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A good idea if only because the natural world contains technology far beyond what humans are capable of engineering today. I use the word technology loosely here. Plants and animals are self-sustaining, self-replicating, intelligent, et cetera. We depend on this natural technology to survive.

However, it's a tough political sell for many people (and many powerful people). The more of us who put up money, the closer to the goal we are.

Charities such as the Nature Conservancy finance nature preserves... I'm curious about other organizations and philanthropists who do too.

Quite Nice. Just FYI, the very first command, :(){ :|:& };: is a fork bomb and you probably shouldn't run it in your shell

As an engineer, I usually know better than to use the phrase I hate to hear: "why don't you just..."

I'm surprised people bother spending so much energy looking for someone who is both a statistician and a computer scientist knowing they are so rare. There are so many more statisticians who can at least communicate and work effectively with developers and vice versa. Why not just compose a team? I feel like just like other professionals have assistants, statisticians should have them too, and they'd be focused on the computer science and deployment of the applied statistics.

Yes, I totally agree with this. I spent weeks debugging some some unexpected behavior with a flash memory chip, only to learn that some crucial information was "explained" in one very cryptic sentence. It turns out the datasheet was originally written in Korean and the translated, poorly, into English.

One thing that got my minesweeper game times down was to never actually mark the mines as such, just click the unturned squares you know aren't mines.

This is great. I wonder how many of the radio devices advertised or described in here would even be legal to operate today.

If it is completely true, then surely "pain = progress - reflection" must also be completely true.

The City of Los Angeles has a really interesting shape:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Los+Angeles,+CA/@34.091182...

Again, yes, but to clarify, the 60+ Hz I was referring to was not the servo loop update rate, but the rate at which (loosely speaking) the servo loop setpoint is updated. (1)

For example, KUKA robot arms can operate in a mode where a motion path is planned and a sensor on a tool tip can make slight adjustments to the motion path on the fly. The points on those motion paths (as well as corrections) are updated every 4 or 12ms (83.3 to 250 Hz).

My point is that servo motor drives do indeed implement (sophisticated) PID controllers for current, position, velocity control loops. (2)

Obligatory Defensive Writing:

(1) Typical industrial servo motors implement sophisticated control over the velocity and acceleration profiles of the point to point moves. Anyone interested can look up the DS402 standard and take a look at the motion profile modes of operation.

(2) The PID loops implemented in servo drives are way more sophisticated than the canonical PID control loop equation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_controller). Nonetheless anyone who finds themselves manually tuning the servo loops for an industrial servo motor will surely find themselves setting proportional and integral gains.

Source: Commissioning servo motor drives is a part of my job.

Yes, and I'm compelled to add that robots are typically actuated by servo motors and/or hydraulics, which are very commonly under the control of PID loops. Those PID loops allow the actuators to reach their set-points (whether position, velocity, etc.). To obtain 'smooth' motion, those set-points are usually streamed to the actuator at 60+ Hz, and it is the generation of those set-points that can become very complex; the stream of set-points is not commonly generated by the output of a PID controller.

This is a introduction to fundamental statistics, and not a very instructive one. For example, this is incorrect:

"By definition, one standard deviation is the amount of variance within a set of measurements that encompasses approximately the top 68 percent of all measurements in the data set; in other words, knowing the standard deviation of your data set tells you how densely the data points are clustered around the mean."

The 68% refers to a rule of thumb for normal distributions, not the definition of standard deviation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation

Also, applying this rule will get you in big trouble if your data happens to have a mean that's less than zero:

“Data with a standard deviation greater than half of its mean should be treated as suspect. If the data is accurate, the phenomenon the data represents is not displaying a normal distribution pattern.”

This is how I first came to a good understanding of assembly language. A basic, working knowledge of how transistors and logic gates operate was really helpful. The PIC12F615 remains my favorite <$1 computer.

I loved the idea of a googol and a googolplex when I was a kid. I may also be remembering incorrectly that a googolplexplex meant a 1 with a googolplex zeros after it. There was also the notion of the word googolplexplexplex... (Appending a googol 'plex's to 'googol')

Tidbit: my iPad tried to autocorrect 'googol' to 'Google'

This might be a bit tangential, but these ideas remind me of the importance of voting with ones dollars (as well as ones time). As an American I find that the freedoms I enjoy to spend my money how I like contribute far more to my sense of participating in a democracy than do my occasional trips to the voting booth.

It's the reason I can't bring myself to follow the often repeated financial advice to stick your money in an index a fund and then leave it there; I refuse to vote for the behavior so many of those companies engage in.

This is a great suggestion, especially if we accept the authors suggestion that hiring agents are only interested in exceptional foreign programmers, not the merely competent ones.

Also, what's a good ratio of exceptional programmers to competent programmers within an organization? Not all important code needs to be written by a clever architect.

I went down this rabbit hole myself, it's great fun. On our camera we noticed The RGB sensor data lined up well moving right-to-left, but misaligned when scanning left-to-right, creating a subtle rainbow effect.

http://topologo.com/animations/scan.html

As someone in the comments section of the original post put it, "newer doesn't mean better". Obviously software with security, stability, or performance issues should be re-written, but software doesn't "age" in the usual sense of the word; the source code can be re-compiled for brand-new machines/processors. A 2004 version of grep will always do everything I need grep to do.

We would want to do that for the same reasons that people write textbooks. Mathematica was not designed for building applications like Java or C++, but as a tool for research and learning. To that end, Mathematica is well designed and the documentation is exceptionally curated, just like, for example, a physics textbook, which also encodes public knowledge in a private (copyrighted) manner.

The mathematicians and software engineers at Wolfram Research should be compensated for their efforts, just like the authors and publishers of textbooks. And I'd much rather pay for my textbooks than see them filled with ads.

As a lover of mathematics I'm happy to see people writing and thinking about the ideas in this post. It's a noble pursuit.

check out http://www.classiccat.net/bach_js/