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estevezon The Demise of the Public Library

There's a 3.5 GB ebook torrent at Pirate Bay. Between Project Gutenberg and places like TPB it's within reach for anyone with an internet connection.

estevezon Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read

>National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell

This thread is making me nostalgic. I was in the doctor's office with my mother the other day and I actually picked up a copy of National Geographics and sniffed it in the middle of the waiting room. I'll occasionally do it in the supermarket checkout line too. Always reminds me of pulling the first copy I got (Feb 1990) from the Christmas subscription I hounded my mom into buying for me out of its brown paper sleeve.

I don't discount how powerful the emotions elicited by the Proustian recall triggered by tactile interactions with the written word, but I just think the gains far outweigh what we'll lose. The conveniences that dominated the OP don't move me nearly as much as the idea of $10 solar-powered e-readers loaded with the equivalent of entire libraries spreading throughout places like sub-Saharan Africa or rural India (cf. mobile telephones). That kind of stuff gives me a warm fuzzy you wouldn't believe.

estevezon Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read

I grew up in a house almost totally devoid of books. I was completely dependent on libraries until age 18 or so, so books were always the property of the collective. To this day I can't bring myself to write marginalia in my books, the idea is just alien to me.

Perhaps this explains why I cast off physical books so easily. Once I got my kindle I systematically started paring down my library by removing any books that I was able to find electronically. Most of what got culled were mass market and trade paperbacks, and most of what I kept were books that had intrinsic value as objects (library of america, folio, and mid-century modern library editions).

estevezon Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read

My reaction to your question might be telling:

  1. I dimly remember that The Shallows had something thoughtful to say about the topic;
  2. I pull out my kindle and search the full text of 443 books for "carr kindle";
  3. I wait 3 seconds;
  4. I re-read Carr's take and mull it over.

Perhaps not fundamentally different from looking it up in the index, but it certainly feels so.

estevezon Space Plan From China Broadens Challenge to U.S.

I suppose my point is that China, like Russia and the United States, see a comprehensive space program as important to its interests. As the article linked to in the parent notes, these technologies are necessarily dual use, but I see no reason for that to lock us into a Sino-US space race.

China's leaders have ambitious long-term goals for their space program that will be almost impossible to meet on its own (the cost of a Mars mission would be staggering), so cooperation with the US is in their interests as well as ours. China gains access to dual-use technology, we get to massage China's nationalism into something less virulent, and if nothing else, we both get to delay a strategic confrontation.

Hey, I'm just some guy on the internet. But it seems wise to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 20th century and do a better job of accepting the reality of China's rise to great power status and accommodating them into the international system.

estevezon Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read

Did you notice the little girl reading the kindle on amazon? What I wonder about is what happens when you grow up with only limited exposure to codices. Is a book still a book?

estevezon Space Plan From China Broadens Challenge to U.S.

Two questions: (1) What does domination of space look like, number of military satellites?; (2) What weapons has the US deployed in space?

estevezon Space Plan From China Broadens Challenge to U.S.

I don't understand stories like these at all. Why are still seeing this from a Cold War perspective?

First, in what possible sense is a Chinese manned spaceflight program a challenge to the U.S. If we apply the same standard to the Russians, haven't we've already "lost"? What's with the International Space Station, can China not join the club? The first item in the National Aeronautics and Space Act [1]:

  >(a) Devotion of Space Activities to Peaceful Purposes for Benefit of All
  >Humankind.--Congress declares that it is the policy of the United States that
  >activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of
  >all humankind.

Second, why no division of labor? Let China do manned spaceflight. Hell, let's chip in (aside from debt service on all those T-bills). We can do plenty of cool stuff: start flinging bacterial spores into interstellar space, submersible probe(s) on Europa, etc.

[1]: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html#POLICY

estevezon Paul Graham: SOPA Supporting Companies No Longer Allowed At YC Demo Day

>Considering that 95% of the National Academy of Science is atheist, the correlation is still pretty relevant.

Since the Academy elects its own members there might be some bias lurking in that number.

estevezon Jurors Need to Know That They Can Say No

This article makes me want to take a trip to Kinkos.

estevezon The scandal of the Alabama poor cut off from water

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta --Brian Aldiss

estevezon Obama Announces $2B Fund for Startups

The lack of bankruptcy protection comes to mind.

estevezon TNT Is Not TeX

>Software evolves, and often dies when it doesn't.

That's what's confusing me about the piece. TeX preserves the ability to evolve (XeTeX, etc.) through stasis.

Or is it simply path dependence again?

estevezon Harvard 1869 entrance exam

You might also consider the role that Latin played as the lingua franca of scholarship.

estevezon Harvard 1869 entrance exam

College education was intended for the elite. The proportion of the population that possessed a high school diploma, much less a college degree was infinitesimal. Indeed, as late as the 1950s, only ~8% of the population were college graduates.

In practice, the requirement for the classics was no impediment to elites; one could be admitted on the condition that shortcomings would be remediated. Once admitted, you could easily purchase the services of a tutor or cheat your way through.

estevezon Harvard 1869 entrance exam

Plus ça change. There are no such sections in modern standardized admissions tests either.

estevezon Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

>Phenotypically, I can easily identify a black person vs. an asian person, with nearly 100% accuracy.

This is a rather hyperbolic statement. You concede edge cases, but the fluidity of phenotype means that it fails to map cleanly onto neatly delineated categories. We can look at the recent book describing the history of 'passing' reviewed here [1] for one of many examples.

>I haven't read much on the subject, but the idea that races can't be separated based on genetics is either false, or due to the fact that we don't have enough sensitivity in the measurement.

Again, I'd caution against letting your intuition be your guide on this topic. A cursory examination of the literature (i.e., 15 minutes on Google Scholar [2]) might lead you to the conclusion that: (1) genotype != phenotype, and (2) while we can reliably sort humans by ancestry using genetic information, there is variation within these clusters because the proportion of any individuals ancestry that arises from different populations also varies.

I think that the upshot is that the science is less useful when applied to a nebulous term like race, which involves a host of cultural, political and historical factors. The way we Americans define race in debates like these is a legacy of our binary 'one-drop rule' concepts of identity, and it isn't at all clear that appeals to science couched in sweeping generalizations have any connection to the biology.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/books/review/Arsenault-t.h...

[2]: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=genomics+race

estevezon Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

I suggest this piece [1] by David Leonhart. As he points out in the final paragraph:

    [...] all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score.

[1]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhar...

estevezon Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

I think race acts as more of a red herring when it comes to this matter.

Agreed. Allowing elite universities to continue to serve up this shadow-play of a sorting function has led to a perverse credentialism that often fails to reflect the actual performance or qualifications of elite graduates.

And even if I were to concede that admissions to elite schools should matter, this thread's focus on URMs reminds me of the joke that was circulating earlier this fall, punchline: 'Watch out for that URM guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.’

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/golden1.htm

estevezon Some Asians' college strategy: Don't check 'Asian'

Stories like this irk me, because they overlook the larger injustice of continuing to think about elite schools as meritocratic institutions, when they are plainly not. At Harvard, for example, the bottom half of the income distribution makes up 6.5% of students.[1] When we consider the most selective schools in aggregate, we see that nearly three-quarters of incoming freshmen at those schools are drawn from the top quartile of incomes.[2]

The illusion of merit that graduation from these schools imparts leads to a false sense of mastery amongst those who've been able to scale the pyramid of achievement, a self-deception that has had pretty profound consequences for the country since, oh I don't know, say 2008 or so.

[1]: http://chronicle.com/article/Pell-Grant-Recipients-Are/12689...

[2]: http://books.google.com/books?id=4JyQus8r9JYC&pg=PA150&#...

estevezon DNA Sequencing Caught in Deluge of Data

>In the case of human genomes, they might store even less — only the difference between a particular genome and some reference genome.

The results from comparative genomics would suggest, at least superficially, that a combination of compression and data de-duplication in the style of S3 and Dropbox would go a long way towards resolving the issue.

estevezon Fliers Must Turn Off Devices, but It’s Not Clear Why

What are the consequences for simply refusing to obey a crew member's instruction to power down your Kindle? Sort of like willfully ignoring the distinction between the first-class and economy security lines---something I wish more people would do.

estevezon The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

As did http://docs.latexlab.org/

estevezon Over time, Linux package dependencies show predator/prey relationship

This reminds me of the work done by Răzvan Musăloiu-E. [1], which used some visualization techniques commonly applied to genomic and phylogenetic data to examine the relationships between filesystems in the Linux kernel.

[1]: http://cs.jhu.edu/~razvanm/fs-expedition/

estevezon Why Science Majors Change Their Minds

I'm living through this right now. I'm struggling through pre-calculus, attempting to learn material I was never exposed to in high school, and the main emotion I'm feeling is profound shame.

Luckily, I've had some amazing research experiences so I know I can do the science; that said, I can easily imagine how differently things could have gone if that wasn't the case.

estevezon College has been oversold

Presumably, the students likely to enroll in a math or science program were (by and large) already heading to college 25 years ago.

This presumption is not supported by the data. Since 1970 the proportion of STEM degrees out of all degrees awarded has averaged 24% with a SD of `2.

estevezon College has been oversold

Another point (perhaps not what the parent meant): the author pulls out computer science from the mid-80s peak.

See here: http://imgur.com/XUCku

estevezon College has been oversold

If we look at the table[1] upon which the article bases its figure we see that the proportion of liberal arts degrees has been steadily around 38% since the 1970s. In addition, the same table reveals that business has held the plurality at around 20% for the entirety of that same period. Visual arts has gone from 4% to 6% in that same period.

[1]: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_282.asp

estevezon No TV for children under 2, urge doctors

    Heavy media use in a household is defined as one in which the television is on all or most of the time.