wgrover

Sounds good. Any example content you can put on the signup website now (a single sample story, a sample contents listing, anything) might go a long way in convincing people to sign up.

Add a link to the current issue of the newsletter, so folks know what to expect before signing up.

[EDIT: I see the first issue will be the 17th, cool; well maybe add a link to that when it comes out]

Very cool, but about eight orders of magnitude away from nano.

There's a similar demo at the Exploratorium in San Francisco - you can drop disks of different materials (and with different cutouts) through the electromagnet and see the different rates at which they drop. I recall it also had a thoughtful warning sign instructing folks to keep their (magnetic stripe) BART cards away from the electromagnet!

LEGO's "Creationary" game always gives me pause. I suppose it's 3D "Pictionary" but the name makes me think it'll be about disproving evolution...

http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Creationary-3844

Making this into a game was the first thing I thought. It could be as simple as having a game mode that puts a small country map in the corner; you click where you think the view is and receive a score based on how close you are. This could be surprisingly fun and addictive.

Cheers for including Scratch (a graphical programming language aimed at kids). Scratch is worth playing with, if only to witness the potential (and drawbacks) of graphical programming languages. Now back to my LabVIEW code...

Nice lessons here for parents. Thanks for sharing and my heartfelt sympathies for your loss.

Seeing Leslie Lamport's first paper (about braids, for a high school math journal) makes me want to put together a list of computer scientists' first papers. Now I've got two favorites:

Leslie Lamport, "Braid Theory": http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/b...

Don Knuth, "The Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures", Mad Magazine: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/Potrzeb.jpg

I was going to make a Brookline joke, glad I didn't! :) Of course you're correct and I commend you for your knowledge of local geography and history.

BTW, If you haven't read "Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston," I bet you'd enjoy it: http://www.amazon.com/Gaining-Ground-History-Landmaking-Bost...

In the author's defense, Cambridge is surrounded on three sides by Boston (Charlestown to the east, Back Bay to the south, and Allston to the west, all part of Boston).

Out of the MIT Media Lab: Processing: http://processing.org Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu

Out of Mass General Hospital: MUMPS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

"you may not download an entire issue of a journal"

I didn't know this. It's as if the New York Times told paid subscribers they can only read 90% of any one issue.

On the kilogram: "I dislike having a prefixed unit as the base reference. What a horrible decision. Why don't you just have it go to ten and make ten a little louder?"

Exactly right.

Worth reading just to find out about the units(1) program. How did I miss that all these years?

Nice! If you'd like to write biopunk sci-fi books, I'd read them. :)

Could this be turned into a plugin for Google Docs as well? It'd be handy to have a cloud-based LaTeX tool, as an alternative to a local-machine install.

It was like Geek Disneyland - frustrating because there's so much wonderful stuff and not enough time to see even a tenth of it. Man I love MIT.

It's amusing that the Hearst family made its fortune mining gold. Just 150 years later, they're mining data.

Rats, on my first submission no less! I knew this was too interesting to be original. I'll search harder next time. Thanks for catching it.

I think that CS is a lot more open than other fields, even putting preprints online and soliciting feedback before publication (that's unheard of in chemistry and biology). You're right that some authors put PDFs of their papers on their websites and Google Scholar finds them, but I frequently need papers that I can only get through interlibrary loan (and I work at MIT; even a relatively wealthy university can't afford everything).

Your "desk drawer in Tech Square" analogy is apt -- right now our publications are locked in a handful of those drawers, and folks can't even open the drawers unless they've bought keys from Springer/Elsevier/ACS/AIP/ACM/IEEE/etc. And how do we find out what's in the drawers? Searching the databases owned by ISI/Thompson-Reuters and friends, again for a fee.

Sure, a "Github of science" wouldn't turn anyone's basement into a cancer research lab, but it would mean that a lot of researchers at less-affluent universities would finally have full access to the literature of science.

I saw the Xoom for sale at Costco last weekend - the demo unit was in a locked case, powered up and running a demo but untouchable. Not the best way to sell a touchscreen.

I think there's an easier explanation than national security. There's a huge variety of research going on at all the National Labs. Their place within the Department of Energy motivates the development of unique energy-related resources (supercomputing, particle accelerators, you name it) which then find uses in fields like biology. At first glance, it looks like LANL's computing expertise facilitated this vaccine research.

For anyone interested in using Github to host their Jekyll-based site, you don't even have to install Ruby and Jekyll locally -- just "git push" and Github runs Jekyll server-side and hosts the generated HTML on Github. You can then set up CNAME records so that traffic to yourblog.com is served by github.com. All for the low low price of free:

https://github.com/blog/272-github-pages

http://pages.github.com/

Phones have nothing to do with this. The advance was making an NMR small enough to be useful at the point-of-care.

Biotech is strong in Boston. The combination of MIT, Harvard, and Mass General Hospital is an extraordinarily fertile incubator for biotech.

Yes! Here's what I want in a modern successor to LaTeX:

- Default output is PDF (DVI is a port on my computer :) )

- Optional DOC/DOCX output (even if it supports just a subset of the program's capabilities)

- Bibliography management built-in (no separate ancient BibTeX)

- Command-line searching and importing from Pubmed / Google Scholar / etc. built-in

- Bibliography styles can be created/edited by normal humans

- Syntax closer to Markdown or reStructuredText, to enhance readability of source file (and maybe shrink the learning curve)

- Program is smaller than 1.6 GB (the size of the default MacTeX distro).

I've played with writing something like this for a while (in Python). The hardest part for me has been dealing with bibliography data - there's always one more weird Pubmed record that breaks my XML parser. Makes me really appreciate Knuth/Lamport/Patashnik and their successors.

I'd agree with you if it weren't for the iPad. Computers have proliferated, but they're also evolving in a way that makes programming knowledge less important (at least for the majority of people).

I agree - there's no question that lots of people would benefit from even a little coding knowledge! But computers are evolving in a direction that makes coding knowledge less useful - shell scripting is irrelevant in a world full of iPads. In that future, the only people who need any coding knowledge would be the folks who write the software for the iPads and such, but the idea of teaching everyone BASIC in middle school just to introduce them to programming (like I was) would be pretty quaint.

I don't like that future, and I don't know how we'd get kids interested in programming in that future. But returning to the topic, I don't foresee a near future where something similar happens to basic math knowledge.