estevez

Another book on the topic that I can recommend:

The New Foundations of Evolution: On the Tree of Life, by Jan Sapp

This one? http://youtu.be/0zHev9iM8kU?t=20m26s

Yeah, I can see where one could get confused. I use a version of Source Code Pro that's been patched to work with vim-airline[0], which is why it's "for Powerline". On OS X I think you can get the font name from the "Family" column of the Fonts pane, or via Quick Look in the Finder.

[0]: https://github.com/bling/vim-airline

To install multiple fonts on Arch and Ubuntu I just copy them into `~/.fonts` and run `fc-cache -v`.

edit: On OS X the directory is `~/Library/Fonts`.

For gVim I put this in my .vimrc:

    set guifont=Source\ Code\ Pro\ for\ Powerline\ Medium\ 11

I've been an active editor since 2011, primarily on the topics of computational biology and African American history.[1] I started by inserting citations, then by incorporating a couple of term papers I had collecting dust, before finally graduating to major rewrites of (relatively) popular articles.

Thankfully, in computational biology articles PR flacks and wiki-lawyers are at a minimum. The extent of my experience with the former extends to over-enthusiastic academics promoting their particular software. I recommend it to students, not only as a way to get some use out of old term papers, but also as a way to sharpen one's writing skills. Because it's an important vehicle for outreach there's the potential for recognition as well.[2]

I'd have to say that one of the highlights of my editing career has been receiving an email from the descendant of an article's subject thanking me for telling their story.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Estevezj

[2]: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...

Wikipedian here.

Your source's analysis reflects the years 2000-2010, while the citation given for Wikipedia's article is based upon numbers provided to the New York Times for the years 1991-2006 (which included a nine-fold increase in the number of cases filed during the years 2002-2006).

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/business/24ward.html

I remember coming across a group of other students who were getting into a argument about a tricky calculation required for a chemical analysis pre-lab. After this had gone back and forth for maybe 5 minutes, I pulled out my laptop and settled it in about 15 seconds, which was pretty fun.

We've found microbes almost everywhere, and they make up the vast, vast majority of life on this planet.

In Lake Vostok's case, the first reports were in 1999,[1] and yeast and fungi have been isolatef from ice cores collected at depths more than 3500 m below the surface.[2] Exciting stuff, no?

*: Posting from school, so sorry if these aren't free.

[1]: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/286/5447/2144.short

[2]: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1728/474....

It's a scientific mission, which is expressly protected by the treaty.

I think the article's main point succeeds on the merits: while we have a variety of statutory and regulatory mechanisms in place to make sure that things like credit reports are compiled in a fair manner we have no such mechanisms for the likes of LexisNexis, ChoicePoint, Facebook, Google, etc., etc.

I don't think its unreasonable to want some assurances that my creepy neighbor can't purchase my web history or FB data. Less facetiously, at the very least, I should be informed when an adverse decision has been based upon this information and should have a chance to review it periodically.

To us, perhaps, but not to the average NYT reader.

Sweave support? You could hand off to an EC2 instance and include n hours of computation time in tier x.

Music for 18 Musicians is usually my first choice whenever I want an hour of uninterrupted productivity. The piano and mallot lines are like a rhythmic propulsion system.

This is precisely where the Copyright Office (and its UK equivalent} can step in and make explicit that textmining in this fashion is unambiguously fair use.

Not solely on family income (but I'd suggest that if 100K is nothing in Manhattan one might be better served by looking a bit farther afield, Brooklyn perhaps...), but as it currently stands low income students receive no advantage at many elite institutions.

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

Yes, to an extent. I think the focus on what the ivies do or don't do distorts our view (the majority of US undergraduates attend community colleges, for example) of what truly is broken in higher ed. I've commented before on it here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3309894

>Correlation does not imply causation.

Precisely my point. By my reading it appears that the only empirical evidence for race-based discrimination (an extraordinarily grave accusation) is something that could just as easily be explained by factors other than racism.

But this is no defense of those elite institutions, mind you. I'd even go so far as to make an exception and tax the staggering returns on their endowments.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/09/harvard-endowment-rises-t...

I don't get it. Family income is a very strong (if not the best) predictor of SAT score. In this case, if you order each race by median income you get the exact same order as mean SAT score, Asian-American families with the highest median income and SAT, African-American families with the lowest.

If that's the case then I disagree with your characterization; I don't see any passage that refers to decade long studies that show that Ritalin is "harmful" in the long-term.

This is good news. As an undergrad at a liberal arts college (and a community college transfer) I'm painfully aware of how much information is locked away behind the Elsevier pay wall. In my case, I wanted to do an independent study project looking at citation analysis in early molecular phylogenetics, but so many of the relevant papers are locked away that I just gave up.

This is the second time that Elsevier et al. have tried to kill PubMed Central. I hope that this is a turning point in the OA movement.

Let me play devil's advocate here and note that twitter has been used as a communication platform by what the US Gov't consider (again, I take no position on the merits) terrorist organizations,[1] and that monitoring such a public forum is at least somewhat legitimate.

The offending party probably shouldn't have been deported, but that's another matter.

[1]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/28/al-shabaab-twitter_...

>The various decade long studies on Ritalin also show it to be largely useless and harmful.

Twenty seconds on Google Scholar would lead me to the opposite conclusion. Your source?

I think the exact point is that the journals don't pay for peer review.

> all life will be destroyed by natural catastrophe.

I'm going to disagree with you there.[1]

A bit tongue in cheek, but regarding your larger point, I think that thinking about preserving life in our corner of the universe solely in terms of keeping meat puppets alive in interstellar space is a rather parochial way to think. We already know of two forms of life that are far better suited to the void, autonomous robots and bacterial spores, why not get them out first?

[1]: http://worldcat.org/title/impossible-extinction-natural-cata...

I'd say something akin to shuffle on an e-reader containing 500 books would approach serendipity.

Or they could just kill the estate ("death") tax, ensuring that those future billionaires are their descendants.

> They could fix it by implementing some cryptographic code that's scanned at TSA entry points, verifying the actual document (boarding passes are a far cry from a verifyable document).

Yeah, I tend to believe that they really aren't serious about it. It seems trivial to include a data matrix barcode that encodes the traveller's name and flight data.