Cube Related Quotes

Fractals are a kind of geometry, associated with a man named Mandelbrot. Unlike ordinary Euclidean geometry that everybody learns in school—squares and cubes and spheres—fractal geometry appears to describe real objects in the natural world. Mountains and clouds are fractal shapes. So fractals are probably related to reality. Somehow. “Well, Mandelbrot found a remarkable thing with his geometric tools. He found that things looked almost identical at different scales.” “At different scales?” Grant said. “For example,” Malcolm said, “a big mountain, seen from far away, has a certain rugged mountain shape. If you get closer, and examine a small peak of the big mountain, it will have the same mountain shape. In fact, you can go all the way down the scale to a tiny speck of rock, seen under a microscope—it will have the same basic fractal shape as the big mountain.

We peeled out with a screech, Ice Cube bumping from the brand-new speakers she’d proudly installed herself. Naperville is a relatively wealthy and predominantly Republican suburb a little over an hour outside of Chicago, and I knew I was in trouble the minute I saw how many churches we were driving past as we exited the tollway. Seriously, it was like church, church, Burger King that whole families actually sit down and eat dinner in, church, church, Walmart, church. We saw at least 137 churches in a two-mile stretch, and that was only after I’d actually started counting them.

4.1 Introduction A flying bird generates lift forces to counteract gravity and thrust forces to overcome drag. The magnitude of these forces can be crudely approximated using elementary physical principles. Steady flight in still air at a uniform speed and at one altitude is the simplest case. It requires balanced forces where lift equals weight and thrust equals drag as well as balanced moments of these forces about the centre of gravity. Under these relatively simple conditions the magnitude of the mechanical power involved in the generation of lift and thrust in relation to speed can be estimated. The power to generate lift is inversely proportional to flight speed and the power needed for thrust increases with the speed cubed. The total mechanical power is the sum of the lift and thrust powers and hence follows a U-shaped curve if plotted against speed. A U-shaped power curve implies that there are two optimal speeds, one where the power is minimal and a higher one where the amount of work per unit distance reaches the lowest value. The question is, does this U-shaped power curve really exist in birds?

The other caution has to do with coordinating what work is phased out as a result of lower staffing levels. Leaders often let any such phasing out proceed of its own accord because they have faith that when they eliminate layers in the organizational chart or increase leadership spans of control, people who feel the increased workload will wisely and naturally eliminate tasks that are non-value added or of reduced competitive importance. But this faith is misplaced if employees are not clear about the relative value of work or what the strategic trade-offs should be. If they do not know what work to eliminate, they may not eliminate any at all and instead pass it on to someone else. In this way the organization chart is like a square of jiggly jelly. If you squeeze the jelly from the top and the bottom, it is going to squelch out the sides, and if you squeeze from the sides, it is going to squelch out the top and the bottom. Increasing spans of control—giving leaders more responsibility—may soon result in more layers (for example, one firm created “senior technician” roles for technicians to fill as intermediaries for busy managers). Decreasing layers of the organizational chart may increase spans of control (for example, another company eliminated a layer of managers but then hired a couple of new directors to handle the additional workload when all the reports were reassigned to the next highest management level). The total headcount dollars are never reduced, just reapportioned.

Now imagine that an anthropologist specializing in primitive cultures beams herself down to the natives in Silicon Valley, whose way of life has not advanced a kilobyte beyond the Google age and whose tools have remained just as primitive as they were in the twenty-first century. She brings along with her a tray of taste samples called the Munsell Taste System. On it are representative samples of the whole taste space, 1,024 little fruit cubes that automatically reconstitute themselves on the tray the moment one picks them up. She asks the natives to try each of these and tell her the name of the taste in their language, and she is astonished at the abject poverty of their fructiferous vocabulary. She cannot comprehend why they are struggling to describe the taste samples, why their only abstract taste concepts are limited to the crudest oppositions such as “sweet” and “sour,” and why the only other descriptions they manage to come up with are “it’s a bit like an X,” where X is the name of a certain legacy fruit. She begins to suspect that their taste buds have not yet fully evolved. But when she tests the natives, she establishes that they are fully capable of telling the difference between any two cubes in her sample. There is obviously nothing wrong with their tongue, but why then is their langue so defective? Let’s try to help her. Suppose you are one of those natives and she has just given you a cube that tastes like nothing you’ve ever tried before. Still, it vaguely reminds you of something. For a while you struggle to remember, then it dawns on you that this taste is slightly similar to those wild strawberries you had in a Parisian restaurant once, only this taste seems ten times more pronounced and is blended with a few other things that you can’t identify. So finally you say, very hesitantly, that “it’s a bit like wild strawberries.” Since you look like a particularly intelligent and articulate native, the anthropologist cannot resist posing a meta-question: doesn’t it feel odd and limiting, she asks, not to have precise vocabulary to describe tastes in the region of wild strawberries? You tell her that the only things “in the region of wild strawberry” that you’ve ever tasted before were wild strawberries, and that it has never crossed your mind that the taste of wild strawberries should need any more general or abstract description than “the taste of wild strawberries.” She smiles with baffled incomprehension.

Two writings of al-Hassār have survived. The first, entitled Kitāb al-bayān wa t-tadhkār [Book of proof and recall] is a handbook of calculation treating numeration, arithmetical operations on whole numbers and on fractions, extraction of the exact or approximate square root of a whole of fractionary number and summation of progressions of whole numbers (natural, even or odd), and of their squares and cubes. Despite its classical content in relation to the Arab mathematical tradition, this book occupies a certain important place in the history of mathematics in North Africa for three reasons: in the first place, and notwithstanding the development of research, this manual remains the most ancient work of calculation representing simultaneously the tradition of the Maghrib and that of Muslim Spain. In the second place, this book is the first wherein one has found a symbolic writing of fractions, which utilises the horizontal bar and the dust ciphers i.e. the ancestors of the digits that we use today (and which are, for certain among them, almost identical to ours) [Woepcke 1858-59: 264-75; Zoubeidi 1996]. It seems as a matter of fact that the utilisation of the fraction bar was very quickly generalised in the mathematical teaching in the Maghrib, which could explain that Fibonacci (d. after 1240) had used in his Liber Abbaci, without making any particular remark about it [Djebbar 1980 : 97-99; Vogel 1970-80]. Thirdly, this handbook is the only Maghribian work of calculation known to have circulated in the scientific foyers of south Europe, as Moses Ibn Tibbon realised, in 1271, a Hebrew translation. [Mathematics in the Medieval Maghrib: General Survey on Mathematical Activities in North Africa]

Dimensional models implemented in relational database management systems are referred to as star schemas because of their resemblance to a star-like structure. Dimensional models implemented in multidimensional database environments are referred to as online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. Figure 1.1 Star schema versus OLAP cube. If your DW/BI environment includes either star schemas or OLAP cubes, it leverages dimensional concepts. Both stars and cubes have a common logical design with recognizable dimensions; however, the physical implementation differs. When data is loaded into an OLAP cube, it is stored and indexed using formats and techniques that are designed for dimensional data. Performance aggregations or precalculated summary tables are often created and managed by the OLAP cube engine. Consequently, cubes deliver superior query performance because of the precalculations, indexing strategies, and other optimizations. Business users can drill down or up by adding or removing attributes from their analyses with excellent performance without issuing new queries. OLAP cubes also provide more analytically robust functions that exceed those available with SQL. The downside is that you pay a load performance price for these capabilities, especially with large data sets.

The most commonly quoted mass for the vacuum is 1094 grams per centimeter cubed (g/cm3) as calculated by John Wheeler who was quoted above.11 We will calculate later that the energy of the vacuum is 1095 g/cm3 by a slightly different method, so that value will be used from here on. As we will see, one order of magnitude difference is not that significant at this point in our discussions. Energy is related to mass by the well-known relation E=mc2. For comparison water has a mass density of 1 g/cm3 by definition. It is impossible for most normal people to grasp just how big a difference in energy there is between the zero-point field and water, so perhaps a simple illustrative example will help. Let’s start with the clichéd drop in a bucket. If the drop is one milliliter (1 ml) and the bucket 100 liters (72.5 gallons), then that gives us a factor of 105. If instead we consider a drop in all the Earth’s oceans, then we have a factor of 1024. That is a lot bigger than a bucket but nowhere close to how insignificant the mass of the drop of water is when compared to zero-point energy. To continue, what if the ocean was the size of the sun? That gives us a ratio on the order of 1041, which is still a long way off. If the ocean was the size of the solar system we get a ratio on the order of 1050. Now if we expand the ocean to the size of the galaxy we get ~1076 and we are still not anywhere close. What if the ocean is the size of the known visible universe? Assuming a radius of 7.4 x 1026 meters the mass ratio is 5 x 1095. There we go. So, the density of water compared to the energy of the vacuum is equivalent to five 1 ml drops of water in an ocean the size of the visible universe. Since we are mostly water and have a similar density to water, the vacuum fluctuations inside our body are like having all the mass-energy of an ocean of water the size of the universe inside each little part of us. Wow, we are pretty insignificant in the big scheme of things and so is any other body of solid matter or any amount of energy associated with it. This zero-point energy is all around us and all throughout us. We are lucky that zero-point energy is not detectable or anything we did would be undetectable noise to any sensor we could possibly make. Even worse, if we could absorb even a small fraction of that energy, we would be vaporized in an instant. Or, if all that energy participated in a gravitational force, the universe would be crushed to a speck.

China is one of only two superpowers on Earth, and they haven’t made their interest in global domination a secret. They’re a ruthless, totalitarian regime. One that has done a brilliant job of showing a friendly, benign face to the world, and managing public relations. Partly because with almost a billion and a half people, more than four times our population, they wield considerable financial resources and punish anyone in the West who tells the truth about them.

Berserker A warrior driven by emotion. Particularly anger. Gains bonuses related to critical hits, as well as resistant to many mental status effects such as Charm and Fear. Only class that can access the 'Undying Rage' ultimate, which prevents death for ten seconds upon activation.

Swashbuckler Similar to a Duelist, although even more flamboyant and flashy. High mobility, favors dual wielding and gains access to a few musket related abilities.

A rare and almost forgotten class of knight. Once common during the Second Great War. Has an affinity with dragonkind and can employ both items and abilities related to dragons. Can also gain a dragon mount which grows in strength as the Dragoon advances in level.