bearcatfish

Does anyone know what kind of algorithm they'd be using to "average" all of the letters? If you look at the I's and J's, you can see that though some people use horizontal crosses, they aren't included in the universal letter. Anyone have any insight here?

What is meant by 150 degree sphere? The picture indicates it's the angle between two tangents, but what is the significance of those particular tangents?

Cheers - I'm a big fan of providing these sort of lightweight applications in conjunction with a research publication. There's a real issue with reproducible research (particularly, though not limited to, the medical field) and this type of thing is a step in the right direction.

Could you provide a link to the code for the algorithm you're implementing? (If I were a better developer, I'd probably be able to find it through your source code, but alas...)

Also, I'd suggest you limit the input fields to numbers within the allowable range. Or, at the very least, to positive numbers.

It generally tells you the line number of the error, either in the web browser itself or in the R session that you're serving it from. I've never had a real problem with debugging the web app itself.

As for debugging the R code itself, options(error=traceback) is useful (though honestly usually unnecessary) as well.

The analogy doesn't really hold because ponds in the forest are going to be much more homogenous than planets. If every pond we looked was unique, we would probably be more interested in individuals.

Of course, there's no reason to assume that life on different planets is more diverse than different ponds, but it seems more likely.

We frequently see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearm homicides in the US is higher than that of other developed countries.

We also see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearms is higher than that of other developed countries.

I'd like to see statistics comparing the number of murders with other weapons. It is perfectly plausible that we have an elevated rate of gun ownership for historical or cultural reasons, and (since they are such highly engineered weapons) we tend to use guns to murder people, rather than other weapons.

If number of murders perpetrated with other weapons is lower than in other countries, its entirely possible that enforcing stricter gun control would not have a significant effect on the total number of murders.

Factors that might go against this hypothesis are the fact that gun availability might encourage people to kill more readily, gun availability makes a successful murder easier, etc... There are a host of other confounding factors, as well.

I don't really have strong a priori beliefs about these questions, but I'd like to see some more statistics. Another interesting statistic would be to see a time-series comparison of overall homicides, gun homicides and gun ownership in America over time.