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User: Strange+Attractor

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Comments · 67

  1. Remember the MathWorld Story? on Library Journal Board Resigns On "Crisis of Conscience" After Swartz Death · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I took a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathWorld to remind myself about how CRC press treated Eric W. Weisstein (creator of MathWorld). CRC press is a division of Taylor and Francis. Whenever I get a request to referee for a Taylor and Francis publication, I decline and point the editor at the MathWorld story.

    Don't do business with Taylor and Francis.

  2. Greatest Shame on Could Twitter Have Stopped the Media's Rush To War In Iraq Ten Years Ago? · · Score: 1

    I believed the adminstration's story 10 years ago. But six weeks after the invasion began, I knew I had been lied to. The great shame is that we (the US voters) voted in 2004 to let Bush stay in office after it was clear even to fools (like me) that what you accuse him of was true.

  3. Re:honestly? on Texas School Board Searching For Alternatives To Evolutionary Theory · · Score: 1

    You would lose your bet.
    I would bet more than 60% percent of voting age Texans believe that heaven and earth were created by Jesus Christ's father less than 10,000 years ago.

  4. Re:TeX on What Early Software Was Influential Enough To Deserve Acclaim? · · Score: 1

    TeX, yes!

    I wrote my first scientific article in Macwrite, my second in ditroff, and my third in LaTeX. Then I combined them into a dissertation. I chose to translate the fist two into LaTeX. My second choice would have been ditroff, and my third choice would have been to pay someone to type it all up. A better name for Macwrite would have been MacMemo. For anything longer than a page, it was awful. I don't know what value it has/had other than a cautionary tale for others to avoid.

    I believe that after 30 years, it may be time for me to move beyond LaTeX. I'd like something I could program more easily. And I'd like support for describing function more than appearance.

  5. Re:Depressing on US House Science Committee Member: Evolution Is a Lie From Hell · · Score: 1

    It just makes me sad. Many decades ago I grew up in a Bible Belt town of 90K immersed in Broun's point of view (and accent). Watching the video was sickening. It was so familiar. I had hoped that rather than it simply being that I moved physically, the world had moved on. I was sadly wrong.

  6. Bradley Manning is subject to US law on Assange Makes Statement Calling For an End To the "Witch Hunt" · · Score: 1

    I suspect that Manning will be convicted and spend several years in prison. He seems to be a sympathetic pathetic character to me. If, as what I read suggests, he broke the promises he made to get a clearance, broke the law, and his action damaged US interests and endangered lives, then serious punishment is appropriate.

    US claims against Assange seem less clear. I don't know what US law he violated and I don't know how the US can claim jurisdiction. I found reference to a rumor of an indictment at wikipedia, but I'm not sure that the US has charged him. The Swedish charges seem plausible and unrelated.

    I have more sympathy for Manning than Assange, perhaps because the case against him looks clearer and more serious.

  7. You are right on Microsoft's Lost Decade · · Score: 1

    I picked up a paper copy of it yesterday by chance and quit reading after the first page or so. The article was effusive about the great creative years of Microsoft. I think they became rich by exploiting a monopoly that they inherited from IBM and imitating existing products in ways that precluded interoperation. I quit reading the article because I thought the author understood neither the history nor the technology.

  8. Elsevier boycott on 'IMAX Movie of Body' Allows Stanford Geneticist To Stop Diabetes In Its Tracks · · Score: 4, Informative

    Cell is published by Elsevier which has been in the news recently because of a boycott. A search provides http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/02/academics-boycott-publisher-elsevier I support the boycott.

  9. How carefully did Intel think about this? on Intel Joins LibreOffice · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've been watching Intel since the 1970's, and I've been impressed with their technical skill and business judgment. I didn't like what the Wintel duopoly did for computing/science/culture, but it made Intel rich. When Andy Grove canned employees at Intel Supercomputing for using Apples, I took it to mean that he believed that his company's future was tied to Microsoft.

    Do you think the decision to join LibreOffice was made at the highest level at Intel? If so, I think it is an important shift.

  10. Richard Stallman is psychic on The Looming Library Lending Battle · · Score: 1

    When I read Stallman's "Right to Read" more than 10 years ago, I thought it was more evidence that he is a crank. Look at it now: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html. Why is he always so right?

  11. Re:Lowest common denominator? on How Do You Keep Up With Science Developments? · · Score: 1

    What is that?

    The integer 1 usually works.

  12. Code demonstrates understanding on Are Graphical Calculators Pointless? · · Score: 1

    When I start coding, I often find that I don't completely understand things that I thought I did. While calling eig() from a matlab prompt does not require understanding much linear algebra. I think writing code often is a better way to clarify and demonstrate understanding than working examples.

  13. Re:Exponentially on IBM Makes a Super Memory Breakthrough · · Score: 1

    That's what annoyed me too. If one were proactive enough to shift the paradigm, how many exponential racetracks could one fit in the width of human hair?

  14. Thickness of human hair is not a useful measure of on How To Cut a Nanotube? Lots Of Compression · · Score: 1

    Human hair thickness varies by a factor of 10.

  15. Re:Other than [...], It beat DEC documentation on The Linux Programming Interface · · Score: 1

    Unix was so much easier to comprehend and had such nice tools compared to the DEC RSX OS and documentation that it replaced on PDP-11s. Just to know where to find something in the DEC documentation, you had to have read it before. I finally simply read all four feet of that stuff. (I think it was in orange 3 ring binders.)

  16. Re:Right to Read on Colleges May Start Forcing Switch To eTextbooks · · Score: 1

    He has been awfully good at forecasting and at figuring out how creative people can organize for their mutual benefit. When I saw the headline, Stallman's "Right to Read" was the first thing I thought of. I expected it to be cited in an early posting.

    As a professor for 15 years I grew to dislike publishers of journals and textbooks. I hope that free journals and textbooks replace current publishers. Perhaps the money that authors of popular texts make will stand in the way, but there are already some good texts available on line.

  17. ad hominem on It's Time To Split Up NSA Between Spooks and Geeks · · Score: 1

    I don't like Noah Shachtman or his work. I last thought about him when he wrote something about Los Alamos, NM, which I know well. His article was misleading and had a misplaced sense of excitement and drama. At the time, I checked out some of his other work and found that it was similar.

    I put him in with Dvorak. I ignore what he says.

  18. I used the first edition but have Beazley now on Learning Python, 4th Edition · · Score: 1

    I learned python out of the first edition of Lutz and Ascher. I just pulled out my copy for the first time in years. The last page number is 366. I use Beazley's "Python Essential Reference" almost daily. Not having taught python and not having learned it twice from two books, I don't have much to say about what would be a better introduction. I recommend python the language and Beazley's book. I never found Lutz and Ascher's book (first edition) useful as a reference.

  19. Re:The evil of a closed platform on Why Apple Denied the Google Latitude App · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Right! The last Apple product that i bought was an early Mac. Writing code for it was unnecessarily difficult because Apple was protecting the secrets of the "OS". I used SUN products for a while after that, but since really open systems became available I've used them exclusively. I will do the same thing with phones.

  20. Re:It's Target. on Do Your Developers Have Local Admin Rights? · · Score: 1

    The Los Alamos National Laboratory addresses the USB menace by encasing the physical ports in epoxy.

  21. Re:not quite that simple on Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content · · Score: 1

    You are right about what he's looking for. But Google is hurting his business by making access to his competitors' products easy and cheap/free.

  22. On the ground on Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content · · Score: 2, Informative

    I think Roger Cohen of the New York Times was there. The New Yorker also has printed a few unattributed pieces written in Iran recently.

  23. Re:A simple solution on Rupert Murdoch Says Google Is Stealing His Content · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We subscribe to four weekly paper magazines and use Google News to see what's happening on shorter time scales. For me as a consumer, News Corp's stuff is distracting and annoying clutter when Google indexes it.

    I for one, second ivoras' solution.

  24. Who owns the land? on Pickens Plans On Wind Power · · Score: 1

    Much of the land in West Texas where the wind blows is owned by the Texas and Pacific Land Trust (TPL). How much of that does T. Boone Pickens own?

  25. Octave is what Matlab should be on GNU Octave 3.0 Released After 11 Years · · Score: 1

    An excellent free instructional interface to excellent free numerical libraries that undergraduates who don't want to learn to code can use for simple examples.

    I've wasted way too much time trying to use such crippled languages for serious programming.