Rants & Raves

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April 10, 2002 Auto-Refresh a Web Page, and the Schrodinger Wave Equation

At the end of the show today, a viewer asked how to get pages such as My Yahoo to refresh automatically. Yahoo does allow you to cutomize this setting. I finally found it under Add/Delete Pages (really intuitive). But the shortest time interval is 15 minutes. If you want to do this for other pages or to refresh Yahoo more often, copy the following code to a text editor such as Wordpad.

<html>
<head>
<title>My Yahoo - Auto Refresh</title>
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="30">
</head>
<frameset rows="100%">
<frame name="main" src="http://my.yahoo.com">
</frameset>
</html>

Customiize the url and the content="30" value to the amount of time in seconds that you want. Then save as a text document with the ".html" extension, using whatever file name you like. Then open the file with your internet browser and bookmark it. You can save a file on your hard drive to favorites or bookmarks, in addition to internet addresses.

The Schrodinger equation shirt:
When they asked for people to email Megan if they knew what the equation on the guest's shirt was, I bolted for the computer. Boy do I know that @#$%* equation! I beat my head against it in the hardest class I took in college, biophysical chemistry. I've never had a use for it since. But the Schrodinger wave equation can be fun. There is a story of Schrodinger trying to explain his theory to an disbelieving Einstein about a cat in a box with a vial of poison. Einstein's famous response was "God does not play dice with the universe."

Cecil Adams writes a syndicated column called "The Straight Dope" where readers send him questions that he researches and then answers. One reader sent him a question about the Schrodinger's cat story written in rhyming verse, so Adams responded in kind: The Straight Dope: The story of Schroedinger's cat (an epic poem)

Posted by Christy on April 10, 2002 11:13 PM

Comments:

Thanks Christy, I learn something new from you almost every day! Now I can refresh 'hamsterdance.com', I mean my home page automatically. BTW, someday I'll beat you at literati.

Posted by: John on April 11, 2002 12:25 AM