estevez

9 ms·

31.
by estevez 15y ago
I'd say something akin to shuffle on an e-reader containing 500 books would approach serendipity.
32.
by estevez 15y ago
Or they could just kill the estate ("death") tax, ensuring that those future billionaires are their descendants.
33.
Controversy Prompts Scientists to Halt Work on Engineered Bird-Flu(chronicle.com)
2 points by estevez 15y ago|0 comments
34.
SOPA and PIPA: Room for compromise?(politico.com)
3 points by estevez 15y ago|1 comments
35.
by estevez 15y ago
> They could fix it by implementing some cryptographic code that's scanned at TSA entry points, verifying the actual document (boarding passes are a far cry from a verifyable document). Yeah, I tend to believe that they really aren't
36.
by estevez 15y ago
There's a 3.5 GB ebook torrent at Pirate Bay. Between Project Gutenberg and places like TPB it's within reach for anyone with an internet connection.
37.
by estevez 15y ago
> National Geographic I-think-I'm-gonna-faint inksmell This thread is making me nostalgic. I was in the doctor's office with my mother the other day and I actually picked up a copy of National Geographics and sniffed it in the middle o
38.
by estevez 15y ago
I grew up in a house almost totally devoid of books. I was completely dependent on libraries until age 18 or so, so books were always the property of the collective. To this day I can't bring myself to write marginalia in my books, the idea
39.
by estevez 15y ago
My reaction to your question might be telling: 1. I dimly remember that The Shallows had something thoughtful to say about the topic; 2. I pull out my kindle and search the full text of 443 books for "carr kindle"; 3. I wait 3 secon
40.
by estevez 15y ago
I suppose my point is that China, like Russia and the United States, see a comprehensive space program as important to its interests. As the article linked to in the parent notes, these technologies are necessarily dual use, but I see no re
41.
by estevez 15y ago
Did you notice the little girl reading the kindle on amazon? What I wonder about is what happens when you grow up with only limited exposure to codices. Is a book still a book?
42.
by estevez 15y ago
Two questions: (1) What does domination of space look like, number of military satellites?; (2) What weapons has the US deployed in space?
43.
by estevez 15y ago
I don't understand stories like these at all. Why are still seeing this from a Cold War perspective? First, in what possible sense is a Chinese manned spaceflight program a challenge to the U.S. If we apply the same standard to the Russia
44.
by estevez 15y ago
>Considering that 95% of the National Academy of Science is atheist, the correlation is still pretty relevant. Since the Academy elects its own members there might be some bias lurking in that number.
45.
by estevez 15y ago
This article makes me want to take a trip to Kinkos.
46.
by estevez 15y ago
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta --Brian Aldiss
47.
by estevez 15y ago
The lack of bankruptcy protection comes to mind.
48.
by estevez 15y ago
> Software evolves, and often dies when it doesn't. That's what's confusing me about the piece. TeX preserves the ability to evolve (XeTeX, etc.) through stasis. Or is it simply path dependence again?
49.
by estevez 15y ago
You might also consider the role that Latin played as the lingua franca of scholarship.
50.
by estevez 15y ago
College education was intended for the elite. The proportion of the population that possessed a high school diploma, much less a college degree was infinitesimal. Indeed, as late as the 1950s, only ~8% of the population were college graduat
51.
by estevez 15y ago
Plus ça change. There are no such sections in modern standardized admissions tests either.
52.
by estevez 15y ago
> Phenotypically, I can easily identify a black person vs. an asian person, with nearly 100% accuracy. This is a rather hyperbolic statement. You concede edge cases, but the fluidity of phenotype means that it fails to map cleanly onto
53.
by estevez 15y ago
I suggest this piece [1] by David Leonhart. As he points out in the final paragraph: [...] all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. [1]: http://www.n
54.
by estevez 15y ago
I think race acts as more of a red herring when it comes to this matter. Agreed. Allowing elite universities to continue to serve up this shadow-play of a sorting function has led to a perverse credentialism that often fails to reflect th
55.
by estevez 15y ago
Stories like this irk me, because they overlook the larger injustice of continuing to think about elite schools as meritocratic institutions, when they are plainly not. At Harvard, for example, the bottom half of the income distribution mak
56.
by estevez 15y ago
>In the case of human genomes, they might store even less — only the difference between a particular genome and some reference genome. The results from comparative genomics would suggest, at least superficially, that a combination of
57.
by estevez 15y ago
What are the consequences for simply refusing to obey a crew member's instruction to power down your Kindle? Sort of like willfully ignoring the distinction between the first-class and economy security lines---something I wish more people w
58.
by estevez 15y ago
As did http://docs.latexlab.org/
59.
by estevez 15y ago
This reminds me of the work done by Răzvan Musăloiu-E. [1], which used some visualization techniques commonly applied to genomic and phylogenetic data to examine the relationships between filesystems in the Linux kernel. [1]: http://cs.jhu
60.
In the 21st-Century University, Let's Ban (Paper) Books(chronicle.com)
2 points by estevez 15y ago|0 comments

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