jcdreads

That there are badly motivated liars near a debate is not a reason to assume that everyone is lying or badly motivated.

Some random scientist is very (not completely, but very) unlikely to care much about the political implications of his results when analyzing his data.

A liberal politician looking to build his green credentials is likely to care a lot; as is a conservative Heritage foundation type.

But you know, sometimes science comes down on one side or the other. Science has shown pretty conclusively that nicotine is addictive; has suggested pretty strongly that humans affect the atmosphere in ways that affect how heat moves through water and air; and has shown pretty strongly that seeing lots of violence can be bad for children. Politicians from tobacco-growing regions, polticians from regions that produce fossil fuels, and politicians opposing limits on what should appear on television all therefore have the facts more or less not on their side; and unfortunately this usually leads to mendacity (of the sort the Heritage Foundation is displaying here) rather than any reconsideration of previously held beliefs.

When I first switched from theoretical physics to experimental physics I thought the same way as you. Now, after years of aligning green laser beams through optical paths that include microscopes and experimental matter, the sight of a green laser beam on a crowded and otherwise dark optical bench makes me unendingly (well, somewhat) glad that I quit physics entirely and became a programmer. Since 2002 those poor bastards have been pointing lasers down that same optical path!

Please do not even speak of the effort that's probably required to align the beam. And let's assume that their detectors are easy to align and otherwise mostly hassle-free.

But the fact that they've run such a cool experiment, and with such interesting results, makes me very happy, too.

[Edit: added this:] Good lord, I didn't even think of the cyclotron, curved separator with its tuned magnetic field, the whole damn thing under vacuum, the hand-rolled lasers. No wonder so many authors.

These paywalls around scientific journal articles were infuriating when I was a physics grad student, and they're even worse now that I don't have a university account through which to view them.

In that spirit, here is the authors' rather fabulous website:

https://muhy.web.psi.ch/wiki/index.php

Instead of {x -> x + 1} you could always run clojure on your existing production JVM and write #(+ % 1) to get the same effect.

Examples:

If you are a mortgage broker or a car dealer then 1000 clicks is easily worth $2000. Even if only a tiny fraction of them leads to a sale, each sale is worth thousands of dollars.

If you are Prada or Lexus and you need people to associate your brand with high-value objects like iPhones, then even high CPM's are a good investment; especially because high CPM's price out the rabble, so your fancy brand won't appear next to an ad for psychics or penis enlargers.

Advertising is bought because it works. Advertising in nice places costs more. iOS users are a much, much more attractive demographic than the general public who see/click ads.

A reasonably high-end display advertiser will pay a relatively high CPM to have their brand associated with an object like an iPhone with a high perceived value, even if no one ever clicks, and especially if theirs is the only ad on the screen at a time.

With the insanely fine-grained targeting information that Apple has about you and your device ---such as your name, age, country and home billing zipcode, how much you use your iPhone, your purchase history with Apple, whatever other information you've ever given Apple like income and occupation, your current location (in principle), what apps you like, what music you like, etc.---they can probably pick the right ad for each user well enough get really, really good average click through rates. You'd be amazed at how well you can crank up the average click likelihood even with way coarser targeting information.

The first line of the linked article at bestinclass.dk:

> Spring cleaning is complete and the driving code behind bestinclass.dk is now being released as opensource. With it you can generate a static site, import a wordpress blog, emit feeds (atom) and much much more.

Is it possible that each of them has searched both for her own name and for yours?

Or you could just highlight the current bar.

Well, except that when most people say "Facebook" they mean "a place online where I can look up and interact with my friends and family". That's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and many people do.

At least Shaw's didn't multiply the price by ten. Sounds like the manager at Shaw's cleverly identified getting rid of all of his (probably profitless) bottled water as fast as possible (and posting a sign outside saying they're out) as the best way to prevent clogging the store with the hoarding hordes.

> "The best signal we’ve seen from Lunokhod 2 in several years of effort is 750 return photons, but we got about 2,000 photons from Lunokhod 1 on our first try."

I was trained as a physicist and I'm still impressed by astronomers' ability to learn things from countably small numbers of individual photons that make it through a telescope.

Had I had this book when I was ten or eleven I think I would have been the happiest ten-or-eleven-year-old in the entire world. Like many technical things, programming is typically either self-taught or taught horribly; this seems like a completely reasonable attempt to do it right.

Especially since every kid these days knows how to look stuff up online, but almost no adults know how to teach them how to program from scratch.

My apps are always originally written with pencil on paper, then in pseudocode that gradually transforms into something that runs. Even those with nothing but ObjC sources. This new requirement seems, if not unenforceably arbitrary, then at least incredibly hostile to developers. Alas.

Naive question: is "graph viz" a term of art that happens to be easily confusable with "GraphViz", the graph rendering software?

I call not having to live atop one of the mountains in the Presidential Range.

Which is among the reasons an engineer might balk at moving from San Francisco to Olathe, KS.

Primary source: http://squeak.org

This point isn't actually blindingly obvious. Those of us raised on Pascal might have assumed (or, in my case, actually did assume, without thinking hard about it) that the program ended when the execution point reached "the end," where the main method was probably located in the binary.

It's disturbing how many Pascal-isms still pervade my thinking, even 20 years since I last (willingly) touched the language.

Oracle Coherence (formerly Tangosol) can be configured to be more or less anywhere you like on this triangle, including persisting everything to disk. Makes me sad that it's so expensive, and it chats a lot if you replicate fast-changing data across too many nodes, but man it sure is nice to have around.

I recall observing in the early 90's, with some amazement, that the actual Times Square had started to look like its depiction in Blade Runner, with over-the-top lighted billboards in every direction and sterile, glass-fronted places of non-sex commerce. It's easy to forget that Times Square verged on being a crappy porn district when Blade Runner came out.

AOL (I mean, Aol; actually the former AdTech) has a pretty good self-service solution. It has a pretty dashboard, good management interface, and getting campaigns up and down is fast. Not sure on price.

http://www.adtechus.com/Home

Write in your most natural voice; and with your canonical spellings. The only British-isms that I have trouble getting my head around quickly are the over-casual dropping of place names and neighborhoods in London. But we Americans grow up reading plenty of Dickens and Orwell and Shakespeare and whatnot, so just like a British accent we can handle it as long as it's consistent.

In general, you will do quite well to have even your American audience think, "Here's an well-written Brit."

Right, but her point is that had they (the author and her late husband) actually understood the costs at the time that they were making treatment decisions they might have made different ones. On the other hand, as you note, in a very real sense they'd already paid for the treatment in the form of decades of premiums.

No, it does not show that more people are finding jobs; it shows that people are losing jobs much more slowly.

That, and he completely ignored coriolis forces, which apparently explain the divergence nicely.

May we have a "try it out without first signing up" space where one can create and play with a list that only lasts for the session or something?

I'm sure every credit and debit card company---who get to charge several percent of each transaction in fees---agrees with you.

My recent favorite, Ebert's discussion of what it's like never to eat nor drink:

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/01/nil_by_mouth.html

Nah. There are all sorts of ways to suspend glass microparticles and a binder in some kind of solvent that evaporates after spraying, leaving a glass-particle-and-binder layer behind. The physics/chemistry of it are pretty easy (for those so inclined). What's probably hard is making the deposited layer durable and non-toxic. For example, if the glass microparticles turn into aerosolized dust then you probably don't want to do a lot of breathing anywhere nearby; think asbestos and cigarettes.