cop359

Also, unlike 90% of starups; he actually has a business model.

This is exactly why patents exist. It's to stop predatory crap like that. You should use them and protect your corner of the market.

VC will think twice about investing in copy-cat startups that are on legally shaky ground.

The "Old" refers to the medium of distribution.

I have no idea what "Fast Company" is, but according to wikipedia it's a printed magazine.

There was a while in college I was like that. It's like you confuse your circadian rhythm enough that it stops bothering you. It was super convenient, but once you sleep the several days in the row it starts breaking down. You just need to constantly be changing it up a bit.

Does anyone know how they communicate with the sub?

My understanding is that radio waves can't penetrate water very far (if at all) and that it's impractical to drag a long cable down.

Strang's hand-wavy teaching style in my opinion kinda falls apart towards the later part of the course. I feel like the whole second half is kinda half baked. I didn't come away really having a good intuitive understanding of what the SVD was or why I should care about eigenvalues. I definitely think it's a good place to start though, but if you want something a little more organized I'd really recommend.

"Matrix Analysis and Applied Linear Algebra"

http://www.amazon.com/Matrix-Analysis-Applied-Algebra-Soluti...

It's very clearly written and all the proofs are not too long nor too short. It pretty quickly goes through all the stuff Strang covers and moves on to more difficult things.

I dunno. That book is really dense and terse. It's a good reference book, but not something you'd read cover to cover.

Seems like a silly paradox. Why is it important?

Also it seems very similar to this famous paradox: (from 600BC btw.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epimenides_paradox

So this is a StumbleUpon for Reddit?

You're absolutely on track here

The way he did it is nice and minimal, and in 2 months when you go back to change something you will have no idea what you did.

I've had to do a few things in R and I always dread revisiting my code. Half the time it's easier and faster to just rewrite everything.

Out of curiosity, does anyone have any info on if Dropbox is profitable?

I personally don't know anyone who actually pays for more space. Most people that use it are not tech savy and I don't think would take the leap to start paying monthly for virtual space. If I had to guesstimate, I'd say maybe 2% of users pay; but that's purely on gut feeling.

I feel like their business model is like Youtube: ie. provide massive amounts of storage and make very little money per GB stored (last I heard Google isn't making much money off of that). It's the "new" traffic + users = success. Not profits - costs = success.

The fact that they didn't sell themselves to Apple seems to suggest that they have higher hopes... Or maybe they're waiting out for a higher bid.

Can anyone make an estimate on how much that would cost?

Naturally because it's on "simplecv.tumblr.com" this is pretty biased.

But some glaring omissions

1) You can compile Matlab to C++ code which is much faster.

2) With respect to Portability there is the glaring omission of Octave (nor to mention there is MATLAB for unix systems). (I guess that also counts for the price issue). I'm not a MATLAB guru, but in the couple of times I've used it, it seems like MATLAB minus the handy dandy documentation and IDE.

3) Debugging in Matlab's ID is so easy a 5 year old can do it. The variables are all there; you can double click on any to see their contents. Debugging in a shell in my experience is a much bigger PITA.

4) I didn't look at their documentation, but I honest really doubt it's better then MATLAB's. I've never seen documentation so well written in an open source project.

In total it might be a lot, but it can't be indepth. for example "Error and Noise" is something you can spend a whole year studying. What are you really going to cover in one lecture? You'll just touch on a few things that might be useful at some point, but you're not building a larger encompassing understanding of "Error and Noise".

I've taking classes like this. You learn a few useful tricks, but when shit hits the fan in the real world and your tools are not enough you're left floundering. You can't prove things, you can't develop your own methods because you don't understand the principles they're based on.

This would probably be a cool class to take freshman year so that you can figure out for yourself what you'd like to study.

The course seems all over the place. You learn very little about a lot of things... The topics don't really seem to build on each other. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

Forget about superconductivity.

How about flywheels?

The data on that graph looks bogus to me. I doubt they'd be able to assess per capita GDP year to year so accurately for the years before 1900.

Take for example the Taiping Rebellion which was from 1850 to 1864. Described by wikipedia: "About 20 million people died, mainly civilians, in one of the deadliest military conflicts in history."

Yet according to that graph is had little to no effect of the per capita GDP.

so without very high power sounds and the nonlinearity business the whole "Sound from Ultrasound" wouldn't work? Huh, I guess all this time I misunderstood it.

for those curious http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound

I don't really know much about this, but wouldn't the 22kHz sounds potentially create beats in the lower frequencies?

As someone who actually has bro friends the author has no idea what he's talking about. He's completely misrepresenting bros and is regurgitating stereotypes.

First he gets all pissy about stereotyping nerds as having pocket-protectors and then in the next sentence regurgitates his one dimensional view on what "frat-house culture" is and bros' attitudes towards women.

I think you've got it backwards. There is definitely a degree of pride associated with being nerdy and non-social to the exclusion of "brogrammers".

Try getting a technical job as with a popped collar. Even if you are technically very proficient, there is stigma and distrust from people like the author of the article

Aren't you forgetting diffraction?

"The larger the corporation (by total employee count) the less nimble they become."

That's because of antiquated management structures. Look at Gore and Associates (makers of Goretex) for a modern corporate structure. Elements of a corporation should be almost completely independent and the only reason they are part of one entity is because of synergies and cooperation.

To give a toy example, McDonalds might grow and slaughter their own cows because they can better place them near their distribution facilities. Buying from a third party might create unnecessary overhead.

I'm sorta oversimplifying things, but I'd recommend reading

"Re-Creating the Corporation" by the late Russell Ackoff to appreciate why corporations exist (and why sometimes they shouldn't)

http://www.amazon.com/Re-Creating-Corporation-Design-Organiz...

"I had a "gift" of being really creative and having my best ideas just before sleep, just waking up, and during insomnia episodes."

This is called Hypnogogia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnogogia

The only way I can definitely replicate it is to stay up all night. The next day I will feel a lot more creative, but at the same time a lot less coordinated, frequently tired and not able to concentrate on doing something complicated. Also it's super easy to forget things, so you need to write down all your ideas.

I dunno if you often for instance stay up very very late with friends talking about things, but I think there is a similar effect at some point.

Soon they'll be paying us for our DNA! (for targeted advertisement etc.)

Physics education is extremely baroque. There is a set way of teaching which has been done for the past 50 years and nothing is going to change it unfortunately.

Everyone learns from the same exact textbooks. My professors were using the same exact edition of Kleppner and Kolenkow (Into Classical Mechanics) textbook I used. It's even a point of pride for them. The canonical set of books are:

K&R -> Intro Mechanics

Taylor -> Advanced Mechanics

Griffiths -> E&M and Quantum

Sakurai -> Quantum

Boas -> Mathematical methods

(I'm prolly missing a few)

Every physics student in the US is familiar with these books.

Part of the reason for the intransigence is that it weeds out the weaklings. They make Physics very difficult and impenetrable in part so that 1/2 the class drops out and goes to do Bio or CS(which are taught sooo much better) and you're left with the most hard working masochistic students of whom the top 10% will become grad students and slave away for minimum pay for 7 years.

I mean.. they're not actively planning this in an evil-planning-room, but that's the end results and the physics establishment is happy and no one is pushing for new methods of teaching.

I think there is a bit of cultural relativism going on here. As someone who goes to UCSB, that's simply the culture here. We have a lot of very smart "bro"s and while it might offend you, that's just the way we roll. It's about being chill. partying hard on weekends, getting drunk, having fun, having sex and then working hard during the week (some people are partying all the time, but as the uni has been getting higher and higher caliber students every year this has become rarer.. well except for the SBCC kids.).

While maybe a bit crude, for the average women at UCSB this wouldn't be "unwelcoming".

Maybe he should have targeted the website more to the average American and mentioned Jesus a few times (I'm being facetious to make a point)

I think the "stream of particles" method is the easier, most visually appealing, way of showing the direction the people are moving.

The first sentence is related to policies of the device maker and the second is to M$'s policies

If no money is changing hands; who's gonna edit, typeset and print them? Who is gonna manage mail, comments from readers and so on? Pimple-faced volunteering undergrads?

I think desire to have everything free is a fantasy of the open source community. Not everything can be run like open source software project. Sometimes people need to get paid.