ubasu

Wendy Doniger is known to have an interpretation of Hindu texts that is hostile to traditional understanding of the texts [1]. Some specific examples in this particular article are:

1. The Bhagvad Gita is commonly understood to be a discussion of appropriate duty. In this case, Krishna's argument was it is Arjuna's duty to go to war, considering that all other peaceful solutions had been explored and rejected by the Kauravas (Arjuna's opponents)[2]. In fact, Krishna himself had acted as peacemaker, and asked Arjuna to take take up arms only when that failed. The use of the Gita by Indian Nationalists fighting for Indian independence from the British has to be understood in this context.

2. Doniger says that the war was "lawless", but the Mahabharata war was an attempt at a "just" war, as understood in its contemporary context. Deviations from just behaviour are noted and held up as examples of unjust behaviour.

3. The so-called "Doomsday" manifestation of Krishna is in fact him showing his universal form, which is supposed to be beyond the capacity of ordinary humans to visualize, which is why Krishna had to grant Arjuna divine vision to be able to comprehend it. Doniger's use of the Abrahamic term "Doomsday" is loaded, because the understanding of comprehensive destruction or "Pralay" [3] in Hinduism is very different. Sure Doniger understands the difference, since she is a professor of Religious Studies.

4. She seems to be applying guilt-by-association by tying the Gita to the RSS and the assassination of Gandhi, and she criticizes Richard Davis for being too respectful of Hindu understanding of the Gita. Overall, the impression is that her anti-Hindutva agenda is spilling over into being an anti-Hindu agenda.

[1] http://creative.sulekha.com/risa-lila-1-wendy-s-child-syndro... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurukshetra_War#Krishna.27s_pea... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pralaya

Just a curious onlooker - don't mean to criticize. A lot of this seems to be recreating stuff that Fortran 95/2003 does natively, but I guess this is for C/C++ people?

The best way to tell is to check if the postage says "Pre-sorted Mail" or if they actually spent money on first-class postage to send it. ;-)

Seems like an interesting way to cast a structural shape. Possibly, it transfers stresses efficiently because it follows the deformed configuration of the fabric.

This has nothing to do with yield strength, which is relevant only where the materials "yields" or plastifies. This is just linear elastic beam bending theory - you have two different beam cross sections in either case with two different moments of inertia. See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8276173

You could fold a piece of fabric like you do the pizza, and it will not keep its shape.

You can always roll up the slice into a cylinder with the crust on the straight edge, and that also is an example of the theorem. It says nothing about the mechanics of the problem, i.e. how much will the pizza deform. It is quite possible to fold up the pizza as recommended and still have the tip sag - this depends on the material of the pizza and the self-weight, i.e. the mechanics rather than only the geometry.

The author's point that "curvature imputes stiffness" conflates several different and distinct mechanisms, and offers an inadequate explanation.

For the examples of the pizza, the leaf, and the corrugated sheets, the stiffness is due to the fact that the bending moment of inertia of the cross-section increases when we fold the pizza or the sheet in a particular way [1]. The Theorema Egregium shows that such a structure can be made from a flat sheet of material, not that this construction imparts stiffness to the structure.

The example of arches show the well-known arch action in mechanics, where forces are carried through pure compression without any tensile stresses, which makes it appropriate for using stones to make the arch [2]. In principle, one could make a triangular "arch", i.e. part of a truss structure, where we use two straight rods joined together at the top [3]. This shows that its not really the curvature that is giving the stiffness.

The example of hyperbolic paraboloids shows arch action in one direction and beam bending in the other.

The examples of the egg and the can show that it is hard to break a surface when it does not have stress concentrations [4].

So the point is that there's a lot of classical solid mechanics at play here, of which the author seems to be unaware.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truss

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_concentration

If you use sympy, I would strongly recommend using ipython qtconsole:

http://ipython.org/ipython-doc/2/interactive/qtconsole.html

One of the big advantages is that you can print your expressions using LaTeX:

http://docs.sympy.org/dev/tutorial/printing.html

Allow me to bring up Lua, which has a nice way of handling multiple return values:

http://www.lua.org/pil/5.1.html

Given the problems with Java's floating-point implementation [1], would this be reliable for statistical analysis?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6585828

Note that this "rant" is by Velvel Kahan [1], who won the Turing Award for designing the IEEE 754 floating point standard [2] (among other things), which is used for specifying floating point computations on almost all computers today. So perhaps he has a little more context on this than yourself.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kahan [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008

From the article: "I’m not RMS, I love open-source for very pragmatic reasons. One of the biggest is that I hate hitting black boxes when I’m debugging!"

RMS started the free software movement because he wasn't able to adapt a black box printer.

Just as rape is not really about sex but about exerting power over someone, here also it is not so much about sleeping with the waitress but about having power over her. I think that was the main point of the article, which he chose to bolster using non-rigorous examples.

That is true, but I have found if I am doing calculations that need something like the full math library of python, it's not a one-off calculation, and I am typically on octave anyway.

In any case, since I have emacs open all time, I usually do

  M-x calc

for one-off calculations.

Or:

  echo "$1" | bc -l

No need to rev up python.

This is "a pox on both houses" disingenuous pablum. Consider their description of the Reinhart-Rogoff affair:

This intellectual disagreement over the impact of fiscal decisions has spilled into the public domain with the fight between Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman and the Harvard Duo of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Here is the letter written by Reinhart and Rogoff labeling Krugman‘s comments on their work as “spectacularly uncivil behavior.” The spat is over the impact of debt on economic growth.

What the author must have known, but fails to mention, is that Reinhart-Rogoff was wrong due their selective data usage and spreadsheet errors.

All the Sans and Santas are California Missions [1] along the El Camino Real [2], also know as US 101 for the most part:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_missions_in_California [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Camino_Real_(California)

She says: "I agreed with him so I turned around and said so." So she interjected herself into this private conversation, and it is not clear if the other guy's allegedly sexist comments were to her in response to what she said, or if they were just directed to his friend privately.

From this article:

"I saw a photo on main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop. I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so."

Seems a tad melodramatic as a reaction to a private conversation. Seems to go with the Joan-of-Arc complex:

https://twitter.com/adriarichards/status/313442430848487424

I wouldn't call them "mega-combo characters" ;-) Typically, these are at most two or three letters written together, and they are very much used today in Sanskrit, Hindi and other regional variants such as Bengali etc.

Of course you also have multiple words that have been combined into one large compound word, by way of appropriate linguistic rules of combining sounds. This is similar to long compound words in German.

Emeryville, El Cerrito, Albany, Kensington.

This blog post linked to from the comments in the article explains the "ecological correlation fallacy"[1] being described in the article:

http://ed2worlds.blogspot.com/2013/01/gates-foundation-waste...

Key quote:

"...it has been known for more than 60 years now that correlating averages of groups grossly overstates the strength of the relationship between two variables"

Apparently, this was also used in the past to show high correlation between African-Americans and illiteracy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

C-x c

Netlib (http://www.netlib.org/) is the home of LAPACK and BLAS and many, many other classic, robust numerical code, almost all in Fortran 77, and would typically need advanced background in numerical analysis to understand the details.

In any case, if you want to do numerical analysis, it is better to use existing code than trying to write your own.

That is true - I was thinking of places with a functional government where the people have participated in its building. ;-)

This is like scrapping old code and starting from scratch, the problem of course being that all that cruft in the old code was there for a reason.

For website scraping, something like casperjs/phantomjs or selenium are more suitable, since they emulate a browser and evaluate javascript, which curl cannot, and it is not clear if this tool can.

What are the use cases where curl is more suitable than phantomjs or selenium?

This is the NYT equivalent of blogspam. Also comes with standard patronizing rhetoric about how today's uppity nouveau riche elites cannot compare with what he knew when he was growing up (as others have also pointed out).

Nitpick: creep is different from relaxation.

Creep is when you apply a constant load on the material, and the material elongates (creeps) gradually, keeping the same stress.

Relaxation is when you apply a constant extension to the material, and the stress reduces gradually (material relaxes), keeping the same extension.

Snarky response of the day: Seems like quite the trend to compare the poor and unemployed to children and animals. ;-)