Technology
gregladen | September 21, 2008In July, citing a budget shortfall, the Governor of California ordered the salaries of 170,000 State employees to be cut to the Federal minimum wage.
Not so fast, said the State Controller. Because California's payroll systems are written in antiquated Cobol code, it would take six months to implement the change and nine months to restore salaries later. That's if we had the Cobol programmers to do the job, which we don't, because you fired them last week, Governor. And we can't hire them back because nobody's going to take a pay cut from Social Security to program Cobol for minimum wage.…
clock | September 21, 2008A clock is supposed to tell time. Furthermore, it is supposed to do it accurately and precisely. These days, it is not too difficult to build a mechanical, quartz, digital or atomic clock that is marvelously accurate and precise. But if a clock is not so good, it will have a systematic error, i.e., it will go slightly too fast OR slightly too slow and will, over time, get seriously inaccurate.
On the other hand, a biological clock is messy - it relies on ineractions between molecules. Thus, it will display occasional fluctuations - getting a little bit ahead at one point, a little bit…
gregladen | September 21, 2008WTF is Microsoft trying to do here???
Can't wait for the satires of this ad....
After you watch that, you may need to watch these to make you feel better.
First, a word from Linux:
Now, to get the taste of this whole thing out of your brain, here's a kitten falling asleep in a box:
gregladen | September 20, 2008Eventually, enough rich and powerful people/companies will become sufficiently inconvenienced or annoyed at the archaic intellectual property laws under which we now live that change will happen. Or am I being totally naive?
A few current stories relevant to this issue:
From Slashdot:
"As Chicago wages its battle to host the 2016 Olympics, it also finds itself scrapping over a valuable piece of cyberspace: the domain name of Chicago2016.com. The bid team along with the U.S. Olympic Committee are trying to wrest that online address from Stephen Frayne Jr., a 29-year-old MBA student. Frayne…
gregladen | September 17, 2008This is almost National Lampoon Vacation Movie funny, except that it is not funny. As five of you, who have read my piece at the new blog A Vote for Science know, the ultimate outcome of events ... and how society reacts to them ... may depend on the level at which were are set up to respond, and by level, I mean level in the hierarchy of government. So one of the most threatening dangers to which our children are exposed ... ice cream trucks ... are ignored. Meanwhile, Killer Clothing, which is actually quite rare, is under lock down at the Federal Level.
I have not even learned to "…
pontiff | September 16, 2008This morning, John McCain's top economic adviser made a bit of a mistake:
Asked what work John McCain did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee that helped him understand the financial markets, the candidate's top economic adviser wielded visual evidence: his BlackBerry.
"He did this," Douglas Holtz-Eakin told reporters this morning, holding up his BlackBerry. "Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you're looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that's what he did."
Al Gore, call…
gregladen | September 14, 200825 years ago, more or less, I was a graduate student and beginning a teaching career, but short of cash. I remember an opportunity arose for me to make some money programming. I thought, "OK, I can make some money in this computer biz, and use that to cover doing what I really want to do, research and teaching."
Just around that time, as I remember, I saw a long haired bearded guy from MIT being interviewed on TV, talking about free software, and how coding software was his art, his love, is vocation, and that he did things like teaching to get money to cover this interest of his.
I…
gregladen | September 12, 2008In many instances, a well thought-out regular expression can convince most non-technical people in the room that you're a computer genius who's brain possesses more synapses, forming more bridges and firing more rapidly than anyone's ever should.
Oh this is so true. The other day I was working on cleaning up some data with a colleague. We had two simple but common problems with our database, which had a few thousand records, and forty or so variables.
1) We needed to get a subset of data that included means for all numeric values based on a single factor (a factor = a categorical variable…
pontiff | September 12, 2008Fifty years ago today, this device
set the course for a pretty big revolution. That's a picture of Jack Kilby's first integrated circuit which first functioned on September 12, 1958.
clock | September 12, 2008From SCONC:
Thursday, Sept. 25
11:30 a.m - 1 p.m
(Free lunch if you're early)
Lecture: "Shaking Up Computer History: Finding the Women of ENIAC"
Historian, computer programmer, telecommunications lawyer, and film producer Kathy Kleiman will speak about the women who programmed the first all-electronic programmable computer, ENIAC, over sixty years ago. Sponsored by Duke University's Office of the Provost, Office of Information Technology, Women in Science and Engineering, and RENCI.
Bryan Center, Von Canon A/B/C, Duke
omnibrain | September 11, 2008Are you concerned that you are just sleeping with waaaay too many people? Do you want to avoid getting STD's? Do your neighbors give you dirty looks in every morning when a new person comes waltzing out of your apartment? Just place this wonderful pez like condom dispenser on your nightstand table. Not only will it ensure that you have safer sex - it will ensure that you have NO sex. When your prospective partner see's it they will realize that you probably carry many many diseases that they simply do not want.
But hey... it's only 28$ I'm not sure how you can afford to NOT get one!
-via…
gregladen | September 10, 2008The same way, more or less, that Bush beat Gore:
Part I
Part II
See this.
laelaps | September 10, 2008The first test of the Large Hadron Collider has successfully been completed, and guess what? We're all still here. I know virtually nothing of the physics involved but you can bet that more qualified science bloggers will be writing about the LHC today. Blake has a good play-by-play to get things started.
drorzel | September 9, 2008I've seen a lot of neat stuff discussed at the Science in the 21st Century meeting, some of which I'll talk about in more detail later, when I have more time to think. One of the most interesting experiences of the meeting, though, has been using FriendFeed to sort of collaboratively live-blog the talks, along with a bunch of other people.
You can get some of the flavor from looking at the comments on Timo Hannay's talk (PIRSA video link, which is worth a look). Not only are there several people making notes as the talk goes along, there are links to things mentioned in the talk, for easy…
cevans | September 9, 2008
It always tickles me when people email me to ask my opinion of pressing science issues, and I've decided to start posting selected exchanges for the benefit of all my readers. Remember, if you have any questions, concerns, or just want to jaw at me about all things science, feel free to write.
On Sep 9, 2008, at 4:39 PM, Christian Oldham wrote:
Hi Claire,
I'm wondering what your opinions are on the whole idea of the Large Hadron Collider and the possibility of the creation of miniature black holes.
<5,
Christian Oldham
On Sep 9, 2008, at 4:53 PM, Claire Evans wrote:
Hi Christian,
How…
razib | September 4, 2008Chrome is Google's browser, and Blogger is Google's weblogging service, but Firefox is much better in the Blogger editing box.
neurophilosophy | September 3, 2008Last week, the number of subscribers to this blog's RSS feed passed the 2,000 mark, after teetering just below that number for a couple of months. It's very gratifying to know that so many people enjoy my writing, and although this increase in subscriptions is tiny compared to the total number of subscribers, it somehow feels like leaping over a high hurdle.
Perhaps you haven't subscribed to my feed because you think you'll have to pay. Actually, it's completely free, as are all other feeds. Or maybe it's because you're unfamiliar with RSS. If so, here's a very short primer on this very…
razib | September 2, 2008After about 3 hours of use I have switched to Chrome as my default browser. Read all about it. Some are skeptical. But, I'm tired of the "Application Not Responding" :-) Also, I just ran a quick test of SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Results, and Chrome was 2 X the speed of Firefox 3.01 beta.
gregladen | September 2, 2008How can Google be taken seriously if a) it runs it's own business on LAMP servers using mainly Python; b) develops a multi-threaded browser with a memory-conservative development API; c) call it all open source and d) make it available only on Windows?
Since Google Chrome is probably very good competition for the remaining users of Microsoft Internet Explorer (which apparently is some kind of a web browser) I'll refer you'all to THIS very interesting cartoon (hat tip: Joe) that will convince you, if you are a Windows user, to install Chrome. But if you are a Linux/Unix (including Mac) user…