I’ve been looking for a decent book on R for a while. I might not do an awful lot of data wrangling, but I’d like to have a sharp tool in reserve for when I do. This looks quite accessible for somebody with a tiny brain like myself.
The Monotron is a tiny analogue synth with a ribbon keyboard. It’s so small, it’ll fit in your hand!
Update (July 28th): Ordered two from Thomann, one for myself and one for Niall. They’re tiny and cheap as chips, so I figure, what’s the harm? I’m also getting myself a Kaoss Pad while I’m at it: I’ve been dithering about getting one for ages, so I figure I’d might as well take the plunge.
The spec that Qt Web Runtime is built on top of. This defines how you actually create widgets.
A way to build widgets for Maemo/MeeGo in JavaScript on top of Webkit and Qt. Nice! But very beta right now.
A homemade synth designed especially for playing chiptunes with, installed within an old organ. Nerdgasmic!
This would have been useful at the weekend: DNS worked just fine, but any other connectivity in the hotel I was staying in was rubbish.
The answers are a fantastic list of interesting and useful datastructures.
How scientists avoid confirmation bias.
I’ll probably be submitting a PR to update the corresponding FreeBSD port over the weekend while I’m at Pycon Ireland. I may request it be forked into two ports based on the changelog, but haven’t decided just yet.
I was sure I’d posted this up before!
“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon—known as “backfire”—is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”
What the intro for Firefly would have been if it’d been made in the 80s. Needs more Jewel Staite.
Zig and Zag do The Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” in the style of Elvis Presley. You might only get this if you’re Irish or British, but if you do, it’s brilliant!
This is brilliant! I love the incessant base. The video might look a touch NSFW, but don’t worry, you don’t actually see anything, so as long as nobody’s offended by silhouettes of the female form, should be safe. The video looks to have been sponsored by the Ministry of Silly Walks. :-)
I’m considering upgrading my Dell Mini 12 to Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04, because the Dell-fuxored version that came preinstalled is a bit crusty. I did a test with a thumb drive and except for the Dell/Broadcom proprietary wireless drivers that needed to be installed through the restricted drivers tool, the only obvious problem was that the screen wasn’t at full resolution, and ran like a dog without graphics hardware acceleration. I’d be happy with decent 2D acceleration for now, which appears to be available. I’m tempted to install the 9.10 (Karmic) based version though, for safety.
On the way into work this morning, I was thinking of what a relatively plausible method of FTL transport would be for a relatively soft piece of science fiction. I’m not really planning on using this in anything as I’ve no plans to write a story featuring it any time soon, but it seems to me to be something somebody out there might entertaining.
The drive is called a skip drive or bunny hopper. The idea behind the drive is that in the universe it’s used in, folding space is beyond the capabilities of current tech, but it is possible to take advantage of pre-existing folds in space to instantaneously move between two points in space.
It does this by altering its phase (I’m not sure of the correct terminology as yet) in such a way as it can pass through the fold. Thus, the topology of settlement differs, quite drastically in some cases, from the obvious topology of the universe. After a number of skips, the drive must enter a heat dissipation cycle to avoid the craft cooking everybody inside, or worse still, collapsing into a singularity.
One important thing to keep in mind about all this is that the amount of power needed to travel from one point to another isn’t tied to how far it is or how quickly you’re travelling, but to how accurately you can get to your destination. Thus, if you wanted to be sure you managed to skip close a gas giant in a particular system, you’d have to expend much more power than if you were just trying to do an emergency skip get out of a tight spot and didn’t care too much where you ended up. It would be very easy to end up lost.
An equally important implication is that the folds may have something akin to eddies due to the gravitation effect of objects in space, and gravitational singularities even more so.
Now, there’s not much science behind any of this. In fact, I’d say any physicist would laugh at much of this. However, but it seem to me that such a technology would have interesting plot implications for a story it’d be used in.
For a while now, when I’ve started my Mini 12 when it’s been running off the battery, HAL would crap out with for no good reason. I’m not even sure when this started happening, but it became very annoying. After a bit of research, I discovered that running this should do the trick:
$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure hal
It didn’t, however. A bit more research lead me to trying this:
$ sudo rm -f /var/cache/hald/fdi-cache $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure hal
It appeared to do the trick. I think what might have happened was some upgrade of HAL in the past must have forgotten to rebuild the device information cache, so it was using stale information. If this happens again, I’ll know what to do!