I'm out of mod points, but this is insightful. The R programming language is GPL'ed and works on lin/win/osx (packages for major distros). It is an interpreted language (except for a few internal commands), and so the source code for the several different 3D plotters is included with the program. Some you might have to install yourself, but this can be done by the install.packages command.
The introductory documentation might be a bit confusing - especially since it's often written for and by statisticians, but there's a mailinglist with a huge googleable archive and I've often found that "google:r-project search term" will get me what I need.
Les Horribles Cernettes are quite nerdcore in their own way. "I feel your attraction It's a strong interaction" seems quite the right words if you're the world's "one and only High Energy Rock Band".
I don't see why these so called "online OS" projects don't just use existing X infrastructure to create an easy way to access standard X windows applications and run them remotely over SSH.
These are running over FreeNX which is basically a compressed X connection where the local machine pre-guesses parts of the communication to cut down lag. I've tried them and they work quite nicely over a 512K DSL. In principle dial-up should work ok too, but I haven't tried.
That said, I tend to disagree with your point. Part of the idea behind YouOS et.al. is that being on the same machine as everyone else makes collaborative software easier. Just think if you could painlessly set up multiuser editing on any document you were working on. Flickr shows some of the way too.
The last thing is that you can't just pop into the average internet café and fire up an X/ssh connection. Something running in most browsers would work better here. Maybe something like VNC java viewer for NX is the way to go.
What would be really nice is some sort of common protocol for collaborative programs. That way we could both run some program locally (or NX'ed into our own snoop-proof private server) and have them connect to each other when needed. Pretty sure I'll get to see that in my lifetime, but if Open Source was a bit ahead of the curve here it would be so much better for freedom.
There is one apple on my desk. Not 0.99. Not 1.00002. Exactly one. I measured.
Actually, due to quantum fluctuations there's all kinds of particles and their composites being created and annihilated at your desk at any moment. There is an extremely small but finite probability that an apple has come into existence since your measurement. (Or that there was actually two apples, but vacuum fluctuations interfered destructively with the photons signalling the existence of one of them). Given this small probability of having 0 or 2 (or 3 or 4 apples) you could try to model your uncertainty regarding the number as a Gaussian probability distribution having a very small but finite sigma. You now have 1+/- sigma apples.
I really wouldn't eat any apples arising from quantum fluctuations though. First of all you have no idea what they're made of, plenty of apple-resembling quantum fluctuations might be toxic. Secondly the apple would be the rarest and most exciting object in the observable universe, probably for our duration. Give it to the Smithsonian or something, even if the curator seems somewhat skeptical...
Well, seriously, it's a matter of perspective. The other day someone was presenting his results at our group meeting, and one of the post-docs looked at his plots:
What temperature is that at?
Errrh, 4 Kelvin. Ohhh, it's high-temperature measurements!
The guy usually works in the milliKelvin range, so I guess it really was high-T for him. A couple of the rest of us exchanged glances...
I've been digging through a rather large and prominent OSS project and found that its code looks like it's been hacked together.
Care to share more about your experience? I can understand why you were afraid of unleashing an unrelated flamewar, but I'm curious and I think this is safely down in the comment tree.
The point the post was trying to make is that we rely on DNS and name resolution
I'm replying exactly to the part of the post I quoted. That point was wrong.
And yes, I do agree that DNS-less Internet would suck. In a pinch, however, we could do without it - if your mother can handle typing 42-60-404-420 to call you she could probably also handle 64.233.187.99 for Google. In any case the IP would probably be just another link on her start page, sorta like a cellphone phone book. And lots of different services (Google and others) would offer updated IP lists for download which would basically amount to some crappy sort of DNS over HTTP.
We don't browse to websites by IP address, in fact if we did, we'd miss a whole lot of smaller sites that make use of HTTP/1.1 name based virtual hosts.
The fact is that most scientists use high-level software (MATLAB, Femlab,...) to do their simulations.
Indeed, most scientists. They also know very little about profiling but since the simulation is used only maybe a hundred times that hardly matters.
The cases we're talking about here are where thousands of processors grind the same program (or evolved versions of it) for years as the terabytes of data roll in. Such is the situation in weather modelling, high energy physics and several other disciplines. That's not a "program" in the usual sense, but rather a "research program" occupying a whole department including everyone from "domain-knowledge" scientists down to some very long haired programmers who will not shy away from a bit of ASM. If you're a developer good at optimization and parallellism there might just be a job for you.
I prefer KDE's feel and UI, but prefer Gnome's look. (small taskbar... I can't stand hidden taskbars though so forget it!)
If by "taskbar" you mean what KDE calls the panel (aka kicker) try right-clicking and choose "configure panel". Then just change size to tiny. Works for me (KDE 3.4.2). Hope this helps.
I'm really tired of always hearing how something can be used for anti-terror this, national security that. THz spectroscopy is an impressive (relatively) new technique with applications for drug analysis, food chemistry, pollution detection, health assessment
and just about any chemical or biochemical sensing you care to mention.
Yeah, I know they must hype it this way in the press releases to get their crumb from the DHS quadrillion-dollar table, but I'd really like to see some greater perspective every now and then. Terrorism has killed what, 400 americans/year over the last decade. Even measured in human lives THz sensing is probably going to save half that without relation to national security at all. Well, I guess as long as they're just funded it'll be ok. Just don't ask me to write the PR.
This just confirms my suspicion that the chance of a Nature publication is directly proportional to alcohol consumption. (Wonder what it takes to get on/.) OTOH, having an advisor from the Bohr family probably doesn't hurt.
My local hospital had a patient reporting something very similar - claimed that bugs were eating her and her son, and she was itching all over.
I Am Not A Doctor, but some of these things sound like what I've heard of ergotism. Ergotism comes from fungus-infected cereals and can induce itching and hallucinations. Maybe some people get exposed to similar toxins in other ways? (With modern food storage and control, classical ergotism isn't very likely).
Slashdot posts such rubbish directly to the front page and then hides the retraction at the bottom of a Slashback section.
You know, that's standard operating procedure for any kind of media. No, I don't like it.
During the Mohammed cartoon crisis the boss of the Norwegian press organization was in some kind of misunderstanding. (I think he was alleged to be one of the cartoonists). With a sly grin he commented that he had discussed the problem with the Arab media, "but if they're as bad at corrections as my own members I don't really expect much." That's average journalistic integrity for you.
the only solution is a worldwide series of gory murders of spam kings
Do it right then. If you've got 15 names, murder 10. Then drop a Usenet post with a couple of scene shots saying "There's five names left on my list. If you want to know if yours is on it, just keep spamming." That would stop much more than 15 spammers. (Or at least they'd cower.)
With all this new fangled tagging it would be nice to have consensus on a good tag for articles related to neural/computer interfaces. Any suggestions?
Yeah, Denmark is worse but the other countries are following in our footsteps and many of them are not too far behind. What it comes down to is that there's really not a significant amount of EU residence permits hanging around aside from what human rights/UN conventions compel.
Is there a mutual development benefit to restricting foreigners from joining EurAmerican labor pools
In the case of the EU, the question is really moot. Anti-immigration politics has been on the rise for many years now, and you'll only have a chance of immigrating if you're a refugee(*), have close family here(**) or can find some company who's really really good at selling you as a rocket-scientist-needed-for-innovative-economy. There's simply no places left to tighten immigration policy.
(*) And people have been sent back, even if they'll be killed by their family for converting to Christianity (danish link, sorry)
(**) Denmark has a "24-year rule": To get your spouse here, you must be older than that. So my sister could marry, and her husband not be allowed into the country...
Not really workable for storage
on
DNA Origami
·
· Score: 1
This technique may have implications for storage (and implications for all of nanotechnology) but it's not directly usable as storage:
There's a long delay from binary file to programmed DNA while the staple strands are readied. It's read-only. It gets harder, less efficient and more error-prone as you scale it to larger arrays. DNA can be destroyed by all sorts of chemical reactions. Maybe it could somehow be used for bulk reproduction of the same data - like printing CDs today, but I predict that we'll find more useful technologies.
Instead, think of it more like a way to do chip patterns. No one would store their mp3s on a chip using optical lithography, but it's hugely useful anyway. This thing may very well be used for patterning all sorts of useful components - CPUs, nanowire processors, chemical sensors and maybe some kind of storage device. There's still plenty of room at the bottom:-)
tire tracks on other planets. They may be that the first signs of life we find, or that other beings find.
If we're talking about Mars specifically that's not very likely. Anyone close enough to spot the rovers would long ago have noted that nearby planet emitting all kinds of radio signals and having a weird off-equilibrium content of methane in the atmosphere. In general, it's hard to imagine Earth or any other civilization sending rovers far enough that the mother planet wouldn't detect each others before they make "rover contact".
it was a lot harder to get into trouble with Communist Party doctrine as a pure mathematician than as a physicist (who might wind up using "Jewish physics" like relativity or quantum mechanics)
There was discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union, but I believe the Communistically Correct way of referring to them was "cosmopolites". (Baaaad) I haven't heard that this should extend to physical theories.
Surely the calculations that they do are not done in farenheit (probably kept in Kelvins).
As one might expect they actually publish in electron volts (eV) which is probably also used internally. This is very convenient for lots of eksperiments in solid state physics, particle physics and apparently here. I don't see why they shouldn't convert to more widely (mis?)understood units when they write for public consumption. That the american unit system needs fixing badly is another discussion.
FYI room temperature is about 25 meV. Since eV is an energy unit (the potential energy of an electron lifted 1V) you need to convert back and forth with Boltzmanns constant.
In particle physics masses of particles are measured in eV, here the famed E = mc^2 is used implicitly.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm out of mod points, but this is insightful. The R programming language is GPL'ed and works on lin/win/osx (packages for major distros). It is an interpreted language (except for a few internal commands), and so the source code for the several different 3D plotters is included with the program. Some you might have to install yourself, but this can be done by the install.packages command.
You might want to have a quick look at output from different 3D commands (persp, scatterplot3d and wireframe).
The introductory documentation might be a bit confusing - especially since it's often written for and by statisticians, but there's a mailinglist with a huge googleable archive and I've often found that "google:r-project search term" will get me what I need.
KDE and GNOME could really use this as well. Security through minority is only so feasible. Is anyone working on something similar?
Les Horribles Cernettes are quite nerdcore in their own way. "I feel your attraction It's a strong interaction" seems quite the right words if you're the world's "one and only High Energy Rock Band".
Oh, and check the lyrics for liquid nitrogen too.
I don't see why these so called "online OS" projects don't just use existing X infrastructure to create an easy way to access standard X windows applications and run them remotely over SSH.
You can actually get such solutions.
These are running over FreeNX which is basically a compressed X connection where the local machine pre-guesses parts of the communication to cut down lag. I've tried them and they work quite nicely over a 512K DSL. In principle dial-up should work ok too, but I haven't tried.
Notice that a Dutch provincial agency has switched its 100 desktops to running over FreeNX. They're running their own server though.
That said, I tend to disagree with your point. Part of the idea behind YouOS et.al. is that being on the same machine as everyone else makes collaborative software easier. Just think if you could painlessly set up multiuser editing on any document you were working on. Flickr shows some of the way too.
The last thing is that you can't just pop into the average internet café and fire up an X/ssh connection. Something running in most browsers would work better here. Maybe something like VNC java viewer for NX is the way to go.
What would be really nice is some sort of common protocol for collaborative programs. That way we could both run some program locally (or NX'ed into our own snoop-proof private server) and have them connect to each other when needed. Pretty sure I'll get to see that in my lifetime, but if Open Source was a bit ahead of the curve here it would be so much better for freedom.
I can't believe this guy is the President pro Tempore of the senate (third in line of presidential succession).
Why not? He's not much dumber than the first in line, and less scary than number two.
There is one apple on my desk. Not 0.99. Not 1.00002. Exactly one. I measured.
Actually, due to quantum fluctuations there's all kinds of particles and their composites being created and annihilated at your desk at any moment. There is an extremely small but finite probability that an apple has come into existence since your measurement. (Or that there was actually two apples, but vacuum fluctuations interfered destructively with the photons signalling the existence of one of them). Given this small probability of having 0 or 2 (or 3 or 4 apples) you could try to model your uncertainty regarding the number as a Gaussian probability distribution having a very small but finite sigma. You now have 1+/- sigma apples.
I really wouldn't eat any apples arising from quantum fluctuations though. First of all you have no idea what they're made of, plenty of apple-resembling quantum fluctuations might be toxic. Secondly the apple would be the rarest and most exciting object in the observable universe, probably for our duration. Give it to the Smithsonian or something, even if the curator seems somewhat skeptical...
Well, seriously, it's a matter of perspective. The other day someone was presenting his results at our group meeting, and one of the post-docs looked at his plots:
What temperature is that at?
Errrh, 4 Kelvin.
Ohhh, it's high-temperature measurements!
The guy usually works in the milliKelvin range, so I guess it really was high-T for him. A couple of the rest of us exchanged glances...
I've been digging through a rather large and prominent OSS project and found that its code looks like it's been hacked together.
Care to share more about your experience? I can understand why you were afraid of unleashing an unrelated flamewar, but I'm curious and I think this is safely down in the comment tree.
The point the post was trying to make is that we rely on DNS and name resolution
I'm replying exactly to the part of the post I quoted. That point was wrong.
And yes, I do agree that DNS-less Internet would suck. In a pinch, however, we could do without it - if your mother can handle typing 42-60-404-420 to call you she could probably also handle 64.233.187.99 for Google. In any case the IP would probably be just another link on her start page, sorta like a cellphone phone book. And lots of different services (Google and others) would offer updated IP lists for download which would basically amount to some crappy sort of DNS over HTTP.
The fact is that most scientists use high-level software (MATLAB, Femlab, ...) to do their simulations.
Indeed, most scientists. They also know very little about profiling but since the simulation is used only maybe a hundred times that hardly matters.
The cases we're talking about here are where thousands of processors grind the same program (or evolved versions of it) for years as the terabytes of data roll in. Such is the situation in weather modelling, high energy physics and several other disciplines. That's not a "program" in the usual sense, but rather a "research program" occupying a whole department including everyone from "domain-knowledge" scientists down to some very long haired programmers who will not shy away from a bit of ASM. If you're a developer good at optimization and parallellism there might just be a job for you.
If by "taskbar" you mean what KDE calls the panel (aka kicker) try right-clicking and choose "configure panel". Then just change size to tiny. Works for me (KDE 3.4.2). Hope this helps.
Yeah, I know they must hype it this way in the press releases to get their crumb from the DHS quadrillion-dollar table, but I'd really like to see some greater perspective every now and then. Terrorism has killed what, 400 americans/year over the last decade. Even measured in human lives THz sensing is probably going to save half that without relation to national security at all. Well, I guess as long as they're just funded it'll be ok. Just don't ask me to write the PR.
Hey, I know these guys! Way to go!
/.) OTOH, having an advisor from the Bohr family probably doesn't hurt.
This just confirms my suspicion that the chance of a Nature publication is directly proportional to alcohol consumption. (Wonder what it takes to get on
The academic lowdown:
ArXiv preprint
The full B. Sc. project
Now, if only we could make 60gons...
I Am Not A Doctor, but some of these things sound like what I've heard of ergotism. Ergotism comes from fungus-infected cereals and can induce itching and hallucinations. Maybe some people get exposed to similar toxins in other ways? (With modern food storage and control, classical ergotism isn't very likely).
You know, that's standard operating procedure for any kind of media. No, I don't like it.
During the Mohammed cartoon crisis the boss of the Norwegian press organization was in some kind of misunderstanding. (I think he was alleged to be one of the cartoonists). With a sly grin he commented that he had discussed the problem with the Arab media, "but if they're as bad at corrections as my own members I don't really expect much." That's average journalistic integrity for you.
Do it right then. If you've got 15 names, murder 10. Then drop a Usenet post with a couple of scene shots saying "There's five names left on my list. If you want to know if yours is on it, just keep spamming." That would stop much more than 15 spammers. (Or at least they'd cower.)
With all this new fangled tagging it would be nice to have consensus on a good tag for articles related to neural/computer interfaces. Any suggestions?
Yeah, Denmark is worse but the other countries are following in our footsteps and many of them are not too far behind. What it comes down to is that there's really not a significant amount of EU residence permits hanging around aside from what human rights/UN conventions compel.
In the case of the EU, the question is really moot. Anti-immigration politics has been on the rise for many years now, and you'll only have a chance of immigrating if you're a refugee(*), have close family here(**) or can find some company who's really really good at selling you as a rocket-scientist-needed-for-innovative-economy. There's simply no places left to tighten immigration policy.
(*) And people have been sent back, even if they'll be killed by their family for converting to Christianity (danish link, sorry)
(**) Denmark has a "24-year rule": To get your spouse here, you must be older than that. So my sister could marry, and her husband not be allowed into the country...
There's a long delay from binary file to programmed DNA while the staple strands are readied. It's read-only. It gets harder, less efficient and more error-prone as you scale it to larger arrays. DNA can be destroyed by all sorts of chemical reactions. Maybe it could somehow be used for bulk reproduction of the same data - like printing CDs today, but I predict that we'll find more useful technologies.
Instead, think of it more like a way to do chip patterns. No one would store their mp3s on a chip using optical lithography, but it's hugely useful anyway. This thing may very well be used for patterning all sorts of useful components - CPUs, nanowire processors, chemical sensors and maybe some kind of storage device. There's still plenty of room at the bottom :-)
If we're talking about Mars specifically that's not very likely. Anyone close enough to spot the rovers would long ago have noted that nearby planet emitting all kinds of radio signals and having a weird off-equilibrium content of methane in the atmosphere. In general, it's hard to imagine Earth or any other civilization sending rovers far enough that the mother planet wouldn't detect each others before they make "rover contact".
I suspect you're confusing the Soviet Union with early Nazi Germany.
There was discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union, but I believe the Communistically Correct way of referring to them was "cosmopolites". (Baaaad) I haven't heard that this should extend to physical theories.
As one might expect they actually publish in electron volts (eV) which is probably also used internally. This is very convenient for lots of eksperiments in solid state physics, particle physics and apparently here. I don't see why they shouldn't convert to more widely (mis?)understood units when they write for public consumption. That the american unit system needs fixing badly is another discussion.
FYI room temperature is about 25 meV. Since eV is an energy unit (the potential energy of an electron lifted 1V) you need to convert back and forth with Boltzmanns constant.
In particle physics masses of particles are measured in eV, here the famed E = mc^2 is used implicitly.
So, how big a tax break did you get?