jamessb

75 ms·

571.
by jamessb 14y ago
When Isaac Newton came to Cambridge, he matriculated a subsizar, meaning that he effectively worked as a menial servant rather than paying fees. Relevant section of Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton - http://books.google.co.uk/boo
572.
by jamessb 14y ago
Previously on Hacker News, hsmaker: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5235709
573.
by jamessb 14y ago
The idea of making ice-cream with liquified gases dates back to the very start of the 20th Century. It was described by <a href= http://matthew-rowley.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/mrs-marshalls-l... Marshall</a>.
574.
by jamessb 14y ago
There are GUI analysis tools that produce graphs directly from databases, eg Tableau http://www.tableausoftware.com/solutions/big-data-analysis
575.
by jamessb 14y ago
Cleve Moler, one of the founders of MathWorks, has written two free books. The first, Experiments with MATLAB, might be a good starting point: http://www.mathworks.com/moler/exm/index.html . It teaches some maths as well as Matlab. The off
576.
by jamessb 14y ago
Of the top 10 universities in those rankings, 3 are in the UK. The population of the UK is only 1/5 of that of the US. The implication that universities in Western-Europe are 'mediocre' seems misguided.
577.
by jamessb 14y ago
Or if you get the entire editorial board to resign, and start a new journal. This happened with the board of Topology ( http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf ), who then set up the Journal of Topology. The new journal isn't o
578.
by jamessb 14y ago
There was an essay a long time ago, a writer had been filing every link and every note into a pre-Evernote piece of notetaking/hyperlinking/PIM software, something with an X or a Z in the name, but I can't recall it or the piece. The essay
579.
by jamessb 14y ago
For launching websites, there's Launchlist: http://launchlist.net/ (free lite version: http://lite.launchlist.net/ )
580.
by jamessb 14y ago
I know some people who used an electronic system which printed out a barcode encoding a cryptographic hash of each entry, which could then be stuck in a paper notebook with numbered pages, and dated and witnessed. This combined a legally ad
581.
by jamessb 14y ago
There are definitely other mathy areas: crystallography, biophysics, computational neuroscience, theoretical ecology, and applications of simulation methods like CFD and FEA to physiology, . . . But yes, most biological research doesn't req
582.
by jamessb 14y ago
Facebook's Open Compute Project released plans for their custom hardware: http://opencompute.org/ Back Blaze open sourced their storage server designs (commodity parts in custom cases): http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a
583.
by jamessb 14y ago
Some of the problems that aren't completely trivial are very hard. These aren't "solved" - instead, there are just very preliminary sketches of potential solutions, which other people have already progressed far further with. For example:
584.
by jamessb 14y ago
He also gave the classic talk "Life at Low Reynolds Number": http://brodylab.eng.uci.edu/~jpbrody/reynolds/lowpurcell.htm...
585.
by jamessb 15y ago
nsns, I think you meant to link to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17809503 What you actually linked to was a story about stealing a penguin.
586.
by jamessb 15y ago
This seems to be a copy of Mathias Bynen's Dotfiles ( https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.osx , 'sensible hacker defaults for OS X'), with a few minor changes. Specifically, comments explainung each line have been changed
587.
by jamessb 15y ago
Niels Abel is an obvious third.