trombonechamp

Thanks for the ascimath reference. Do you know of any similar technologies for writing equations in a simpler and more readable form than latex?

I've never seen ascimath before but I wish I had because I think I partially reinvented the wheel. I wrote some extensions to Pandoc (and an associated emacs major-mode) for scientific note-taking, with a main portion being a "simplified latex" for writing equations in a more readable way. The key features of simplified latex format are matlab-style matrices, UTF8 support, easy exponents, and better formatting (e.g. functions automatically use roman instead of italics). There are still a few edge cases mine doesn't catch, but I'm in the process of rewriting it in Haskell and rewrite is more stable.

https://code.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3

or for documentation:

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mwshinn/+junk/notes3/view/head...

> we need a "Yelp for labs"

It exists: https://www.gradpi.com

There was an article in Science about it last year: https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2018/02/crowdsourcing-goe...

Most researchers agree that mental disorders should not have names, as it is difficult or impossible to draw discrete boundaries in this complex and poorly-understood spectrum of symptoms. However, as a broad generalization, researchers are the only group who feel this way:

- Doctors like names because then they can provide a diagnosis and recommend action based on the diagnosis

- Patients and their loved ones (often) like names because it is easier to think/say "I have schizophrenia" than it is to describe their factor scores on a myriad of benchmarks

- Drug companies like names because they can develop drugs for specific disorders rather than for a combinatorially large number of factors

- Regulators like names because they can approve treatments and standards of care for a finite number of situations

- Insurance companies like names because it allows them to approve or deny claims in a more straightforward way.

While names are often times arbitrary, they make many things more convenient. I am not saying that I personally agree or disagree that there should or should not be names, only that this is a complex issue with many complexities besides the underlying science.

Also, I see nobody has mentioned RDoC yet, which is the taxonomy researchers are starting to use to classify mental disorders: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/constructs...

> Distance is a monotonic increasing function of time, so the inverse function exists.

Not to be pedantic, but I think they mean a "strictly increasing" function, as f(x)=1 for x∈ℝ does not have an inverse.

The fields of nutrition and economics do have the basics worked out. But the basics aren't things like "is eating too much salt bad for you?" The basics are about nutrient metabolism and the human body is a very complicated (/complex) system. The basics don't necessarily have to be "actionable", and they don't necessarily need to say how the system comes together as a whole. For instance, in your example of evolutionary biology, there is a lot of debate about whether natural selection or neutral evolution is the primary driver behind species diversity. We know that both exist and both happen, but we don't know how they came together to create the species diversity we observe.

Another aspect of this is that there are certain fields (namely economics and nutrition) where the popular press over-exaggerates every single paper as a groundbreaking discovery because it gets clicks. The media tries to present the idea that scientists as a whole have come to a brand new conclusion which should change the way everyone behaves, when in reality it's just a few people in a windowless room reporting on some observations they found and speculating on what those observations might mean.

As someone with no knowledge of this, how do you do small-scale precious metal reclamation and how did you get into home smithing?

The section on assignment operators is incorrect. x += y modifies the object x, whereas x = x + y doesn't. For example,

  >> a = [1, 2, 3]
  >> b = a
  >> a += [4]
  >> a
  [1, 2, 3, 4]
  >> b
  [1, 2, 3, 4]

By comparison,

  >> a = [1, 2, 3]
  >> b = a
  >> a = a + [4]
  >> a
  [1, 2, 3, 4]
  >> b
  [1, 2, 3]

Evidence that it is a whale and that there is only one: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096706370...

In most countries, there is an ungodly large amount of oversight that goes into animals used in scientific research. The problem is that when the media reports animal testing, they skew the facts in order to make them sound dramatic, when in reality animal well-being is taken very seriously. Lab mice in general live much better lives than your pet mouse.

There is actually a pretty simple algorithm people can use (in real time) if they want to generate random numbers: http://blog.maxshinnpotential.com/2017/07/05/can-humans-gene...

There is a difference between "random in theory" and "random in practice"... see: http://blog.maxshinnpotential.com/2017/11/05/how-you-should-...

Take a look at http://openhatch.org They try to match potential contributors with projects based on the needs of the project and the skills of the contributor.