dmlorenzetti

16 ms·

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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
The essay "Shakespeare in the Bush" describes an anthropologist recounting "Hamlet" to a group of people in West Africa. Their cultural expectations completely upset her understanding of the "true meaning" of
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
It may be worth noting that some government-sponsored software is intended to get dropped as soon as version 1 gets released. Of course, this is a small fraction of government-produced software. This happens for a variety of reasons. Ofte
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
The upshot is that unless you carefully read the apply() documentation..., you’re hosed. One thing that jumps out at me, having returned to R after several years in the Python world, is how obtuse its documentation can be. The standard fo
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
"State-sponsored actors" sounds like over-specification. If Yahoo detects a "sophisticated attack" from a lone jerk with a computer, do they not notify affected users of defensive actions to take? It's no doubt int
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
The modern equivalent of this would be to convince the New Yorker to print data graphics such as scatterplots. You can find instances where they devote an entire paragraph to describing some plot that the subject of an article produced or s
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
My wife and her Thai friends frequently use "555" (the Thai word for "5" being "ha"). It's a nice cross-over between the two languages, and of course quite easy to type.
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
The article is a bit biased in calling humans the subjects of the test... A subjects of an experiment is the entity being observed It's actually pretty conventional to label any research that involves changing the environment of pe
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
Off-topic comment on Leanpub -- Judging from the "best sellers" list, you handle a lot of software-related titles. Yet the categories pulldown in the bookstore has only two obvious software-related topics: the rather specific &qu
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
I wonder if Wolfram's 100-times-slower reference point was based on a very particular comparison. Suppose you benchmarked a numerical algorithm that dealt with a lot of matrix-vector operations. And suppose you compared, on the one h
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
One sentence per line is also an excellent strategy for when it comes time to "diff" two files. It helps diff identify edits (by giving it more anchoring lines to figure out what's actually changed), and it makes the output
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
For a fascinating read on the intersection of buildings, wind dynamics, and a litigious society, see "The Fifty-Nine Story Crisis" [0]. The article describes the response of the architect/engineer of the Citicorp Tower, when
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
The error bounds shown in the figure labeled "The Problem With Prophecy" are almost comically narrow. DTRA is very familiar with propagating uncertainty in their software. It's hard to imagine they weren't aware of how
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
A nice little book, "Seven Wonders: Everyday Things for a Healthier Planet", counts public libraries as one of the seven "sustainable wonders" (along with bikes, ceiling fans, clotheslines, and other low-intensity means
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
I think what distinguishes Botswana is how much of the diamond revenue the government turns into benefits for its citizens. Unlike many other countries, and no matter what other woes it might have, the place is not run as a kleptocracy. I
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by dmlorenzetti 11y ago
Perhaps the sanest approach is we type every column of X and Y separately... Typing every column of a matrix is not sufficiently general. Each element of the matrix can have its own type. Suppose you're solving a linear algebra prob
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by dmlorenzetti 12y ago
All of this is outside my experience, so I have to ask - how does the attack, as described, prove HutHos is the perpetrator? The poster was able to find the HutHos site owner's full information "in a few minutes", due to &quo
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by dmlorenzetti 12y ago
Surprisingly not mentioned in the video is that the failure mode of the Olympic's hull, when the Hawke collided with it, provide clues to the reason the Titanic sank so quickly. The heads of the rivets holding Olympic's hull plat
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by dmlorenzetti 12y ago
Everyday acts... depend on the availability of essentials such as water, light and food, items whose acquisition, at least in the vast rural areas, is rarely straightforward. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I spent 1.5 years in Africa (Botswa
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by dmlorenzetti 12y ago
According to Eisenberg & Bellamy-Royds' (excellent) "SVG Essentials", you should be able to create a fallback by using an <object> tag. Assuming that works (I haven't tried it), it could be a more direct appro
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by dmlorenzetti 12y ago
The first thing you should worry about is whether your computation is ill-conditioned, and only then worry whether it's numerically stable. OK, but how does one apply this advice in practice? The radiative exchange between two surfac
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Portal for free public access to DOE-funded pubs (beta)(osti.gov)
1 points by dmlorenzetti 12y ago|0 comments
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by dmlorenzetti 12y ago
The rules around titles are to always use the title from the article. In general, that is the rule. The cynic in me couldn't help but notice that an article with the original title "One of a Kind: What do you do if your child ha
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by dmlorenzetti 12y ago
This article makes a good argument for simplicity. Yet two of the topmost examples-- that simplicity in the MIG-25 made it fast, and that simplicity in the transmission of Soviet tanks makes them more easily repaired, even if they're
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by dmlorenzetti 12y ago
I would run through "Driving Technical Change" by Terrence Ryan for a few ideas. It's short and to the point: http://pragprog.com/book/trevan/driving-technical-change http://www.amazon.c
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by dmlorenzetti 12y ago
I once went with a friend to price electric pianos. The models she was looking at sampled traditional pianos to get their notes, and had a switch to toggle between different sampled instruments. She asked why there was such a price differe
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by dmlorenzetti 13y ago
Good question. In my case, probably not, but it might work for others (I do fairly specialized research; if I drop it, either somebody else will pick it up right away, or it will die altogether). More likely for me, I think, is that I woul
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by dmlorenzetti 13y ago
Given money enough, and time, I definitely have things I would work on (mostly developing numerical algorithms for solving physical modeling problems, and expressing them in software). Yet, paradoxically, I worry about being given uncondit
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by dmlorenzetti 13y ago
The site seems to encourage questions with simple yes/no answers, and to solicit sentence- or paragraph-length blurbs from commenters. Furthermore, since comments aren't obviously linked to the opposing statements that evoked the
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by dmlorenzetti 13y ago
The karma threshold shifts over time, so while it might have been 500 at one time, it's a moving target: http://jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ I don't know what the current level is, or where to look it
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by dmlorenzetti 13y ago
There's also a hardware ecosystem problem. Apparently we live in a world where people expect a TV to have a web browser with Adobe Flash on board. I have a 30-year-old amplifier that still works just fine, despite having been built be

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