mikebike

Does "Nicolas Bourbaki" count?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Bourbaki

You might want to check the bio of Antonio García Martí­nez, who has a physics background, and subsequently worked in both finance and adtech.

There's a bill (H.R. 4009) named "Flamethrowers? Really? Act" to regulate flamethrowers the same way machine guns are regulated: https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4009...

Several open source cloud projects (OpenStack, Eucalyptus, CloudStack, OpenNebula) implement the Amazon EC2 API. Eucalyptus is the only one that formally obtained a license from Amazon.

That's called a warrant canary: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/warrant-canary-faq

I've used k2pdfopt for reading two-column formatted academic papers on Kindle Paperwhite, it works great.

Here's a talk he gave on this topic, from 2013: http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/blog/video/lecture-...

There's "Making Software" by Oram and Wilson: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596808303.do

For a critique of Unz's data analysis, see Andrew Gelman's blog post here: http://andrewgelman.com/2013/02/12/that-claim-that-harvard-a...

Orca wasn't built by contractors, it was written in-house by Romney staffers and volunteers.

See: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

"In 2010, of all the farms in the United States with at least $1 million in revenues, 88 percent were family farms, and they accounted for 79 percent of production." -- http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/the-triu...

Perl's a dynamic language, but return type can vary based on context. I once saw this really bite someone where the presence of parentheses on the left-hand side of the expression changed the behavior of the function being called on the right-hand side. Not fun to debug that one.

Michael Crichton called this "the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect":

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/65213

RStudio is a pretty cool IDE for R.

I think we'd be better served using such styles in scientific journals more often.

As an example, here's a wonderfully written article by the late statistician, Jacob Cohen: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~sternh/courses/210/cohen94_pval.pdf

This Stallman quote (transcript from an interview) may be instructive here:

"And the issue doesn't really arise for software that goes in a watch or a microwave oven or an automobile ignition system. Because those are places where you don't download software to install. It's not a real computer, as far as the user is concerned. And so, it doesn't raise these issues enough for them to be ethically important."

Source: http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.html

This article suggests that shopping around for, say, knee replacement surgery, is not so simple:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/how-much...

They are tied together because of fundraising. American universities raise a lot of funds through alumni donations. Sports programs provide a mechanism for alumni to continue to feel connected to their alma mater, which increases the likelihood of alumni donations.

It's funny because it imagines what the reviews would be like if these papers were reviewed today. The object of ridicule is the current state of peer review in computer science.

It's looking good for Buffett:

http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/11/21/hedge-funds-kiss-...

Obligatory Tao of Programming reference (by Geoffrey James) <http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html>...:

There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: ``Which is easier to design: an accounting package or an operating system?''

``An operating system,'' replied the programmer.

The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. ``Surely an accounting package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system,'' he said.

``Not so,'' said the programmer, ``when designing an accounting package, the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This is why an operating system is easier to design.''

The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. ``That is all good and well, but which is easier to debug?''

The programmer made no reply.

An interesting example of going too far the other way (favoring readability without enough thought to writability) is Applescript. It's very easy to read, even for those without too much programming experience. But it turns out that it's very difficult to write Applescript scripts.

John Gruber wrote a good essay on the flaws of Applescript a few years back: http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/english-likeness_monster

In this case, the monkey "borrowed" somebody else's camera, without permission, and took the picture in question. If I steal somebody's camera, and take photos with it, do I still own the copyright?

Aren't they brutal to the grad students working as research assistants in the lab?

"With notably rare exceptions..."

http://crookedtimber.org/2011/03/30/with-notably-rare-except...

How smooth is the Nook Color for navigating around an academic PDF? When I've played with one inside the store, it seemed a little jerky when zooming on the Nook Color manual PDF.

There's a commercial computational chemistry software package called Gaussian that uses Linda: http://gaussian.com/g_prod/linda.htm

Yipe! Were you able to negotiate the bill down at all when working out a payment plan, or did the hospital end up charging you the full amount?

Isn't price fixing is done for U.S. Medicare payments to doctors, hence the constant wailing over the "doc fix" issue?

I can imagine a scenario where the age for Medicare was lowered slowly over time to cover more and more people. (Unlikely, but not beyond the realm of possibility).

I've never understood the meaning of the "retail" rates. How many people are there who can afford to pay these rates and also don't have health insurance?