February 23, 2007

Many languages have functions to process lists (array). These functions usually return a list, so you can pass that to another list function. This chaining of functions is really powerful. UNIX provides this sort of chaining capability. If I had a cities (with some repetitions) and I wanted to find out how many started with the letter ‘A’, I’d just type: cat cities | sort | uniq | grep "^A" | wc cat: types the cities. sort: sorts the cities alphabetically. uniq: finds unique cities (works only if sorted - that's why we had to sort the list). grep: filters the cities. Only allows cities beginning with A. wc: word count To do this on Excel, the only way is to ...

Running shoes may actually cause injuries. The heel has evolved to detect the pressure of hitting the ground, and to adjust the force with which to land our feet. Cushioned shoes soften the pressure. So we tend to land with greater force, creating more stress on our bones. In fact, the more expensive the shoe, the more likely the injuries! Comments Dhar 24 Feb 2007 7:03 pm: Argh… this is crazy. I have been running for the past year or so and recently shifted to Nike Pegasus because of the cushioning it provides. The whole article seemed like a rant. Will need to check the references he quotes before I can really believe this article. That said, I will nevertheless try a bit of barefoot running as the article suggests and see if it really helps. Cheers, D.