rflrob

78 ms·

781.
by rflrob 17y ago
I actually had Chazelle for freshman CS, many years ago. I think his style is targeted for the freshman CS kind of audience, people who aren't already into the field, and thus need some of the cuteness. His lectures were a lot of fun, by
782.
by rflrob 17y ago
So presumably if the naive interpretation is wrong, then the bias should be predictable. Any ideas how to go about determining which permutations are more likely than they ought to be?
783.
by rflrob 17y ago
One thing that always irks me about things like "56 percent faster" is the potential confusion. On the one hand, it's fine to say you do things 56% faster: that describes a rate of speed, and now the rate is 156% of baseline. But when the
784.
by rflrob 17y ago
I just want to give them points for having the answer to the question in the title be "Yeah, could be". It seems like with so much other science reporting out there, when it ends in a question mark, the answer is more like, "No, not likely
785.
by rflrob 17y ago
While I suspect that this is actually true, the way he presents it is a little odd: "All these 'trusted health organizations' (his words) present different times. They are wrong. Here is the correct time, according to [trusted health orga
786.
by rflrob 17y ago
I like option 3 the best. For the "apps that are built with landscape in mind", do they only have one setting, or do they have both, but somehow work "better" in landscape? I've seen at least one of the former, but that one defaults to la
787.
by rflrob 17y ago
A friend recently switched to the mac, and I recommended QS to her after years of being happy with it. The discussion then ensued about why QS is better than Spotlight, and the best I could come up with is that I like the fact that QS can
788.
by rflrob 17y ago
Actually, I think it might take some of those into account. It mentions a Lost Wages term, assuming 1/3 day per failure. It also has includes "Transaction costs" for buying a new(er) car. It's been 5 years since I bought my first, and so
789.
by rflrob 17y ago
In reference 6 from the Wikipedia article on Radiation Hormesis, the abstract says "Data concerning about 85,000 exposed animals and their 45,000 corresponding controls, with a total of over 60,000 and 12,000 cancers in exposed and control
790.
by rflrob 17y ago
Remember, though, that if you enjoy life as a graduate student, there's nothing forcing you to become a tenure track professor and deal with all the management/politics. And if you enjoy being a grad student, then there's little disincentiv
791.
by rflrob 17y ago
Maybe a little nitpicky, but does the font they used in the book seem a little... plain? Maybe it's just the sans serif that's bothering me, but if I were designing a book about the ultimate engineering anything, I'd want to put similar tho
792.
by rflrob 17y ago
On the other hand, a doctor need not know all of Latin (especially the fiddly bits about case and conjugation), but enough to pick out the roots of words they come across. While I'm sure there is a small subset of doctors who actively stud
793.
by rflrob 17y ago
>(Personally, I made it through high school and then up through upper-level undergraduate mathematics, physics, econometrics, etc. courses without ever buying a graphing calculator, so it’s clearly not strictly mandatory for current cur
794.
by rflrob 17y ago
> According to your definition, pure untested intuition would then be "scientific". As it happens of course, intuition isn't very effective. The point is that all kinds of crazy methods might turn out to be effective, but we wouldn't th
795.
by rflrob 17y ago
I just use a plain old $1 graph-paper composition book for all my notes and such. I find them to be much more durable long-term than spiral bound notebooks, which inevitably seem to end up with the cover just barely hanging on.
796.
by rflrob 17y ago
"monoculture is efficient" This is true, from a certain point of view. In the short-to-medium term, monoculture does allow us to produce more from a given acre of land. In the long run, though, monocultures are more susceptible to disease
797.
by rflrob 18y ago
I can't help but think of ImageJ here. Except Mathematica is much more of a scripting language than Java, so much more convenient if you don't yet know if you're doing the right thing.
798.
by rflrob 18y ago
"We’d probably all be using an IM client built around Jabber." Depending on your circle, some do. gChat is runs off the Jabber protocol. On the Mac, Adium is one of the best (I don't know about most popular) multi-system clients out the
799.
by rflrob 18y ago
I had a job where (among other things) I was teaching Python (and the VPython package) to high schoolers. That made me comfortable with it. Combined with PyLab and a need to wean myself from matlab before graduation, I worked on a few hom
800.
by rflrob 18y ago
"It's possible to build a quad-core PC running Eclipse and Gimp for less than $400 with refurbished hardware. At the time of this writing, the Mac Pro with one quad-core CPU begins at $2,300. Adding Photoshop and other tools can push the bi
801.
by rflrob 18y ago
"But the past two years have been rocky for Tesla, which first announced it would build a big factory in New Mexico, then said it would instead build in San Jose, after California dangled incentives to stay in the state." Oh no! They took
802.
by rflrob 18y ago
Has anyone tried this with large source code files? I suppose, in the long run, if your source has too big of an overhead to implement this, you're probably doing it wrong, especially considering the relative power of computers to the amou
803.
by rflrob 18y ago
Is free-standing actually a good thing? It seems to me if you're trying to maximize flux per unit material, you can't do much better than a flat sheet. The only problem is that the sun moves, but it seems like a free-standing array would
804.
by rflrob 18y ago
What about some sort of rating of ads by an external, independent body (something like FactCheck.org). When you go to a movie, they make an announcement: "the following movie has been rated {(P)G(-13), R} by the MPAA". Why not do the same
805.
by rflrob 18y ago
The article says it uses less power than three 60-watt bulbs... why not just say it uses about 150 watts? Also, when the designer says, "No one knows how a grasshopper escapement works", does he mean "most people don't know how it works", o
806.
by rflrob 18y ago
There's actually several thousand in their site, but that page only lists the top 100. Unfortunately, their page is also chock full of redundant gripes. Reader annoyed me to no end, but what I discovered (on a Mac) is that there was (almos
807.
by rflrob 18y ago
This seems like it could be potentially dangerous. The article doesn't make it clear how you activate this alarm/encrypt feature. Presumably it has some sort of password, and perhaps you send a specially formatted text message, but it seem
808.
by rflrob 18y ago
I barely use facebook any more. A select group of my friends moved onto ning.com, but by and large, I don't use much in the way of social networking sites. Facebook seems to have turned me off of it, especially with the creepy News Feed.
809.
by rflrob 18y ago
Not just is it not especially insightful, I'm finding the prose a little hard to get through. Granted, this is presentation and not content, but my complaint are the sort of thing a decent editor ought to clean up: there's all sorts of syn
810.
by rflrob 18y ago
There really is no good way to tell if there were imaginary flashes. Once you get down to really dim (i.e. low photon count) flashes, you're in the realm of Poisson statistics. So, on average, a flash of light might have 4 photons in it,

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