wch

I second this warning. I've never used a Raspberry Pi, but I've used netatalk for years on a Linux server, and after I upgraded OS X 10.7, my backups to it would get corrupted once every month or two. I think it's not so bad if you have a wired connection, but wireless backups from a laptop (which can get put to sleep at any moment) just aren't reliable, for me at least. Also, it would constantly index my Time Machine backups over wireless, which takes forever and made my Macbook Air's fan turn on.

I suspect some of this is due to limitations in netatalk's AFP implementation, but I've never compared to a proper Time Capsule

I've gone through the same thing with photography and other hobbies, and for me, at least, that stage of acquiring lots of stuff is necessary. During that time I'll use all the new things -- I end up learning how it all works by making good use of it all. Later, after having more experience and perspective, I'm much better able to decide what's worth keeping and what's worth getting rid of.

It's not quite the same to use ssh + screen/tmux. mosh resumes automatically (no need to log in again), and it also will show your keystrokes as you type them, even if the remote machine hasn't yet received them and then sent back to your local machine the updated text. This "buffered" text is displayed with an underline and when your computer receives communication from the server, it gets updated to the correct text. This makes the terminal feel a lot more responsive, in my experience. mosh can also be installed with apt-get, at least in Ubuntu.

Before he started writing more political stuff, Paul Krugman wrote a great article in Slate about a baby-sitting co-op that had a "recession" because everyone was saving too much and not spending enough. It's a nice example of the liquidity trap that he talks about a lot: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...

Actually, I just discovered that on btrfs, you can disable COW on a volume, or even on individual files. To do it on a per-file basis, you have to compile a small program available here: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg1...

This makes btrfs suitable for virtual machine images.

My understanding is that COW filesystems have really bad fragmentation if you're changing portions of large files -- for example, with virtual machine disk images.

As a recent Psychology PhD, I agree completely, and I'll add this: people outside the field commonly believe that neuroimaging tools like fMRI are better and "harder" science than more traditional experiments that measure human behavior, but they have it totally wrong.

Here's an analogy for computer nerds: imagine if you had an "fMRI" of your computer's operation. You'd see that different tasks result in different parts of the computer "lighting up". Tasks such as graphics, disk I/O, numerical processing, etc., would lead to different patterns of activation. And if your scanner had could resolve, say, 0.1mm voxels in your CPU, you might even learn that certain parts of the CPU are related to certain tasks. But what all this tells you is something about the gross physical structure of the computer; it doesn't tell you much about the abstract, logical structure of the computer. To draw an analogy, you learn something about the brain, but not very much about the mind.

What's of interest to most people (except hardware engineers) is what the computer does, not what parts activate.

With a "computer fMRI", you'd learn little about how, say, a filesystem works, how a programming language works, or much of anything that's of interest at the functional level of the computer. The same is true of fMRI and humans: it doesn't tell us much about the mind works. Instead, it tells us that there's a brain region associated with some task. For example, one of the major recent-ish findings with fMRI is that there's a small brain region that's associated with face recognition.

I'm not saying that traditional experimental psychology is going to answer everything. The mind is very complicated and I'm pessimistic that we'll ever have a good reductive model, the way that we do in many other sciences. I'm also not saying that neuroimaging is totally useless -- but it's certainly not as enlightening as many people imagine.

Here's a summary of a paper that found that lay people thought that psychological explanations were more convincing with neuroscience talk (even though the "neuroscience" was totally irrelevant), and that those with experience in neuroscience/psychology thought the opposite: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/03/when_we_see_a...

Here's another one that did something similar, but with brain pictures: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2008/06/whats_more_co...

Psychology != Clinical Psychology, which is what you're referring to. None of the journals in this project are clinical psych journals.

I'll assume that there are two players, and that you spin the cylinder at the beginning, but not after each turn. If this is the case, then at the start, the die is cast; the bullet is in one of the chambers, each with equal probability. It therefore has an equal probability of being in an even or odd chamber. Depending on if you go first or second, you either take odd-numbered or even-numbered turns. Either way, you have the same probability of losing.

On the other hand, if you spin the cylinder after each turn, it's best not to go first.