Sometimes simple things can be very hard to do. For instance plotting a single point with gnuplot. Luckily, there are two horrible hacks which allow you to accomplish this from the gnuplot prompt (putting the point’s coordinates in a file is of course just the easy way out…).
Method 1:
gnuplot> plot “< echo ‘x y’”
(Set x and y to your point’s x and y coordinate)
Method 2:
gnuplot> plot “-” (press shift enter)
x y (press enter)
e
Holy *’$@#! I just looked at slashdot for the first time today and I really can’t believe what I’m reading: A 13(!) year old sixth-grader from california just got 6.5 million dollars in venture capital for a company he co-founded and which he is said to have been running the last year or so in his garage.According to the slashdot article and the original article behind it the kid raised the first capital for his company by selling online game items. Now his company tries to fully commercialize this market and offers game publishers a platform enabling people to sell and buy online game stuff (like that kick ass wow sword you always wanted) directly in-game.Ok, we were already getting used to 18 year old dot com millionaires and other web 2.0 strangenesses, but this story now seems to set a new record. So I guess that all those college students wishing to start their own companies should hurry up just a little. The next generation of kindergarten enterpreneurs is already forming…
Check out this: http://www.wissenschaft.de/wissenschaft/news/282945 (in German). Some scientists apparently have been trying to find a difference in how persons who consider themselves rather liberal (or conservative) deal with new situations. The result they came up with seems to be quite interesting: Whenever the situation in the experiment changed, in most ‘liberal brains’ a different area was activated than in the ‘conservative brains’. The ‘liberal area’ in the brain seems to be the anterior cingular cortex. The scientists conclude that this might be a clue to whether political opinions are inherited saying that political opinion usually doesn’t change throughout one’s life. I can imagine the next Fox News headline: ‘Scientists: Liberals need brain surgery.’Â
According to this article on forbes.com a US B-52 bomber mistakenly(!) flew around six nuclear armed missiles across several states of the US. Guess I’ll go rent me some Kubrick DVDs now…
