"This special issue of Common-place explores food. It particularly investigates the production and consumption of food during the age of experiment, that period between 1820 and 1890 in the United States after the soil crisis of the early nineteenth century disrupted customary agriculture and before scientific agriculture became institutionalized nationally in the system of experimental stations legislated into being by the Hatch Act (1887)."

"While Adelle is a slab serif typeface conceived specifically for intensive editorial use, mainly in newspapers and magazines, its personality and flexibility make it a real multiple-purpose typeface.
The intermediate weights deliver a very legible and neutral look when used in text sizes, providing the usual robustness expected in a newspaper font. The unobstrusive appearance, excellent texture and slightly dark color allow it to behave flawlessly in continuous text setting, even in the most demanding editorial applications.…"

"NovelSans Pro is new humanist grotesque typeface family matching the award winning serif typeface Novel Pro.
NovelSans' carefully attuned character design, well balanced weight contrast and the classic proportions show many similarities with the serif version and enable designers to combine those two families and reach highest quality in typography.…"

"Here’s a look at our Photosynth app:"

"The idea part is cheap. Try to think of an idea that’s actually worth something on its own. “I wish I’d thought up the web browser.” Bullshit. The web browser had been thought up at least twenty years before those high-energy frogs coded one up on NeXTstep (c.f. Dynabook, 1968). It was the actual shipping product they wrote that caused the internet revolution, not the idea."

"On March 30th, Lux Research released an update on the vehicle electrification market titled "Small Batteries, Big Sales: The Unlikely Winners in the Electric Vehicle Market" that predicts:…"

"One of the characteristics of the titles was that they used multiple variations of the same basic letter forms to create unusual variations in character placement and to allow nesting of certain characters in special relationships with other characters. Simulating this effect required the creation of three complete sets of characters, representing three possible positions and forms for each letter. A few letters even have a fourth variation. For the user this means that hitting the any letter key in combination with shift or option will produce different versions of the letter.…"

"Standing in contrast to these stretched models is the hybrid. It is based on the principle that a single entity—be it an L3C, a 501(c)(3), a benefit corporation, or a traditional for-profit—cannot by itself do everything that a social venture needs to do. Instead, the hybrid uses a series of contracts and agreements to combine one or more independent businesses and nonprofits into a flexible structure that allows them to conduct a wide range of activities and generate synergies that cannot be done with a single legal entity. The two (or more) entities that generally make up a hybrid are distinct for legal purposes, and each is responsible for compliance with the laws and regulations that govern it, but when properly structured, the legally distinct entities can behave much like a single entity. For these reasons, a hybrid is often a better solution than a single legal entity that tries to incorporate a wide range of activities."

"A few years back, when a user at the University of Manchester asked for help with the ‘diff – files too big/ out of memory’ problem, I wrote a modern version that I called idiffh (for Ian’s diffh). My ground rules were:
Work on any text files on any operating system with a C compilerHave no limits on, e.g., line lengths or file sizeNever ‘give up’ if the going gets tough (i.e. when the files are very different)"

"No wonder they shut down the internet. It's more powerful than guns. Smart mobs with online capabilities are defeating status quo organization ruled by hierarchy and unfamiliar with coordinating technologies. These mobile smart mobs can be built on the fly in a matter of hours or days and they will continue to get smarter. Reaction rates are getting much, much faster."

Worth hearing, as a counterpoint to the stupid bullshit that's more often promulgated by business development and investors.

"…In my reflective mood, I’m wonder- ing, was its advice correct at the time, is it still relevant, and do Istill believe that metrics are a must for any suc- cessful software development effort? My answers are no, no, and no."

"A LaTeX template to efficently design pretty posters for scientific conferences. Posters are composited of blocks with headings, which can be positioned easily on the page, using absolute or relative positioning. A number of predefined styles can be composed to generate new color schemes and ornaments."

"An exquisite jQuery plugin for magical layouts"

"… Edmundson, similar to some conservative or traditionalist humanists, believes in a command model. The public only valued literature because the critics told them to. The public only understood literature because the critics told them what it meant. The public only read literature because the critics lead them through the reading of it. Once the commandment vanished, so did the Western tradition itself, and with extraordinary rapidity."

"On the bright side? Screencasting. From your Mac. To your Apple TV."

"The goals of the journal are to promote sharing of high-quality scientific software (e.g. there must be a test suite with 100% code coverage), promote discussion of best practice in research software development, and to enable researchers to be rewarded through publication for the time spent on developing software tools for others to use."

"In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail."

"But the privacy divide is deeper than that. Are the poor begging for extra helpings of privacy? No, not much, not even where they could use it. Pollsters in England have found that when they ask people in hard-up communities what things would improve their lives, the top three items almost always include more closed-circuit TV cameras on the streets. The people who get worked up about universal ID cards, DNA databases and CCTV monitoring are almost always the wealthy elite.
It’s the poor who are forced to live with crime, violence, harassment from unstable and marginalized people — exactly the sort of stuff that these supposedly privacy-invading conveniences are designed to prevent. When your life is hard, privacy equals isolation equals death. If you consider it a right, it’s a pretty good sign that you’ve got too much money and too little to worry about."

"The rhetoric of social mobility helps to legitimize  class hierarchies, by maintaining the pretence that  management is a technical skills. In fact, bosses' power derives from other sources.And what's worst of all is that such hierarchies might not be needed anyway. In many firms, "management" is either a redundant function – because good companies run themselves – or it's worse than useless."

"Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity."

"Mr. President, I don't believe that word means what you think it means."

"[A]narchists resemble the American Founders, who saw the spirit of liberty as a necessary bulwark against concentrations of power, and were themselves partly embedded in international networks preaching revolution and social upheaval. In building a truly global economy, the great states have given anarchists the opportunity to rebuild their networks of sympathy and common political purpose across borders. Today’s anarchists want to change the world through distributed action rather than a pistol shot. It seems to be working out better."

""They told me that EPA scientists had reviewed the originally lifecycle study and determined it wasn't scientifically sound, and I asked if it had been documented, if there was a hard copy," he says, "The [employee] said yes, and I asked if I could get a copy." And just like that, he had the proof he needed that the EPA had overlooked something that could be killing America's bees."

"You already have geniuses working on your infrastructure.  Listen to them.  This article is for people who don’t have any option between “code runs on developer’s laptop” and “code runs in production.”"

"Netflix has been a business partner to the movie and television studios through licensing deals, but increasingly it is seen as a partner with its hands far deeper in the pockets of the media companies than anyone thought. Through its success, the company has positioned itself at the center of the media universe — at the nexus of technology and content — and is now finding it a place increasingly under attack."

"Critical pedagogy, for Freire, meant imagining literacy as not simply the mastering of specific skills, but also as a mode of intervention, a way of learning about and reading the word as a basis for intervening in the world."

Because there is no way to bookmark a bookmark

"To summarize: trading practical work for high-level positions is prestigious, but it may make you dumber, alienated and unhappy. Back when I was a graduate student, we used to joke about the accident. The accident is what happens to successful professors: they suddenly become uninteresting, pompous, and… frankly… a tad stupid."

"We present a very fast algorithm for general matrix factorization of a data matrix for use in the statistical analysis of high-dimensional data via latent factors. Such data are prevalent across many application areas and generate an ever-increasing demand for methods of dimension reduction in order to undertake the statistical analysis of interest. Our algorithm uses a gradient-based approach which can be used with an arbitrary loss function provided the latter is differentiable. The speed and effectiveness of our algorithm for dimension reduction is demonstrated in the context of supervised classification of some real high-dimensional data sets from the bioinformatics literature."

a charming little language for GP, introduced to me by Maarten Keijzer "… Various introductions to Joy / Papers on Joy / The C sources and the Joy libraries…"

"This article attempts to outline, in informal terms, a new theory of combinators, related to the theory of Combinatory Logic pioneered by Moses Schonfinkel, Haskell Curry, and others in the 1930s. Although not essential, an understanding of the classical theory of combinators may be helpful (see the links at the bottom of this article for some introductory material to combinators)."

"TUNES is a Useful, Not Expedient, System"

"Once you've broken out the components, however, recognizing that the infinite components are what make the scarce components more valuable at no extra cost, you set those free. Not only do you set those free, you have every incentive to create more of them, and encourage more people to get them. You break them into easily accessible bites. You syndicate them. You hand them out. You make them easy to share and embed and distribute and promote.…"

"What I’d like is that the two Rutgers students have to work in everything they do for a more humane culture, for a wiser use of communicative media. I’d like them to have a special charge to live and teach the Golden Rule to their children, their friends, their neighbors, their co-workers, their communities, to any stranger who will listen and maybe even those who’d rather not."

"The task of the 11-bit boolean multiplexer is to decode a 3-bit binary address (000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111) and return the value of the corresponding data register (d0, d1, d2, d3, d4, d5, d6, d7). Thus, the boolean 11-multiplexer is a function of 11 arguments: three, a0 to a2, determine the address, and eight, d0 to d7, determine the answer. As GEP uses single-character chromosomes, T = {a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8} which correspond, respectively, to {a0, a1, a2, d0, d1, d2, d3, d4, d5, d6, d7}."

"…This phenomenon is self-healing. This is the important part, but it's not as complicated as it sounds. As we've established, shares can only be redeemed when they are actually delivered into the trust. If everyone wants to redeem their shares, then the shorts need to cover their positions – we have also already discussed this above.…"

"People aren't envious, they are frustrated and furious with a system that causes them to lose equity in their homes, have their retirement funds evaporate, have their employment prospects plummet, while at the same time bailing out those at the top who caused the problems.…"

"I want to share with you a story about books, publishing, fundraising and seed capital. It's a story that I hope will change how you think about all of these topics. And it's a story that I hope will serve as a template."

"Terminal junkies rejoice! Now you can use Cucumber to test your command line interfaces just like you do for your web apps.…"

“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.”

"So, let’s get down to the nitty gritty. If consumer debt was $13.8 trillion at the end of 2008 and the banks have since written off 5.66% of that debt, total write-offs were $800 billion. If total consumer debt now sits at $13.5 trillion, then consumers have actually taken on $500 billion of additional debt since the end of 2008. The consumer hasn’t cut back at all. They are still spending and borrowing. It is beyond my comprehension that no one on CNBC or in the other mainstream media can do simple math to figure out that the deleveraging story is just a Big Lie."