I had created, but that failed. So I tried again with a USB drive that I had created using the Windows Media creation tool. I think I had created this on another system, but it worked just fine after I put in old Windows activation code for the system. It took a while to download all the Windows updates it needed, but I expected that.
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Seeing Stars on the Moon
Why don’t moon photos show stars?. Specifically, why can’t we see the stars in the photographs of the Apollo Astronauts on the moon? As the article clearly explains, all of the pictures were taken during lunar daylight, during which the lunar surface is well illuminated by the sun. This completely washes out the light from the stars. If you made a long enough exposure to catch the stars, the lunar surface, the astronauts and their gear, and the lunar lander would be grossly overexposed. This would defeat the purpose of documenting human activity on the moon.
In fact, this issue was anticipated by Arthur C. Clarke in his classic science fiction novel A Fall of Moondust, first published in 1961, eight years before the first Apollo expedition landed on the moon. Continue reading
Rang Gaeilge, 28ú lá Mí na Márta 2023
Duinnín in Áth na Lachan (tuilleadh)
Dineen in Duckford (continued)
- ‘Go bhfóire Dia orainn,’ ar seisean, agus ba phaidir óna chroí amach é. ‘A Mhary, a chroí … Bhí snáth dearg chun cliath a chur ar gheansai, nó a leithéid, a bhí ar ordú ón mangaire aici, ‘Bhfuil ball éadaigh dearg ag éinne agaibh?’
‘Nil, a Athair.’
‘Agus cogar, a thaisce, ‘mbionn an clog cruinn de ghnáth?’
D’fhéach Mary ar an gclog, seanchlog a raibh aghaidh bhán bhricneach air.
‘God save us,’ he said, and it was a prayer from his heart. ‘Mary, my heart, There was red yarn to darn a sweater, or the like, which she had on order from the peddler, Do any of you have a red garment?’
‘No, Father.’
‘And whisper, treasure, is the clock accurate as a rule?’
Mary looked at the clock, an old clock with a speckled white face.
fóir Help, succour, relieve, save v cliath Wattled, latticed, frame; hurdle; patch of darning f mangaire Hawker, peddler; Small dealer, monger; Huckster, haggler m ball organ; spot, place; member m cruinn round; exact, accurate gnáth Custom, usage; customary thing m De ghnáth as a rule bricíneach freckled
Rang Gaeilge, 28ú lá Mí na Feabhra 2023
Duinnín in Áth na Lachan (tuilleadh)
Dineen in Duckford (continued)
- ‘Thuig Toole nárbh fhiú aon ní a cheilt. Tá marc an dúnmharfóra ar a chlár éadain ón uair gur rugadh é,’ arsa Nell.
‘Seafoid,’ arsa an gabha. ‘Nil ansin ach ball dearg, faoi mar a bheadh gead ar chapall.’
‘Cá raibh Fayley Toole sular fhill sé abhaile an lá úd?’ arsa an Duinníneach.
‘Toole realized that there was no point in hiding anything. The mark of the murderer has been on his forehead since the time he was born,’ said Nell.
‘Nonsense,’ said the smith, ‘Nothing there but a red mark, about like a patch on a horse.’
‘Where was Fayley Toole before he returned home that day?’ said Dineen.
WordStar on FreeDOS
After last time I tried to ftp a file from my Linux host to FreeDOos. The connection worked, but I could not do the transfer. Somehow my C drive was full. 0 bytes free. So I looked again at How to Backup VM(s) on VirtualBox to see how to restore my snapshot. This worked, although I had to use the “clone” option to restore it under another name. After the restore dir c:\ showed plenty of free space. So I tried the ftp again. I ran cd c:\net\mtcp and then used ftp (the basic ancient ftp client) to get Ws4.zip from the host. I had used this program a lot back in the 1990s. This particular zip archive has the installation files for WordStar 4.0, which was released jn 1987 and which I used at home in the late 1980s and into the 90s.
Reinstalling FreeDOS
After Installing FreeDOS I tried to get networking up. This is did not work, and I completely trashed the system. Fortunately I had no data on it, so I lost nothing but time. So I reinstalled FreeDOS.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 