rd108

Check out enthought http://www.enthought.com for "everything and the kitchen sink". Numpy and scipy will generally have you covered, and often wrap low-level libraries written in e.g. FORTRAN and LAPACK. YMMV but I've used python exclusively in scientific computing as well as "web startup" data analysis environments. I love being able to write my data analysis and web server code in the same language. :)

This looks like it's using R to teach, primarily. I'm partial to "Collective Intelligence" (Toby Segaran's book)-- it's written with all python examples and appears to have much of the same content and approach (practical application > theoretical underpinnings).

What do you think of the current SOPA-like "Research Works Act" bill being shuttled through Congress?

http://publishing.umich.edu/2012/01/05/more-legislative/ http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/24541-H...

The currently pending Research Works Act is a SOPA-like debacle that seeks to impede the free flow of scientific information to a degree previously unheard of. Thank you for lending your voice to stop this counter-productive madness.

http://publishing.umich.edu/2012/01/05/more-legislative/ http://www.opencongress.org/contact_congress_letters/24541-H...

I just watched the video. Thanks for adding that link.

I thought about this for a while and realized after sleeping on it that this quality problem seemed to occur only after points visibility was removed from comments. People can and should be able to say what they want, but if the only public feedback is greying out downvoted comments (negative) then you're losing the positive feedback cycle and hampering the ability of the cybernetic system to regulate itself.

Yup. All great projects but jQuery Mobile is just too damn slow. Drives me crazy.

That is amazing! I'm impressed....

don't celebrate prematurely

Is it... really just one guy doing the core dev work? (nonwithstanding plugins and so forth)

Fascinating. Thank you for the link.

Excerpt:

3.1 What information is retained? The NOC will retain only user-generated information posted to publicly available online social media sites. Information posted in the public sphere that the Department uses to provide situational awareness or establish a common operating picture becomes a federal record and the Department is required to maintain a copy. However, the Department is working with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on a retention schedule to immediately delete PII, upon the approval of this schedule by NARA, as well as to maintain records necessary for further use by the Department.

same here. eye-opening

I worked with airjaldi.org in the Himalayan mountains for a few months. They use a solar+mains hybrid to power wifi mesh nodes, but the issues they had to work around (variable voltage inputs, using locally available components) might be applicable for your laptop charging use case as well. Here are some design specs. Good luck! http://drupal.airjaldi.com/node/69

I have a feeling, looking back, that the birth of weaponized drones will be far worse for our world than the invention of the nuclear bomb. they're already being used domestically in the United States by law enforcement, which raises some pretty disturbing prospects. and now other countries (e.g. China) are creating drones at a breakneck pace....

thank you.

Thank you for cutting through the bullshit. Especially in developing (not fully industrialized) economies, the power of the web on everyone's phone will change our world.

This is actually what I was thinking too. The fundraising pitch they're currently running says something like "We have 6000 servers and only 95 paid staff". I'm not sure 95 paid positions + servers cost 20 million a year, but then again, Wikipedia does deserve to be well-funded and not have to worry about making budget year-to-year. I'd like to see a more open transparent accounting of the funds right there on the fundraising page.

gained a lot from this comment. thank you

Thank you for framing the choice like this. The article mentions as a case in point Iceland; our Western media has conveniently ignored the miracle that occurred there post-banking crisis. They threw the government and banking chiefs out and started their democracy afresh- actually having ordinary Icelandic people help reformulate their Constitution and their future. It's a beautiful story: http://wilmaswish.blogspot.com/

traditionally, yoga referred to both preliminary physical practice ("what ladies do" or hatha yoga) as well as mental practice ("meditation" or raja yoga). The two were inextricably linked, where the former was practiced for the sole purpose of preparing the body for long, seated meditation.

Yes, we have started building a database of many different styles of meditation, but the work is just beginning. There's so much we don't know yet! Thank you for the feedback

We do need to get a little more info on the teaser page, we've been pretty heads down on the actual app for the RockHealth.org incubator. We just finished last week so I'll throw something together soon. My background is actually neuroscience; before this I was doing neuroimaging of meditation research at the Harvard-MIT-MGH Martinos Center in Boston. The whole project kind of started with this crazy trip to India to find monks to put EEG equipment on in 2009.

The two areas highlighted in the article show prefrontal cortex (front of brain) and PCC (towards the back) shutting down. The prefrontal cortex is associated with executive attention and reasoning, while PCC appears to be differentially dialed up or down in conditions with altered states of consciousness (like people under anesthesia, in a coma, or apparently meditating.) Shameless plug: We're using these neuroscientific insights to design a meditation self-tracking tool at http://brainbot.me now.

I've worked with researchers studying how mindfulness can ameliorate chronic pain. Here are some references- the mind is a powerful thing.

http://dericbownds.net/uploaded_images/medpain.pdf http://www.neuro.cjb.net/content/31/14/5540.short

You're right.

"like any portfolio of startups ours has a pretty steep power law distribution. If we can produce accurate estimates of the values of the top 10%, we'll have a sufficiently accurate estimate of the total value. "

No... this is incorrect. Power laws looks like this (imagine the "top 10%" in green): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law so the median value, or even showing a histogram of all values, would be WAY more informative. My hunch is that the "22.4m" average valuation is way higher than most YC grads.

hahah

"Hollywood Principle: "Don't call us; we'll call you." ... You implement the interfaces, you get registered. You get called when the time is right. This requires a distinctly different way of thinking to that which is taught in introductory programming where the student dictates the flow of control." — Dafydd Rees

Great, free ebook by Stephen Ferg. Well-written, conversational style.

worse than that- AT&T is buying T-mobile apparently.

hah, this is cool.