jdnier

"If we ship Python inside of Firefox, no one is going to use it because it's not available in Chrome, it's not available in Internet Explorer." Oh yeah? Try me.

Wild bees live adjacent to cultivated fields. From the cited letter in Nature: "Our second finding was that the insecticide seed coating correlated with reduced nesting of the solitary bee O. bicornis. To investigate this we placed three trap nests containing 27 O. bicornis cocoons (ExtendedData Fig. 1) adjacent to each of the 16 fields before the beginning of oilseed rape flowering and monitored if emerging females started to build brood cells. In six of the eight control fields, but in none of the fields treated with the insecticide seed coating, females started to build brood cells (Wilcoxon test Z 5 2.84, P 5 0.0045; Fig. 2b). Although the reasons why the bees failed to build brood cells when exposed to the insecticide treatment remain unclear, a reduced capacity to navigate[8,9,20,21] is a possible explanation."

"Honey bees weren’t affected by the [neonicotinoid] seed treatments. But wild bees were affected, and in a big way.... In this study, no mason bees (Osmia bicornis) began brood cells in the seed treated fields. None."

Here we have a "curator" saying these photos are from "Source: NASA", but with no additional details provided. No original source or URL, no captions, no detail on cropping or manipulation, just a collection of "the best ones" he's found somewhere on the Internet. Nice to look at but lacking all context.

I wonder how overwhelming it might be to suddenly see vivid reds and greens for the first time, especially for an adult, and not be able to turn it off.

Much larger in scale, alfalfa is also exported, often to Asia. "The water used to irrigate just alfalfa and hay — 7 trillion gallons per year — exceeds the irrigation needs of all the vegetables, berries, and fruit orchards combined." (Center for Science in the Public Interest; http://www.cspinet.org/EatingGreen/pdf/arguments4.pdf)

On the theme of the impact of animal agriculture, here's a much deeper exploration of those impacts and a dizzying list of statistics and sources: http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/

I think of it as indicating the function name and parameter list are a unit (it's foo(object), not foo (object)). I've always liked that style.

When I see people write

    'some %s %s text ' %('x', 'y')

my first thought is "% is not not a function".

I'm reminded also of (and agree with) the Crockford convention in JavaScript recommending a space in

    function () {...}

but not in

    function foo(object) {...}

But conventions are are a choice made; most times it's easier to adopt them and move on.

This is the best gallery of photos I've seen. One close up views the comet from only 6 miles away.

An hour-long video summarizing the effectiveness of plant-based diets, which can prevent, treat, or reverse 14 of the top-15 causes of death in the US (just not accidents).

"ohmygodthelistgoeson"!

Life is endlessly surprising: "The diverse bacteria were found in groundwater and are thought to be quite common. They're also quite odd, which isn't a surprise given the cells are close to and in some cases smaller than several estimates for the lower size limit of life. This is the smallest a cell can be and still accommodate enough material to sustain life. The bacterial cells have densely packed spirals that are probably DNA, a very small number of ribosomes, hair-like appendages, and a stripped-down metabolism that likely requires them to rely on other bacteria for many of life's necessities."

"If they some­times act as if they dis­cov­ered ty­pog­ra­phy like it was the Higgs bo­son, we can for­give their ex­cess of en­thu­si­asm."

It looks reasonable in Chrome on Linux... until I looked at the source, which is littered with <FONT FACE="Comic Sans MS"> tags.

From 2013, but it's a big list.

It pains me to see him unwrapping paper-backed rolls of film in room light, then using a strobe to document the appearance of the the roll (before developing). The fogging you see at the top and bottom edges of some rolls is from light leaking around the edges of loosely-rolled spools; it happens even with modern 120 roll film. There's a good chance he's fogging some of the rolls due to his handling.

“I realize why my cab driver seemed so proud to drop me off at the aging-but-impressive all-brick main building of Cenicafe... ‘Welcome,’ he said, ‘to the NASA of Colombia.’”

No, not really. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/irregardless

The Studio Ghibli film Spirited Away (2001) overtook Titanic and is still the highest grossing film in Japan.[1] Another Ghibli film, Howl's Moving Castle, also passed Mononoke on that list.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films_...

"The atend and peek properties of the Lookahead class enable a whole set of simple recipes for working with generators."

The docs make a nice tutorial on various itertools functions and how iterstuff enhances them.

A great book, full of interesting ideas and implications of software development carried on over millennia.

From the paper's abstract (published by Nature Medicine, 08 December 2014):

"These preclinical studies suggest that, so far, this unimolecular, polypharmaceutical strategy has potential to be the most effective pharmacological approach to reversing obesity and related metabolic disorders."

At one point in the video he suggests (with a laugh) the name imagin-ary to go along with binary, ternary, n-ary, etc.

What a huge list! There are many new titles coming in 2015.

Here's another explanation from the Postgres docs with additional examples: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/queries-table-expr...

My favorite large regex for testing sites like this (Regulex link was very long, so here's a tinyurl):

http://tinyurl.com/ovmvphg

Original paper: http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html

Except that arrow is simple-minded when trying to parse date strings (compared to dateparser or delorean[1]). By default, it only tries to match a few patterns. You'll see a lot of this:

    arrow.parser.ParserError: Could not match input to any of
    ['YYYY-MM-DD', 'YYYY-MM', 'YYYY'] on '01-06-17'

Here's a list of (US English–centric) test dates that dateparser ((ddp.get_date_data(date)['date_obj']).date()) and delorean (delorean.parse(date, dayfirst=False, yearfirst=False).date) both parse correctly, nearly all of which arrow fails on:

    01-06-2017
    01-06-17
    2017-01-06

    01/06/2017
    01/06/17
    2017/01/06

    Jan 6, 2017
    Jan 6 2017

    2017, Jan 6
    2017 Jan 6

    2017, January 6
    2017 January 6

    January 6, 2017
    January 6 2017


    January 6nd, 2017
    January 6rd, 2017
    January 6st, 2017
    January 6th, 2017

    January 6nd 2017
    January 6rd 2017
    January 6st 2017
    January 6th 2017


    2017, January 6nd
    2017, January 6rd
    2017, January 6st
    2017, January 6th

    2017 January 6nd
    2017 January 6rd
    2017 January 6st
    2017 January 6th


    01//06/2017
    01//06//2017
    01--06-2017
    01--06--2017

    01/06-2017
    01-06/2017

I like Delorean's API better than arrow's (strictly personal preference) but think dateparser's language detection is interesting.

[1] http://delorean.readthedocs.org/en/latest/quickstart.html

"Global Fishing Watch is the product of a technology partnership between SkyTruth, Oceana, and Google that is designed to show all of the trackable fishing activity in the ocean."

It's a veritable book.