“ If our research capability is to remain vibrant, we need more science and math students with decent elementary and high school preparation. The declining interest is partly from the perception that scientists don’t get rich like lawyers and dentists and stockbrokers, but also because science isn’t valued in a country full of creationists. One way the president can help is by trusting scientific advisers and not overruling them for political reasons.
Memo to the Next President. I can’t help but quote a good dig at creationists, but the rest of the memo is actually more insightful.
Brandt's Tumbling Log
This is a tumbling log of things and thoughts that pass my way.
If you got here by accident, you may want to visit my website instead.
“ My Flickr account is my Yahoo! account. If I use Yahoo! Mail, it’s my e-mail account. If it’s my e-mail account, it’s Single Sign On for basically everything I use online thanks to forgotten password e-mails. It may not be an internet banking account but it’s only one step down.
Simon Willison nicely sums up why OAuth matters, in a discussion about suspicious behavior by the iPhone app “Exposure”
“ Nikon is a competent camera company. The IOC is a competent sports impresario. The Chinese government is a competent authoritarian dictatorship. Pity they’re all so fucking stupid about technology.
Lock-In, the 2008 Flavor
“ The control to manage the % is in iSync (in the Applications folder). Open it, and then its Preferences. There’s a thing called Show Data Change Alter, where you can set the figure to something more comfortable.
Apple - Support - Discussions - “Syncing with MobileMe will change more than 5% of your calendars”. Thank goodness I finally found this—it was driving me nuts!
“
I’m watching TV with my family. A particularly insipid commercial comes on, and I say, “Can you imagine being in the room where THAT idea was presented?” This is now a common refain in our family.
I was there, so I know.
I Was A Mad ManI love the inverse square law
Taking my headphone amplifier, which was two feet from my iPhone cradle, and moving it to another spot four feet from my phone has reduced the GSM interference in my headphones from “intolerable” to “inaudible”. Which is great, because there’s a paint crew scraping my house prepping it for new paint, and I happen to be working from home this week on a critical project, so I was in desperate need of some sort of auditory isolation.
Apple just gave out my Apple ID password because someone asked
Giving me second thoughts about signing up for MobileMe.
“ 99% of the time operating system bugs are actually bugs in your program, and the other 1% of the time they are still bugs in your program
Call Me Fishmeal.: Pimp My Code, Part 15: The Greatest Bug of All. Good story.
“
During the Russian revolution, the mathematical physicist Igor Tamm was seized by anti- communist vigilantes at a village near Odessa where he had gone to barter for food. They suspected he was an anti-Ukranian communist agitator and dragged him off to their leader.
Asked what he did for a living he said that he was a mathematician. The sceptical gang-leader began to finger the bullets and grenades slung around his neck. “All right”, he said, “calculate the error when the Taylor series approximation of a function is truncated after n terms. Do this and you will go free; fail and you will be shot”. Tamm slowly calculated the answer in the dust with his quivering finger. When he had finished the bandit cast his eye over the answer and waved him on his way.
Taylor Series—a matter of life or death (via 3QD)
“ Ditz is a simple, light-weight distributed issue tracker designed to work with distributed version control systems like darcs and git. Ditz maintains an issue database directory on disk, with files written in a line-based and human-editable format. This directory is kept under version control, alongside project code. Changes in issue state is handled by version control like code change: included as part of a commit, merged with changes from other developers, conflict-resolved in the standard manner, etc.
Ditz. Beautiful! Ditz, where have you been all my life?
Use a Red Bull can as a radio interference shield—I’m not a Red Bull drinker, but this does make me think it’s time for a tin-foil hat for my iPhone
“ wtop is like “top” for your webserver. How many searches or signups are happening per second? What is the response time histogram for your static files? wtop shows you at a glance.
wtop—even better than apachetop
“ We are monkeys with money and guns.
Tom Waits True Confessions