“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!””

“Lenders are offered returns based on a rolling six-​​month aver­age so dud projects will be off­set by sales of prof­itable ones. It takes just a few deals to strike it big, Huynh and Stack say, and because it is a com­mu­nity that is not just pas­sion­ate but also knowl­edge­able, bet­ter projects are likely to get funded.

The promise of returns is enough to get for­mer invest­ment banker Andrew de Mon­tille excited.

“I put money in the bank not because I con­sider it as a char­i­ta­ble invest­ment,” says de Mon­tille. “Rather, I am very con­fi­dent that some of the projects will do well enough to be prof­itable to the investors.””

“Ana­lysts, reg­u­la­tors, and politi­cians are begin­ning to rec­og­nize that most if not all of the widely touted ben­e­fits of mod­ern finance redounded only to its pur­vey­ors. The decid­edly retro Cana­dian bank­ing sys­tem, with sim­ple prod­ucts, high equity require­ments, and rel­a­tively mod­est secu­ri­ties oper­a­tions that focus on domes­tic cus­tomers, is the sound­est in the world.”

“Wel­come to Hack­ing­Congress! This site is just start­ing up as of March 14, 2009 — the goal is to be a hub, or at least a links page, for the devel­oper com­mu­nity sur­round­ing the inter­sec­tion of civics and tech­nol­ogy espe­cially (but not exclu­sively) as it relates to the U.S. Congress.”

“The thing that finally con­demns the entire “base­ball” idea, how­ever is this: even with all these improve­ments, the game is no fun at all.

We tried base­ball, and it didn’t work.”

“… Yet, it seems like other parts of the movie indus­try are hav­ing a lot of trou­ble under­stand­ing this, as recent efforts around the globe have forced the clo­sure of a num­ber of fan­sub sites — even ones that don’t pro­vide the actual movies to down­load at all, just the sub­ti­tles. Yet movie stu­dios an the courts are rul­ing that just cre­at­ing trans­lated sub­ti­tles is infring­ing. In one case, it appears that a site was shut down just for link­ing to such an “unau­tho­rized subtitles.””