Matti

Classical control theory is often sufficient for dealing with changing loads, terrain and wear and tear. Rejecting unknown disturbances is what a control system does. No training is required. Perhaps somewhat less than impressive due to the choice of robotics platform, but:

Achieving natural behavior in a robot using neurally inspired hierarchical control Joseph W. Barter, Henry H. Yin Paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.22.427862v1

Movie 8: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2021/01/25/202...

Movie 9: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2021/01/25/202...

http://www.syntax-k.de/projekte/teapot/

Tutorial: https://kmandla.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/how-to-use-teapot-l...

"Our only monetization strategy so far has been LocomotiveHosting. We had big hopes for it, but it has gained little traction and too little interest from our users."

http://suckysales.locomotivehosting.com

The mayday call from Estonia and the ensuing radio traffic is available on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7cZTEQJ2VQ

Last year someone mentioned an 8 hour recording of Patterns and Conflict that was apparently distributed among some of the participants of Boyd and Beyond 2012. Googling the write-ups of that event should give you more information on which archive the audio recording should be located in (at the Marine Corps museum?).

It's too bad that the longer audio recordings of Boyd's briefings that exist are stuck in some military or private archive. (I'm not talking about the stuff that's currently available on Youtube.)

"But they haven’t stopped Swedish entrepreneurs from building giant firms like H&M, Ikea, and Tetra Pak."

Look at when the mentioned companies were founded:

IKEA - 1943

H&M - 1947

Tetra Pak - 1951

Then look at the historical tax-to-GDP ratio chart here:

http://www.ekonomifakta.se/sv/Fakta/Skatter/Skattetryck/

The companies were founded in low-tax, pre-welfare Sweden.

The book reads like an extended rant written by a high-schooler on how the system, like, forces you to conform, and stuff. The anecdotes that are given in support of the "thesis" are seemingly randomly thrown in and range from long quotes about how one student had a bad advisor to some stuff on racial profiling and frisking on the streets. I am not typically a very discerning reader, but I had to put the book away after a brief amount of time. That almost never happens to me. Returning to the review with the above in mind the satire should become obvious as you get midway into the review:

"In developing his critique of professions, Schmidt draws on his own experiences and uses extensive quotes from correspondents, such as graduate students who became aware of the political nature of their training. This makes for an engaging account that feels authentic rather than remote in the conventional academic style.

Readers familiar with literature on the sociology of professions and the sociology of education may be surprised that Schmidt has few citations to it. He makes no mention of works on the professional-managerial class, such as Alvin Gouldner’s well known The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), nor of critiques of professions such as Randall Collins’ The Credential Society (1979). Actually, Schmidt knew about such works but decided not to mention them because he found that they were not necessary to his argument. This may reflect his physics training. A social scientist would naturally become familiar with "the literature" and refer extensively to it, in order to show how their contribution relates to it. A theoretical physicist, on the other hand, may start out with a theoretical framework, such as Schrödinger’s equation in quantum mechanics, and derive logical consequences from it, without having to cite prior or related work.

That is essentially what Schmidt has done in Disciplined Minds. The book’s analysis is quite rigorous in its own terms. Schmidt has set various challenging fundamental questions for himself, such as why theory is more prestigious than practical work, systematically examined possible answers and then made a conclusion based on logic and evidence. His intellectual framework for this task can generally be characterized as a critique of domination and inequality coupled with support for egalitarianism and democratization. The result is bold and refreshing. While Disciplined Minds misses the more elaborate structural theories and empirical evidence from works in the sociology of education and professions, it redresses a key shortcoming in these works, namely a concern for analysis without ideas for change. Schmidt’s voice has the authenticity of experience and concern, and thus has a much more subversive quality."

Those of you who think this is a positive review might want to read it again, more carefully this time.

"But the researchers believe that a more refined version of their system could prove useful even at something like its current scale. Armies of mobile cubes could temporarily repair bridges or buildings during emergencies, or raise and reconfigure scaffolding for building projects. They could assemble into different types of furniture or heavy equipment as needed. And they could swarm into environments hostile or inaccessible to humans, diagnose problems, and reorganize themselves to provide solutions." http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/simple-scheme-for-self-as...

"The terms and conditions did not seem to forbid this."

Why would they forbid that? Do you realize that you are paying basically nothing for a dedicated server with a 500GB harddrive and an unmetered 100Mbps connection?

You got in on the server deal of the year and yet you are still thinking about canceling when the three months are up?

You come very close to being an example of a pathological customer.

20 min interview with the "captain", recorded a month ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bodv2P19Vc

For somewhat less idealistic blog posts on education, Educationrealist is worth reading:

http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/2012-in-rev...

http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/05/06/most-popula...

The differences between the comments posted so far in the two threads seem to illustrate the importance of the submission title.

Emacs-related things I have learned recently:

* Sticky modifiers: I don't know why it took me so long for me to activate these. The difference between holding Ctrl while hitting another key or just hitting Ctrl once before the next key makes a huge difference for me. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/StickyModifiers

* Got an old-styled Thinkpad keyboard with the trackpoint buttons below the spacebar? I mapped the left button to C-x and the right one to M-x. These buttons are PERFECT for this purpose. I would have mapped them system-wide to Ctrl and Alt but didn't find a solution for doing that in Debian (console/tty).

* Helm: Incremental completion and selection narrowing. Makes it a lot easier to find those commands which you sort-of-remember-the-name-of: https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm

* Sunrise Commander: MC-ish file explorer, based on Emacs's Dired: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Sunrise_Commander

You can export/import views as XML or CSV. The generated XML is UTF-8 encoded and it only has three element types in total for the cells and rows so the structure of the file isn't complicated at all.

Far from identical, but along similar lines: http://treesheets.com/

"It's like a spreadsheet, immediately familiar, but much more suitable for complex data because it's hierarchical. It's like a mind mapper, but more organized and compact. It's like an outliner, but in more than one dimension. It's like a text editor, but with structure. "

You can nest spreadsheet-like cells within cells within cells within cells.. and zoom in and out between the various levels of nesting.

For Windows and Ubuntu, with a beta for Mac OS X available.

The 13.3" e-reader from Sony mentioned in the article is interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZSGZkEEVfQ&t=3m25s

I often find myself leaving my Kindle on the shelf because it isn't suitable for reading PDFs.

"I'm about to explain to the people sleeping in the bunk beds that the bunk beds are not for sleeping.

It is hard for me to type the above statement without laughing, but I persevere."

https://www.noisebridge.net/pipermail/noisebridge-discuss/20...

Having a very affordable Linux laptop that only works well for development could be seen as an advantage: you use one machine for work, and the other one for play and personal stuff.

I recently chose to setup my old Thinkpad X41t with something fairly similar:

-- antiX 13 "base" with the Debian "stable" source list: http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

-- I3-WM as the window manager. Needs to be installed separately. http://i3wm.org/

-- Conkeror as the keyboard-driven browser: http://conkeror.org/FrontPage

The reason for using antiX/Debian rather than Arch is that I have no need to live on the bleeding edge. Once I've set things up I don't want them to break. I3 is at least as good -- probably better -- than ratpoison that I used to use earlier. The ability to quickly switch between "stacked", tabbed and full screen windows works great. Whether Conkeror is superior to Firefox with Pentadactyl I'm not yet sure of -- subjectively everything seems to load faster, but you do need to do some extra customization if you are going with Conkeror. Of course, that is also one of its selling points.

US only shipping for now.

"Hyperloop Passenger Capsule The maximum width is 4.43 ft (1.35 m) and maximum height is 6.11 ft (1.10 m). With rounded corners, this is equivalent to a 15 ft2 (1.4 m2) frontal area, not including any propulsion or suspension components."

At a first look I didn't get that the proposed passenger capsule would be so small. That's pretty cramped.

Edit: Isn't the the ft to m conversion for the height wrong?

A 2010 headline from Arctic Startup read: Killing Finnish Entrepreneurship With Tax

http://www.arcticstartup.com/2010/02/24/killing-finnish-entr...

Skim through the comments to the article: what are the general themes that are brought up?

Looking at the Nordic countries you might possibly make the counterpoint that publicly funded health care implies a taxation model that makes it economically unrewarding to become an entrepreneur.

The analysis seems to be based more on Venkatesh Rao's fairly lengthy "Gervais Principle" series rather than MacLeod's cartoon per se: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

"from roughly 150 feet away down to just one or two inches."

Are these kind of sensors/receivers available in such commercially available versions that they can be easily incorporated into robotic projects? It seems like this could be used for a robot "homing in" to a position -- such as a charging station.

I actually received my server today. It was ordered from the French site on the evening of the 25th -- I am a EU-resident and paid with Paypal. If you can find your order under "orders in progress" and some of the "fields" in the bill have their status marked as "en sortie" it means that you'll probably get your server.

The UnixBench scores of the machine lie in the same range as those reported by someone on serverbear.com.

According to discussions on lowendtalk they've cancelled ALL orders made with Paypal as the payment method. This might possible be true for the order I made an EU-resident on the 25th. (The information in OVHs manager is sketchy.) The waiting and "hoop jumping" you have to do makes this an expensive server for what you are getting -- which, for many people, doesn't seem to be anything at all.

One of the concepts:

"Digital Chocolatier Prototype

The Digital Chocolatier is a prototype for a machine that allows users to quickly design, assemble and taste different chocolate candies. This machine is composed of three primary elements: a carousel of ingredients, a thermoelectric deposition cup and a user interface. Through a graphical user interface, users can select and combine the ingredients housed in the different carousel containers to create customized candies. The carousel rotates to extrude these ingredients into the thermoelectric cup that rapidly cools and hardens the chocolate, making it ready for consumption. The interface also makes it possible to save and rate favorite recipes for later use." -- http://www.cmarcelo.com/cornucopia

I can actually see how that could work.