fantispug

I automated my wedding seating cards and plan.

I managed invitations as a CSV (who had been invited, who responded yes and no, addresses and dietary requirements).

I designed the placecards and seating plan as SVG in inkscape with special text I used as {templating parameters}.

I could then produce all my place cards and seating plan from a simple simple script. This was handy when guests changed their RSVP a week out from the wedding when I had little free time and I could make a change instantly. (Although admittedly I spent more time getting the layout right for the seating chart than if I had done it by hand).

I once sat in on a friend's final year economics course.

They talked about the "gravitational model" of economics, that the amount of trade between two economies is proportional to the product of the size of the economies each raised to some power, divided by some power of the distance between them. They showed a best fit of the 5 parameters to under a dozen data points and it looked rather awful. (I am not sure how well defined those variables are). Without any theoretical justification it seemed like a model stolen at random from physics that didn't fit well.

I've also read a published economic paper written in terms of measure theory, where it was clear the author did not understand measure theory at all. The ideas were misapplied to a simple problem in a way that made it sound very difficult. Admittedly this is partly the fault of mathematicans who teach measure theory as statistics; while you can use that model it makes things very complicated and you almost surely don't need to deal with infinities in most real problems, let alone non-measurable sets.

This arm of economics trying to ride the coattails of prestige worn by maths and physics is void of meaning.

There's a cultural divide here; many Australians do not consider gun ownership a "liberty" in the same way as Americans do because we do not share the same revolutionary history.

If anything in Australia's history guns were used for oppression (of Aboriginal people) and not for liberation.

That's a very good point; even if it's possible to detect steganography of encrypted messages it's probably expensive to do so, especially in the torrent of digital traffic online.

I guess it will only impact law abiding citizens then.

This is a great analogy.

Encrypted messages are used by both criminals and whistleblowers. Weakening encryption will likely help apprehend criminals and even create a chilling effect on criminal communications. It will equally help apprehend police and government whistleblowers and create a chilling effect on criticism of authorities.

If it's illegal to send encrypted communications it will still have an impact. If the source of any unapproved encrypted transmissions could be identified there is a good chance the sender could be apprehended.

It's not necessarily obvious if they're just tracking your behaviour on WiFi and making external actions based on that (approaching you in store, or sending certain promotions).

I think a lot of people don't appreciate that you really need to trust to a WiFi network you connect to.

If used this could be seen as a precedent for letting internet carriers do this. Even if you're paying for the connection it's still their network.

While this is already occurs for content that is considered illegal, broadening the content it can be applied to is dangerous.

They may block or throttle their competitors, or send you promotions for their products (or do the same things of their associates). Many people won't know or be able to detect that this is happening.

For each of the 3 tests the training sets were classified with a biopsy, images were randomly seleced then blurry images were filtered out by a separate dermatologist. The ratios Benign:Malignant were 70:65, 97:33, and 40:71 respectively.

These close-to-even ratios make for a more powerful test of classification. I would assume that these test samples have biopsy data means that some dermatologist thought that they might be malignant (unnecessary medical operations are unethical). This might lead to some bias towards samples that are difficult for humans to diagnose.

Separating these into binary classifications of specific tumor types makes it easier to classify than out of every possible tumor type (as a dermatologist does).

Still the claims this paper makes are very promising. A lot of the training data was classified by dermatologists, not biopsy. Using more biopsy data could lead to even better classification, as well as improvements to the model.

Being methodical is good when your problem is intricate and well defined. Fast feedback won't be helpful in implementing a complex algorithm like a compiler or a numerical simulation (although I would argue it will help you debug it).

When what you're doing is simple but error prone, or not well defined fast feedback can make you much more efficient. If you're using an underdocumented API/dataset, the best way to understand it is to probe it with code, quickly iterating.

I used to write a lot of LaTeX and make lots of simple mistakes (missing backslashes typically). I found having an environment where I found my mistakes as soon as I made them more efficient than searching through the output for all mistakes, and then for each mistake finding the corresponding source and correcting them.

I have seen a production system (which is still live) using much like Joel's suggestion 2 - a Windows 2003 server that uses Excel to produce reports (inside an otherwise Linux shop). It's fragile, no one wants to touch it, it's costly to migrate, but too used to deprecate. It dies about once a month and has to be restarted.

I guess it works (although the output isn't particularly good), but it's drained quite a bit of maintenance time and even more morale.

Learning advanced mathematics without going to university would take an extreme amount of dedication, focus, and effort, but it's certainly possible. It's much easier with the resources available on the internet, and being able to connect with people through forums and stack exchange.

John Baez's recommendations: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html

For theoretical physics 't Hooft's recommendations: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gadda001/goodtheorist/

You're right, in the sense that the partial sums are always 0 or 1, so 0.5 away from 0.5. However the mean of the partial sums converges to 0.5 (this is called Cesàro summation). It converges "on the average" towards 0.5. However this isn't normally what people mean by convergence.

Paywave/Paypass is about convenience, rather than security. It is less secure than chip and pin.

Fraud was a lower risk to credit card companies in America because [1] they were better at detecting and preventing fraudulent transactions, and were better at passing on the costs of fraud to retailers and consumers.

[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/10/ec...

This is interesting, but unfortunately the community looks stagnant; there have only been 5 edits and 1 new article in the last year (excluding the 2 edits I just made).

It is a Hausdorff space that is locally homeomorphic to the Euclidean plane, but not paracompact. Manifolds are usually defined to be paracompact because this implies the existence of partitions of unity which have many nice implications: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/98105/why-are-smooth...

A lot of that, though, is actually loading LaTeX packages itself.

TeX underneath is really very speedy; on my several year old laptop it can compile several hundred pages in around half a second (and pdftex takes around twice as long).

I believe it's also possible to perform optimal line breaking algorithms incrementally, so you wouldn't have to reset the whole document as you add to the end of it (although you may as you add to the start of it, but that happens in Word anyway).

Evidence that it's trying to improve LaTeX macro programming? It's in the documentation. Evidence that it will be released any time this century? I have none of that. It looks like the last commit to the SVN was in January.

The commit graph (http://wiki.patoline.org/developers.html) shows commits every month from December 2011 to now.

Some effort is going towards this in LaTeX3 (see the experimental package: http://www.ctan.org/pkg/expl3).

That's great if people are viewing your resume online, but the print version looks very ordinary; there's a page break within a block, the format is dull (you even set a print stylesheet), and, for instance, the kerning is mediocre compared to TeX (e.g. in Europe). Your resume even compete on any of the points that (La)TeX is good at.

Thanks! If it wasn't for this I would have given up on this site for being unreadable.