"This is how I deal with the situation these days: If I get a new device, I just stuff any new cables right into the swamp of existing ones. And if I need to remove a cable, I optimistically pull on it, like a madman"

"Before the English-speaking world was exposed to the fruit, the colour was referred to as geoluhread in Old English, which translates roughly into Modern English as yellow-red."

"I was amazed that the Journal of Cell Science has the wherewithal to publish an essay like this. Kudos to the author of the essay and the editors of the journal. "

"Machinist generates data for the fields you don't care about, and constructs any necessary associated objects, leaving you to only specify the fields you do care about in your tests."

"My experience so far, as I explore what Cucumber can do, has been largely positive. Where I was starting with Cucumber and only a vague idea of how the user interaction would play out, writing the scenarios at the Cucumber level felt very valuable and gave the development a clear path that I wouldn't have otherwise had. That said, there is extra code being written, and it's clearly possible to get really tangled in getting the step definitions right."

"Turns out, Scott Fleckenstein and Tom Preston-Werner have already solved this problem for us, allowing bi-directional data exchange between Erlang and Ruby via Erlang Ports. As far as Erlang is concerned, this communication pattern is seen as direct communication with another Erlang process, which also means we can transparently invoke our Ruby interpreter whenever we need it! To get started, gem install erlectricity: Erlectricity allows a Ruby program to receive and respond to Erlang messages sent over the Erlang binary protocol."

"The key, then, is to have good jobs waiting for workers when they are displaced due to inevitable (and desirable) technological change or to jobs moving overseas, jobs that are every bit as good or better than the jobs they left. That is where we are falling short. "

"Antenna arrays have been studied and used for years, but the latest NIST work provides several new twists. Unlike the typical case in which antenna arrays boost signals to or from a distant target, a first responder’s radio would be relatively close to the portable transmitters, ideally within the perimeter of the array. More importantly, since disaster sites rarely allow for niceties of design, NIST studied the benefits of a fast and imprecise technique—randomly placed antennas combined with coarse signal matching. The signals produced by the radio and portable transmitters need to operate at the same frequency and roughly in phase, such that the radio waves are fairly well synchronized and thus build on each other. Phase-matching was performed manually in the experiments but might eventually be possible remotely."

"But what if the underlying basis for the model is wrong? That is the message of Merritts and Walters’ Science article. It “was like a bomb, in a good way,” says Frank Pazzaglia, a geology professor at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. Earlier generations of geomorphologists had recognized the widespread nature of legacy sediments but had attributed them solely to high post-settlement erosion, he says. “More recent workers had focused on the processes, such as how does sediment move, and less on the history. Now we have both pieces. Furthermore, by adding the hard data on milldams, Merritts and Walter have made this legacy better understood.”"

"Our study shows the extent and severity of land degradation measured in terms of loss of net primary productivity, making allowance for climatic variability. Overall, a quarter of the world's population depends directly on these degrading areas. The worst-hit areas are Africa south of the Equator, SE Asia and S China. The worst-affected countries, with more than 50 per cent of territory degrading are, in Africa, the Congo, Zaire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Zambia and the most affected (95 per cent degrading) Swaziland; in Asia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Korea and Indonesia. In terms of the rural population affected, the greatest numbers are in China, with nearly half a billion, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Brazil. The usual suspects, such as the African Sahel and around the Mediterranean are much less affected."

"On his authority as Admiral of the battlestar Galactica, Edward James Olmos addresses a crowd in the United Nations chamber and gets them to condemn the use of the constructed term [edited] “race” with a shout of “So say we all!”"