rcthompson

197 ms·

1801.
by rcthompson 15y ago
Well, elephant mothers in a group help protect each others' young from predators by creating an impenetrable elephant wall around them. A single elephant mother could not protect her own young by surrounding them in this way, but she can pr
1802.
by rcthompson 15y ago
I'm a biologist, and I never realized that group selection wasn't broadly accepted until I read this article. I'd always assumed it was trivially implied by the theory of natural selection. Natural selection has been observed at every lev
1803.
by rcthompson 16y ago
Did you try hitting it?
1804.
by rcthompson 16y ago
I have BackupPC running on Linux on a headless PC in my laundry room. It does daily incremental backups (file-level dedup) of itself and my laptop over ssh. The important part, as with most systems, is that after the setup process it works
1805.
by rcthompson 16y ago
I looked through the source, and it doesn't seem to have any conflict resolution. As far as I can tell, it simply executes the push and pull commands without checking their exit codes to see if they succeeded.
1806.
by rcthompson 16y ago
So, did anyone try out the workaround in comment 55? I tried it just for fun, but Flash already doesn't crash for me, so I didn't see any difference.
1807.
by rcthompson 16y ago
You can use it the other way. It's a little more awkward, though. Go to the github page: https://github.com/schacon/hg-git and scroll to the very bottom. Read the section on the "git.intree" option. After setting that to True, you can pul
1808.
by rcthompson 16y ago
The real value of hg-git for me is that it made the git vs mercurial choice moot, since I can switch back and forth whenever I like. I started with Mercurial, and then switched to git after deciding that I liked it better. If I ever change
1809.
by rcthompson 16y ago
But usually you want to commit the things that you're ignoring (some of them, at least). You just don't want to do it twice , once in .gitignore and a second time in .hgignore. My solution is generally to put syntax:glob at the top of .h
1810.
by rcthompson 16y ago
You can also compactly visualize an extremely long vector by mapping it onto a space-filling curve: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/huber-srv/hilbert/ I'm using this right now to visualize sequence coverage depth across the human genome (an integer
1811.
by rcthompson 16y ago
Well, first you need to get started with Git, if you haven't already done that. Github itself provides links to Git tutorials. Anyway, many projects on Github use Github's issue system for tracking bugs and feature requests. So if you find
1812.
by rcthompson 16y ago
You're missing the point. The point is that even when everyone is actually equal, there is still some apparent wealth inequality because different people are at different stages of life.
1813.
by rcthompson 16y ago
They switched to a sidebar because all screens are widescreens now. Having toolbars on the top or bottom just worsens the situation. If your netbook screen is only 1024 x 600, you don't need to lose even more vertical resolution to a task b
1814.
by rcthompson 16y ago
Is there dependency graph of mathematical fields somewhere? That would be useful.
1815.
by rcthompson 16y ago
If you want to incorporate ideas from xkcd without using any of the published comics, you could come up with your own nerd snipe and put it on the front of your shirt. Then put something on the back like "You've been nerd-sniped!" Make sure
1816.
by rcthompson 16y ago
But if a third party happens to appeal to a similar demographic to one of the main parties (in this case, the Democrats, and the Gore campaign in particular), then it will split the vote. If you don't believe it, then the Bush campaign (R
1817.
by rcthompson 16y ago
It's quite common for both of the main parties in the USA (Democrats and Republicans) to try to disenfranchise voting districts that vote predominantly for the other party. This can be done by sabotaging voting machines, resulting in long w
1818.
by rcthompson 16y ago
I don't actually know. I'm just saying that it's one possible interpretation, and that it seems to me like a more likely explanation than heavy drinking extending your life. The point is that harsh selection early in life means that anyone
1819.
by rcthompson 16y ago
What the study actually finds is that heavy drinkers who live to age 55 live longer than nondrinkers who live to age 55. This might be because heavy drinking confers some health benefit, or some behavioral benefit (couch surfing vs outdoor