http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23821/

well, is from numpy import * recommended?

Ah, friction, dissipation, entropy production. Life in the non-equilibrium world is so unpredictable…

Your comment: ‘Continuously readjusting non-explanatory models to fit new data isn’t what a science does. ‘ is too optimistic.

I guess by ‘causal mechanical’ you mean dynamical models, and explicitly not regression or stochastic schemes? If so, fitted models like the ones I mentioned are still the best tools available in some noisy physical sciences, I’m thinking hydrology in particular, and older but still used atmospheric subgrid parameterisations.

Nevertheless, you’re right to prefer a dynamical approach where available. I suspect though, as others in the thread have noted, that the system is simply unpredictable at some of the time scales we’d like it to be, and that it might turn out that simple models explain most of the predictable variance.

http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2009/09/07/flaws-and-frictions/?dsq=17371660#comment-17371660

Really enjoying this Album. Takes me back to when Metallica first spoke to me as a teenager. I think Hetfield’s writing is brilliant.

according to a documentary I am watching. It says he tried to take women and children hostage and got fucked.

I’ve started wrapping my fortran sph code, with the aim of being able to reuse a lot of code. In particular the second order spatial gradients code is long, and error prone. Python wrapping not only means I can use fast fortran for my real-time 3d fluids code, but it makes testing and verification that much easier. Plotting for fortran was a matter of spitting out ASCII files and writing a script to plot them. Somewhat ad-hoc, and either leading to the code being littered with commented out write statements, or multiple hardly ever used output files being written every run.

I’ve had to remove a lot of the more whizz-bang features, like derived types and assumed shape arrays from the argument lists of the subroutines I’ve ported, but a) this is only a subset of the code and b) it’s not hard to make these changes on neat, tidy, single purpose routines, which are the best candidates for wrapping and reuse in the first place.

If I had a dollar for every (usually childless) turkey who wholesale believes the interesting, yet under-evidenced hypothesis that ‘germs are good, therefore let kids eat off the floor’ I’d have nearly 100 dollars.

I’ve even been called a ‘germophobe’. Let me add some perspective: I own two dogs, who are allowed inside for part of the day. I let my son crawl around on the floor, and let him put things in his mouth as long as they are not obviously filthy. I like playing outdoors, and I think it is normal for kids to be a bit dirty. I also believe the rather more established theory that most colds, flus and gastro infections can be prevented by good hand hygeine, which basically means washing hands with plain soap and water before meals, and after taking a dump or cleaning up a nappy.

I really doubt that one needs to eat a spoon of earth a day to build up a proper immune system. The new fashion that all child cleanliness is bad seems more socially and politically motivated than based on sound evidence.

I rarely agree with his point of view, but this piece on unemployment
is thought provoking. I think he’s on the money with this one.

http://andrewleigh.com/?p=2132

I like the one about coin flipping.

Ok here’s the problem. I need to produce fast documents with images, and I want to control the layout of the images.

Word is a pain for this. So is Lyx. Obviously this is not a job for straight Latex. Neither is the restructured text I use for most of my day to day notes good for this either.

So, I’m giving Scribus a spin.

Macports compiles it just fine. Took about an hour or so, I think a fair chunk of that was compiling qt3. Hmm, qt3. Is the macports version an old one?

UPDATE: would you know, I gave up, and just used Powerpoint…