Stwerp

But MIT did this, so we should carefully point that out in the title so it is newsworthy. </unbridled snarkiness>

I also was in Caracas in 2006. I remember seeing graffiti "Vota Por Chavez" and the next day "Vota Por Chavez Jodete", the last part added overnight. It all depends on where you were (this was near parque del este, a more middle-class pro-opposition area).

I went in expecting a dictatorship and left feeling that it was a democracy. Or at least much more than a hopeless dictatorship as all the articles I read made it sound. There did exist fear about expressing anti-Chavez sentiment in and around the barrios[1], but this was mainly due to fear of the people in these areas being dangerous and potentially lashing out. And in fact, many people were just scared of the barrios period.

[1] Poorer, temporary-turned permament housing throughout the city, if anyone isn't familiar.

I'd argue that what you want to do is write English language as you're accustomed. Paragraphs with multiple sentence in a single line.

What you'd like Git (or whatever your diff'ing program) to do is parse the individual sentences as individual lines for version control.

To each his own though. I have trained myself to start putting LaTeX sentences on separate lines to accomodate for this, but don't think that this is the best solution.

I used checkout a year ago and had the same issues. No human, only pre-fab answers based on checkboxes. I haven't used it since.

Recently, I had trouble with gmail on my iPhone (due to the whole EAS shutdown) and was looking for help or info on account upgrades. Only userland help forums for me.

I would say: Google's tech support is terrific until you actually have a problem and need to talk to someone.

I think the question to ask is why are the professors who tackle writing these books going through such distribution chains?

It is not the monetary incentive. My friends who have contributed chapters to books generally see essentially zero return from royalties when the books are printed/sold.

Academics are more concerned about getting their name out (i.e. prestige). The business a professor runs is his/her name and they must market and position this well so that they get the funding and grants and the agencies recognize their name. There is nothing limiting professors currently from assembling notes into a textbook using free tools like LaTeX and putting their book on the web. Some currently do this (thank goodness!). However, putting a point on a CV that you uploaded a PDF file to your personal website versus being published by a well-known publishing firm makes a big difference.

That would be the problem to tackle: assuring authors that their time will be worthwhile. The fact that a book gets through the process to be published is seen as a mark or seal of quality, whether this is in any way true or not.

Well, the photophone was actually a much cooler device anyway. Experimental wireless transfer of human speech over 200 meters from a completely passive device using optical scattering? In 1880? Sweet! The receiver was active, but transmitter was not at all. Somewhat similar to modern UHF RFID technology.

Bell was actually a pretty awesome engineer largely motivated by wanting to help the impaired.

That's not across the board, though. My family grows rice in northeastern arkansas in fields that have not been treated as such. Still spray for bugs though.

> Everything about this rubs me the wrong way: ... to there even _being_ a market for Aereo (it shouldn't be necessary, given modern technology).

Sadly, though, there is a _huge_ hole in the market for cheap, easy-to-setup DVR boxes for over-the-air broadcasts. Mythtv is too tedious for the average consumer to bother with, and items like HD Homerun still require some sort of backend server (of sorts) running to schedule record times. Tivo is perhaps the cheapest option, but its monthly service costs are still higher than this option (and still requires separate purchase of a box).

For $8 a month for a 40 hour DVR box, this sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me.

Mountain Dew is coke as well.

I've been living in Emacs + Auctex for a while now, so my questions about markdown/pandoc: I have grown very accustomed to regex (and normal) searches on my bibtex/reference database and easily plugging in citations in my document. Is there support for this (reftex) in any of the markdown editors? I don't know if I've seen a good solution to this.

The other thing is preview-latex which inline-png's all equations, section titles and images in the emacs buffer. This is very valuable to me to easily see a figure without needing to tab between windows. I don't think markdown would support something like this, as far as I'm aware.

I like the idea of complete separation of content and appearance/layout, but Latex has many customizations (psfrag for image text replacement, tikz, programming custom macros) that I would be somewhat lost without. For instance, I start all my outlines in org-mode, and love having quick html, or tex->pdf output, but for the real nitty-gritty content, I _need_ my straight latex code.

Ack! Not available for me yet. Is it all the goldsrc games, or just HL? Ok, really all I want to know: CS 1.6 available?

I agree. I think I picked up this syntax from Python. My response was intended as tongue-in-cheek answer since Matlab allows both i and j as the complex number. I mainly see this when editing or modifying scripts written by others in my lab and have to pinpoint their counter usage.

It should still be ' foo * 1j '

Me too! I changed my array counter to 'j'. :P

I work in matlab a lot and have had this error creep up several times. It's very annoying, to say the least.

I really wouldn't trust those connections without adding solder yourself. What fab house are you using? I've generally stuck with 4pcb (advanced circuits) and there might be enough solder for a 0402 to "sort of" stick, but there is no way I'm going to trust that connection. It could just as easily be sitting in flux from a nearby wire and not actually have any connection at all.

My understanding is that the solder mask is there to only expose copper for the solder to flow, but mask off everything else with a main intention of preventing crowbarring, or shorting out traces -- not to put actual solder on the boards at the fab house.

In a discussion on Slashdot, I was linked to an IEEE article that claims that all OAM type transmissions are subsets of MIMO. I haven't read this in detail yet, but so far it seems interesting:

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&rec...

No, you're right. From everything I've read on this, it is essentially limited to line of sight as you need the "middle" reference for the other "orbits", or whatever the heck they're called. (Assuming this is the same technique as the experiment the Italians displayed in Venice a few months ago.)

Wow. You can choose between light and dark. This is not a theme, but rather a background you can change. That's it. Want to change the opacity of the overlay? Too bad. Want to customize colors? Too bad. Want a scroll bar that you can see and is not just a gray blob on the side? Too bad.

They are different physical phenomena. Sound is a pressure and is produced by compression and expansion of the (local) environment. RF or light is a self-sustaining electromagnetic wave (assuming we are not right next to the source [i.e. far-field]) produced by a time-variant electric field inducing a time-varying magnetic field, which induces a time-varying electric field, which induces ... All these induced fields end up supporting each other and propagating the wave.

While they are both considered waves, it is not frequency regimes that differentiate acoustic pressure waves and RF waves -- RF waves can be anywhere within the "audio" spectrum and beyond, and audio waves can be well into the ultrasonic range and into the UHF regime.

The idea of the anechoic chamber is the same (blocking all reflections), but it is not just as simple as tuning to different frequencies. They do however need to be designed for a specific frequency range.

I am not an expert on anechoic chamber design (or acoustic wave propagation for that matter), but an RF anechoic chamber is not the same as an acoustic anechoic chamber, although it will show some functionality as one. Does that make sense, or am I just confusing the conversation? It did when I started writing all this. :/

Minor Pedantic Point of Contention: Quake 1 had the rocket jump "discovery"; by Q3, it was an expected part of the gameplay. However, this does not affect your argument in any way.

Your article is amazing. I was moved to tears many times reading through this. (My wife is 6 months pregnant right now.) Just wow. Good luck with it all, and the fact that Victoria does not have the same diagnosis is just amazing! I'm glad Duke could help and your story is beautiful and inspiring. I don't know what to say, just, thank you so much for writing this. I will certainly be passing this on to some friends.

Yeah, I just tried the trial and got an error. Strange. I hope the trend of Lion-only apps doesn't continue because I just can't cripple my workflow to "upgrade."

Can we just not call it nix? I think that is what is confusing. Maybe its just the most popular desktop linux format (at least currently) or something else. It is kind of weird to talk about a standard nix interface that isn't a terminal (at least it seems that way to me). Every linux box I use always has different desktop/X-environment from the next. There may not be thousands of X11 desktops, but there are quite a few (cde, enlightenment, gnome, kde, xfce, just off the top of my hdead) that all have their differences. I would agree more with the other guy, but acknowledge its pedantic details.

Thanks! This is great.

Just fyi, I too would also be very interested in the source for this. It really looks nice!

> the christian academic community seems to be about the only one in which one can have a serious conversation about innate differences between the genders without getting immediately taken out and shot.

(Sorry, I don't mean to harp on this too much, but after hanging out around a sociologist with a pet peeve, it has sadly rubbed off on me.)

This may be because in the academic community "gender" has an entirely different meaning that "sex." Sex (and the sex differences) relate to biological differences, male and female. Gender (and gender differences) relate to society, culture, and how one acts or the roles of the masculine and feminine _within that society_. So of course "gender differences" are not going to turn up a lot in the academic world since a self-identifying masculine male should have the same biology as a self-identifying feminine male. Googling for "sex brain difference" or something like that may help (in google scholar or a journal database, probably not plain google).

One other data point is that it is worth investigating women in technology in other societies. According to this (old) study: http://www.frauen.inf.ethz.ch/stats/international_stat_fraue... women are in the majority for a few asian countries.

Just some thoughts.

Do you mean sex or gender? (Remember, words are assigned gender but cannot have sex.)

I'm not going to try to argue the brain chemistry thing^, but the social/culture aspect is a large problem and (as you bring up) can also partially explain why there are few women as well as men choosing to live effeminately in programming or technical jobs.

^Edit for clarity: Because I think its a totally loaded statement and don't want to even start down that path, not because I agree and assume its fact.

Radio guy here. You are correct. I just finished reading their paper, and they describe a technique that creates a spatial null by changing the orbital angular momentum. In other words, they push the intensity away from the line-of-sight (LOS) ray out slightly (in space about the ray) so that two antennas can receive the different signals by spatial diversity. This requires A) precise tuning and setup B) a decent distance away from the transmitter source since you need the wavefront to spread out wide enough for antenna location and C) a re-calibration/tuning anytime the setup or possibly multipath changes.

This technique should work well for static point-point comms (not with the claimed infinite bandwidth though since you run into a physical problem of area and precise location of the receiving array as well as near-field antenna effects affecting receiver patterns) but in its current form could not be implemented in a mobile device. Hell, a bunch of the time in WiFi or cell reception, multipath is your best friend and can be the only way you receive a signal and this work does not seem to address this issue.

Still though, this is an interesting idea and should not be quickly discounted, although the article gives it much more hype than it merits imho.