There was a thread on HN some time ago and I saved this link, which has some instructions on where to find the data and a description of the format.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/readme.txt

I wanted to start a little project to process it but never got around to it.

Hope this helps.

I've seen claims somewhere (maybe at "Watts Up with That") that no unmodified climate station data exists, that it's all been modified or corrected to adjust for something.

Is this data raw?

Well, it does exist, you just have to go back to the original sources, e.g. the meteorological organizations of the various countries, militaries, etc.

As far as I know, the position of the CRU is that they have no original unmodified raw data anymore. Don't know about NASA and NOAA.

This article claims that 3 out of the 4 datasets available, the ones from the CRU, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN), are not independent and that the latter two were felt by NASA to be inferior to the CRU's. The article doesn't have anything on the raw data, however.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-stunner-nasa-heads-...

The NOAA data is exactly what I was looking for.

Of course, it's only the U.S., and it's only for the past 80 years or so. But the dataset looks clean.

I always thought that the Strunk and White was about style - it's up to the reader to decide whether it's good advice or not - but to call it clueless is just wrong. My English improved a lot after reading that book.

Style, frequently, should be personal and 'learning' it often betrays the original writers intent. However, you're right. Strunkn and White were writing, primarily, about style and in such it is more akin to a recipe book for writing rather than it is a dictionary for spelling. If the book helps you in one specific area that you yourself desired to change, then it's likely been beneficial.

Having said that, Strunk and White's book is an abomination of self-contradiction. I can tell by your writing, albeit only a small snippet, that you don't follow their teachings religiously (as some do; IE the Grammar Nazi's - a little knowledge is a dangerous thing). You use your own style for parenthesise (dashes rather than commas), likely one you picked up and liked, and one the Elements of Style suggests is wrong (at least from as much as I've managed to read of the text).

It should be in the vicinity of

http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=-77.733333,162.166667&...

There is a book that has some of the same questions, and a lot more. It's "How would you move Mount Fuji" by William Poundstone (http://www.amazon.com/Would-Move-Mount-Microsofts-Puzzle/dp/...). As stated in some of the comments already posted, asking this kind of questions in interviews is by now "deprecated" (or even "considered harmful"), because they are in the public domain.

The layout is neat, but the purpose of the site is not obvious at first. Is it a review site? A shopping site? It's only after clicking around a bit that one can understand what the site does (present a selection of products in a cleanly organized manner, and provide links for purchase on Amazon.com). The name of the site is a bit misleading (bebefore? I thought it was something about how things were "before").

It is a derivative of oCaml and Haskell, but it's also a multi-paradigm language that borrows from C# and Python. It has elements of imperative and OO.

I don't know if it really is "the most original new face", and could be critized for trying to bring too many things into one, but it's not just a clone of Haskell or OCaml.

[edited typo]

One of the major benefits of F# is that it is .NET. This allows companies who already have investments in .NET (microsoft technologies) to explore a functional language in a realistic way. I think F# has a good chance of bringing functional programming to the mainstream.

OCaml is also a multi-paradigm language, in which you can program in imperative, functional, and object-oriented styles.

Sorry, but F# basically is OCaml. F# code can even be compiled in an OCaml compiler, often without modification.

The only credit I'll give Microsoft here is in not picking a shitty technology to copy, like they usually do (like Java for C# or VMS for NT).

"F# code can even be compiled in an OCaml compiler, often without modification."

I think you have that backwards. The #light syntax preferred by F# is not compatible with ocaml. ocaml and the non light syntax are about the same though.

Why do you say VMS is "shitty"? Linux is 15-20 years behind it on clustering alone...

Accoring to this article, the income/home price ratio has gone

  1950 -> 2.21

  1960 -> 2.11

  1975 -> 3.15

  2008 -> 4.40

With housing bubble and all, it seems that this is part of a long-term trend. Choosing 1975 as the hypothetical standard of where the ratio might return seems completely arbitrary.

> Choosing 1975 as the hypothetical standard of where the ratio might return seems completely arbitrary.

My guess is that it's based on the notion that wages (for the average person, not for the rich) have been stagnant since about that time.

Anecdotally, the standard advice I've always heard is that you should look for a house priced at around 3x your annual salary, and that you should be able to make a 20% down payment. If it's not possible to find a reasonable house which fits that, then there's a problem somewhere.

He has corrected it to "infinite loop" now.

There is a vast difference between Windows 95 and Windows 7.

I am not sure how vast it is the difference between NT4 and Windows 7 though

Having some knowledge of the internals would help you.

Are they that different?

As an amateur photographer, I have often noticed how the best nature images are often of curves, or other geometrical shapes with some amount of symmetry. Lines that converge to the corners or lead the eye towards the intended focal point are another good example. Seeing function curves overimposed on natural curves tells the observer explicitly of the underlying harmony in nature and in math, which we all perceive, consciously or not.