Looks like Moyashimon earned its creator 2 million yen in prize money:
The Asahi Shimbun paper announced the winners for the 12th Annual Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize on Saturday. Masayuki Ishikawa won the 2-million-yen (about US$20,000) Manga Grand Prize for his Moyashimon medical comedy manga. The manga follows a college student who discovers that he can see and communicate with the germs all around him — germs that appear as super-deformed characters.
This is definitely on my towatch list.
The new episode of Darths and Droids – Ãœberstition – has this truly inspired meta-commentary at the bottom, which purports to quantify the dice superstition that all RPG gamers suffer from to varying degree:
Pete, being the highly logical, calculating person he is, rejects all of that as superstitious nonsense. He instead applies the scientific approach. Over the years, he’s collected somewhere around a thousand twenty-sided dice. Every so often, he gathers them all together. He sits down at a table and carefully and individually rolls each of the thousand dice, once. Of course, roughly a twentieth of them will roll a one. He takes those fifty-odd dice and rolls them a second time. After about an hour of concentrated dice rolling, he’ll end up with around two or three dice that have rolled two ones in a row. He takes those primed dice and places them in special custom-made padded containers where they can’t roll around, and carries them to all the games he plays.
Then, when in the most dire circumstances, where a roll of one would be absolutely disastrous, he pulls out the prepared dice. He now has in his hand a die that has rolled two ones in a row. Pete knows the odds of a d20 rolling three ones in a row is a puny one in 8,000. He has effectively pre-rolled the ones out of the die, and can make his crucial roll with confidence.
This is the sort of geek brilliance that you’d normally find over at XKCD (though this forum thread comes close).
Being the geek that I am, and also because I just sent in a draft of a paper so the ball isn’t in my court and I can goof off a bit, I wonder if we cant look at Pete’s empirical superstition more critically. First, we can write a script in MATLAB to actually implement Pete’s strategy and see whether the empirical results match expectation. Second, we can analyze the problem theoretically.
I’ll play with MATLAB later – as far as the theory goes, though, Pete is out of luck. Each die roll is a purely independent event, so the probability of rolling a 1 is always 1 in 20. Pete argues that the special dice have already rolled 1’s twice, so there’s only a 1/20*1/20*1/20 = 1/8000 chance of getting a third 1. But that calculation explicitly makes the die rolls dependent. In essence, Pete is arguing that the previous rolls represent a-priori information that can be used to modify the probability of the next roll. Pete is a closet Bayesian in a Frequentist world.
But forget boring statistics jabber – look at the superstition on its own terms. Pete rolled 1,000 dice, not just one, and so if you roll each one three times you would have a total of 3000 rolls, out of which 3000/20 = 150 should be 1s. Note that Pete set aside 50 dice that rolled a 1 after the first round, so there are 100 1s still unused. Pete rolls only those 50 dice again, and gets about 3 that roll 1s, so now there are still 97 1s left! Of course you could argue that Pete has only made 1050 rolls thus far, in which case there are only 53 1s expected, but if you make that argument then you’ve admitted that each roll is independent and thus the next roll would still be a 1/20 chance of a 1 again. Plus, you made all those 97 1s angry by not carrying out the other 1950 rolls. Don’t anger the dice, Pete.
As soon as I finish downloading Microsoft Office Ultimate (which I bought for $60 – you need a .edu email address to qualify), I am going to shut down my Thinkpad, remove the hard drive, and install the new hard drive I bought earlier. Then I will put the nlited DVD of Windows XP SP3 (using the original Windows license that came with the Thinkpad) in the drive and hopefully boot to the install screen. If all goes well, I’ll have a clean install on a clean hard drive. I’ve already backed up my data and also have an external USB case for the old hard drive handy.
Gulp. Here goes. I’ll be twittering updates if anyone is curious to follow the progress.
… was awful.
In a nutshell, mystical world existing in parallel to our own, schoolgirl recruited from ordinary life in which she doesn’t fit in, to play a role in prophecy therein. Schoolgirl learns something about herself and changes her attitude. World is saved by love.
Oh and let’s also mention that arrival into new world occurs via immersion in mystical water and then breaking out of a giant cocoon. And girl gets wings.
There is the super badass armor that drinks blood, the ultimate fighter badass who is really a dethroned king, and the bad guy who seeks total annihilation for no good reason.
Throw in some utterly pointless magical ability and some big flying dirgible warships, and a catgirl.
A waste of time all around. Thanks, Netflix Recommendation Engine!
The WD Raptor has long ruled the roost in terms of raw hard drive performance. These are 10,000 RPM drives that are widely used in servers and high performance gaming rigs. They are expensive, and they maxed out at 150 GB if I recall correctly. However, WD is now releasing the next generation, the cleverly named Velociraptor series, and these things are probably the fastest hard drives on earth. But I think the name has a double meaning for WD, because the very existence of this drive is a clear sign that the days of rotating-platter hard drives are soon over. These raptors might be the pinnacle of their evolution, but their breed is going extinct.
That the Velociraptors are awesome drives is not in dispute. Part of their advantage is that these unabashedly desktop-PC-oriented drives actually use notebook-drive technology for better power consumption and speed:
The new VelociRaptor takes an untraditional approach for a desktop HDD with its 2.5″ drive design. The 2.5″ form factor allows the drive to be smaller, lighter, and more power efficient than its 3.5″ rivals.
But what good is a 2.5″ HDD in a desktop system which typically accommodates 3.5″ HDDs? Western Digital addressed that issue by affixing the VelociRaptor to an “IcePack” heatsink which allows the drive to fit into a standard 3.5″ drive bay.
[…]
When it comes to performance, Western Digital promises a 30% increase in performance though is SATA 3Gb/sec interface, 1.4 million MTBF, and Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) to improve performance in vibration-heavy environments.
Using a 2.5 inch drive surrounded by a stabilizing and cooling frame to round out the 3.5 inch enclosure is just brilliant. I think that the 3.5 inch format is itself a dinosaur of sorts – they do rule in raw capacity, but 2.5 inch drives are catching up, and their smaller platter size means they can spin faster and consume less energy.
The idea behind the velociraptors is to compete with solid-state hard drives (SSDs) on performance, while maintaining the cost advantage (at present) of traditional HD technology. And there’s no doubt that these monsters deliver. But as the Extremetech indepth review notes, it represents the pinnacle of hard drive technology. This is the peak of evolution, but SSDs are only just starting to evolve. The new generation of SSDs is on the horizon, and are already faster and cheaper than before, so the value and performance proposition of the VR is going to fall, inevitably.
Consider that SuperTalent is going to release a 120 GB SSD for only $699 shortly. The read speed is going to be rated at 120 MB/sec. As TGDaily notes,
When I bought my 32 GB SSD from Samsung in 2006 and put it inside Q30Plus notebook, SSD drive settled me back for almost $2K. But read speed of 120 MB/s was stuff dreams were made from. Performance of that drive, considered world’s best SSD – was in 35-50 MB/s read range (don’t ask about write). But even that was enough to beat default 1.8″ 4300 rpm drive. Now, imagine putting a 120 MB/s read, 40 MB/s write SSD in your notebook that is currently ran either with 5400rpm or even 7200 rpm HDD.
As the CEO of SuperTalent Joe James notes, SSDs are going to drop in price 50% every 9 months for the forseeable future (call this James’ Law). Couple that with continual improvement in performance as SSD makers gain more and more experience, and you can see the writing on the wall.
The traditional hard drive makers know it too, and products like the VR are only half their response. The other half is to try and buy time through delaying tactics – such as lawsuits:
Seagate Technology, the largest maker of computer hard drives, made a pre-emptive strike against an emerging competitor on Monday when it filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing STEC Inc. of patent infringement.
In the suit, Seagate contends that STEC’s solid-state drive products violate four Seagate patents covering how such drives interface with computers.
STEC, based in Santa Ana, Calif., makes solid-state drives for corporations and other large enterprises, a market that Seagate executives have said the company plans to enter this year.
STEC is a relatively minor player, so this lawsuit is Seagate’s way of testing the waters before going after the bigger fry like Micron and Samsung. It’s a desperation move, and it will fail, but it will give Seagate time to try to catch up.
In 5 years, every notebook will come with an SSD. Traditional hard drives are going to be relegated to cheap desktops, servers, and external drives for backups or NAS. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: The Velociraptor is dethroned from the performance peak.
Major spoiler about finding Earth, if it can be believed:
I have to agree with Author that fanservice is a term whose definition brooks no hijacking. The examples he gives of others abusing the term might better be phrased as “brainservice” and “engineerservice”, respectively. Pedantically, it’s [thing whose base needs is being serviced]-service. This is why I invented geekservice as a term; I think the song “it’s good to be a geek” is disturbingly accurate in it’s exploration of the primal forces that truly motivate our kind:
Belonging to multiple categories myself (geek, fan, intellectual, etc) I may be catered by various types of -services in different contexts. For the most part I tend to refrain from fanservice, though with my Ranma viewing entering season 5, I’ve pretty much caught up on my quota.
When my daughter was 3 years old, I bought her this amazing toy called Magnetix, which is basically nothing more than a few large metal marbles and some multicolored plastic rods with magnets at each end. It’s a great toy, letting you build all sorts of nifty geometric shapes, and she really loved it. It’s invaluable as a child-distractor, though she’s already starting to outgrow it.
This takes the idea to the next level – and is definitely not for kids, nor something you will ever outgrow:
That’s brilliant. Forget the rods, just use the balls, and make those magnetic. Is it just me or should this thing be part of every graduate physics curriculum?
Congratulations to Don on his continuing recovery.
Also, the term “kawaii religion” is cool enough that I am stealing google karma for it from Don with this post.