Technology
gregladen | December 10, 2011This is a very good LaTex Tutorial, marred only by the fact that it is running in some odd operating system that I am not familiar with:
The rest of the tutorials are HERE, nicely organized.
Hat Tip Got Emacs
gregladen | December 9, 2011Some interesting news from the world of computer programming. A company that provides products to improve code studied a bunch of programs and evaluated how badly they were written. Cobol programs had the lowest rate of bad code, while Java the highest. Part of this is because Cobol programs are all old and have been revised and fixed up quite a bit, but it was also suggested that Java programs relatively suck because modern programmers relatively suck. For this reason, maybe Microsoft's latest Evile Corporate Decision makes sense: The new Microsoft 8 App Store deal allows Microsoft to…
jtoney | December 9, 2011
Tahrir Square, February 9, 2011. Photo source.
This article was co-authored with Jessica Wyndham, a human rights lawyer.
As we mark Human Rights Day 2011 on December 10, it is impossible to ignore a clear theme that has emerged during the year -- the use, misuse and abuse of technology in support and in violation of human rights. While innovative means exist to apply technology to promote human rights, there are serious questions about the legitimate role of government in restricting access to some technological advances as well as the obligation to prevent the development and/or misuse…
gregladen | December 6, 2011Chrome Passes Firefox, Google May Pull Out Support: I stopped using Firefox around the 20th time it made me do something I shouldn't have had to do because it sucked as a browser. Firefox used to be my hero, now I regard it as somewhat dangerous, and I only use Google Chrome. My productivity has gone way up.
(Update: Check out the Linux Journal Readers Choice awards vis-a-vis browsers.)
Apparently other people have had similar experiences, because according to at least some measures, Firefox has been overtaken by Chrome in the browser wars. Chrome is now the "new number 2" second only…
drorzel | November 17, 2011The water heater for Chateau Steelypips is significantly older than the usual useful life for such devices, and it's really started to show. I'm getting pretty sick of lukewarm showers, so we probably need to replace it.
As a good squishy liberal type, I of course want to replace it with something more efficient, and there are claims out there that the best way to go for efficiency is with the "tankless" models (a gas one, in our case, so we can still have hot water when/if winter weather takes out our electricity). Of course, there's a lot of contradictory information out there. The usually…
drorzel | November 5, 2011I sent in the page proofs for How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog this week, and by way of celebration, I went out and helped boost the economy by buying some consumer electronics:
Yes, I now have an iPad. Just one with wi-fi, not the 3G version, because we already send Verizon enough money, and if I need instant access to my email absolutely anywhere, I've got an Android phone. But I like shiny things, and this is pretty darn shiny (even if I'm hampered by it needing an immediate software update that's taking six hours).
Anyway, I have a few ideas about what to put on this, and SteelyKid…
drorzel | November 1, 2011This coming June will mark ten years since I started this blog (using Blogger on our own domain-- here's the very first post) and writing about physics on the Internet. This makes me one of the oldest science bloggers in the modern sense-- Derek Lowe is the only one I know for sure has been doing this longer than I have, and while Bob Park's "What's New" and John Baez's "This Week's Finds" have been around longer, they started out as mailing lists, not true weblogs.
As such a long-term denizen of the Internet, I'm pretty much contractually obliged to have an opinion about Michael Nielsen's…
cevans | October 28, 2011"I read this book. It's pretty good even if they made it in a week. Worth the fifty bucks, easy."
Bruce Sterling
In February of this year, I had the distinct pleasure of being invited to the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, a zygote of an institution nestled between departments at Carnegie Mellon University, to work on a strange collaborative project called a "booksprint." A booksprint, I discovered, is a fairly new practice, derived from the world of open-source software "codesprints." In this version, a group of writers work exhaustively for a week on a shared project, which is then made into…
gregladen | October 25, 2011('born '1927)
('championed 'ai)
('created 'lisp)
('thought-up 'space-elevator)
('won 'turing-award)
('died 'oct-23-2011)
gregladen | October 23, 2011You will recall that I recently reviewed the book Land of Lisp. It turns out I've got two copies of it, and would like to give one away. To you. As a bounty.
This is not a contest. It is a bounty. You can "win" a brand new copy of Land of Lisp very easily. What you need to do is to supply the best eLisp code, in my opinion, in the comments below. The code should have the following characteristics:
1) It should work, probably as an .el file. Code that you just think might work or has parts like "Then you do something like this bla bla bla" is interesting and you are welcome to post it…
pharyngula | October 5, 2011I'm typing this on a Mac laptop. I heard about it while browsing the news on my iPad. I have an iPhone in my pocket. There's an iPod in my bedroom that we use for alarm and music. I bought my first Mac in 1984; I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on an Apple II. Maybe you use a Windows machine, but face it: Microsoft has been chasing Apple's interface design since the 1980s.
And now Steve Jobs has died.
We owe a lot to him. He's the guy who shaped our virtual world.
(Also on FtB)
milhayser | October 4, 2011
The planet-hunting spacecraft known as Kepler has detected the first definitive exoplanet in a binary star system, and lead author Dr. Laurance Doyle has all the details on Life at the SETI Institute. He writes, "Perhaps half the stars in the galaxy are in double star systems. Understanding that planets can form in close binary systems means that these, too, can be targets in the search for habitable worlds." The twin stars have a combined mass less than that of our sun—and the planet is the size of Saturn, in an orbit as close as Venus. Fellow SETI Astronomer Dr. Franck Marchis writes, "…
pharyngula | October 4, 2011Remember when Facebook started censoring the pages of breastfeeding women? They were removing photos that showed…nipple. It was a violation of the TOS! If they didn't hold the line on nudity, they were on a slippery slope to open pornography. Think of the children! And most importantly, they were enforcing a consistent policy that simply banned all nudity without judgment about its purpose or context.
The situation has a apparently changed in 2011. Now there are crass Facebook pages filled with crude jokes about rape, and that's all right despite the fact that they do plainly violate the TOS…
gregladen | September 26, 2011Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time! is a book about lisp programming. If you are into programming for fun, artificial intelligence, role playing games, or an emacs user, you should take a look at this book. I've got some info on this book as well as a few others for the budding emacs enthusiasts.
Land of Lisp teaches the lisp programming language using the development of games as a focal point.
Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages, and occurs in numerous dialects. The standard form that is taught in Land of Lisp is Common Lisp.
The teaching style in…
pharyngula | September 26, 2011You can download the app today for £9.99…and the price of your iPad, of course, but all the cool kids have one of those already.
Dang, I was feeling so special because I had the book on Friday and the rest of America wasn't going to have it until 4 October, and now it turns out I was only 3 days ahead of you all.
(Also on FtB)
gregladen | September 24, 2011I very rarely read a story on the WCCO web site. That's my local news station. I don't scroll down below the headlines, and that by the way means that I don't see any of the wonderful ads that are down there. I often don't respond to facebook conversations with anything more than a sentence, but rather, put my thoughts in a text editor and then post them somewhere, usually not facebook. Lately, I've stopped with any extensive responses on Google+ as well.
Why?
Well imagine that you are using the ancient technologies of pen and paper, writing an important letter while at work. And…
milhayser | September 23, 2011
It seems like every time we turn around, there's another new smartphone or robotic butler pouring coffee in our laps. On Uncertain Principles, the engineering breakthroughs du jour are "technical advances in ion trap quantum computing." Chad Orzel explains, "previous experiments have used optical frequencies to manipulate the states of the ions, using light from very complicated laser systems." Such lasers (though effective) are unwieldy, and researchers are now using simple microwaves to perform the same functions. This promises quantum computers on a chip—eventually. Meanwhile, on the…
illconsidered | September 10, 2011What Exxon says, through its various mouthpeices, that global warming is not happening or is happening but reversing or what have you, is apparently not what it believes.
Once seen as a useless, ice-clogged backwater, the Kara Sea now has the attention of oil companies. That is partly because the sea ice is apparently receding.
Two billion is alot of money to put where your mouth is not!
gregladen | September 5, 2011
How come nobody told me about this!!!!
I eagerly await my copy of Land of Lisp: Learn to Program in Lisp, One Game at a Time!.
And while we are on the topic, Behold The Power of Regex: Emacs Lisp: Writing a Date Time String Parsing Function