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I rushed mine, to the extent that my supervisor mentioned it to me a few years later... it was a reflection of my state of mind at the time, exhausted and overwhelmed.. if I ever get around to doing another one I'll give it the attention and love it deserves

Strange Attractors 4 years ago

despite having a phd in nonlinear dynamics, I struggle to wrap my head around most of this stuff... but I always found is deeply fascinating.

In one system I studied we had a sequence of period doublings, which followed one of the feigenbaum constants[1]

seeing this happen in the lab, and subsequently seeing it numerically, and uncovering the analytics behind it was a worthy use of 6 years

--- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feigenbaum_constants

Matplotlib 3.6 4 years ago

the extensibility of matplotlib is simply incredible to me. I've always found the main limiting factor to be my imagination, once I wrap my head around what I want a plot to look like I know matplotlib will facilitate it. An absolute marvel, and a credit to the devs

doing the math is seldom enough ;)

*KE == kinetic energy

kinetic energy: "energy of an object is the energy that it possesses due to its motion. It is defined as the work needed to accelerate a body of a given mass from rest to its stated velocity. Having gained this energy during its acceleration, the body maintains this kinetic energy unless its speed changes."

in normal person terms: the energy of moving, or ~exercise, in a parallel world :)

anonymous messages are sometimes very powerful, measurements that are easy to make are not necessarily the right ones to make

sometimes you get snowed in, often you get snowed under

How Google Works 12 years ago

I'm a physicist (semiconductor lasers), now doing tech support, it's a big change for me, but so far it's been great

How Google Works 12 years ago

I started work at google pretty recently, and expressed an interest in working on a particular project. I made some notes about some of my ideas, and was putting some stuff together to show to one of the teams, to get some input before prototyping.

I asked a senior team member to have a look at the notes I had made, and see if they were ready to show to the wider team.

His advice?

"Go build something, then we can have meetings"

Coming from an academic background I find this type of thinking very refreshing.

Another vote for firefox OS here, I definitely think they're making a better effort than most in this space. The fact that firefox is targeting entry level devices in a serious way is another positive for me. I've been using a ZTE open as my primary device, and although the hardware is absolutely awful, I've managed to get by, mostly just because of a sentimental attachment to firefox.

I agree it's somewhat unlikely to be too successful, but I definitely think they're at least aiming in the right direction.

agreed, this is exactly the sort of thing for loops in shell are useful for.. incidentally, in zsh you can do this with

   for f (*.md) pandoc $f --to html > $f:r.html
personally I find that when I can fit a loop on a single line in zsh I'm much more inclined to use them

What's more, if I record a macro and run it, then realize after it that I want to do a small addition, I have to go through all the "setup" steps again - go back to the start, re-record, add the logical of finding the next block, and so on. I can't just visually see the situation and say "oh yeah, why don't I add this little tweak".

this is very doable, lets say you record a macro to 'a'

    1. q:
    2. let @a='
    3. ^r^ra to put in the current contents of the macro
    4. edit as you see fit

    --- you should now have something like ---
    let @a='contents of macro'
    
    5. ???
    6. profit

and another reason to use zsh is the incredibly nice looping syntax, for example, this is the same as

  for fic (**/*(.)) doSomethingWith $fic
I find the fact that it fits in a single line makes me much more likely to use it in everyday shell use.. though I'd still revert to bash for scripting

the ability to copy/paste is particularly useful in this case, given that that's what most people end up doing anyway.. particularly for more complicated commands

what might also be interesting is to see how karma is accrued.. from a huge number of submissions, or from a large number of insightful comments, or what the breakdown is..

for example, i've made two submissions, both making it to the #1 spot, and have been afraid to submit any more lest my streak be ended

some measure of quality over quantity would be nice :)

to me vimperator isn't just about having a few vim bindings here and there, it completely redefines the browsing experience... also, when you "f" to find links, you can just enter a piece of the url string and vimperator opens it.. either way, it doesn't matter much..

vimium is a lightweight clone of vimperator, if that's what you want then of course you'll prefer it..

these "problems" you're talking about in vimperator are features once you actually embrace it and use it properly. it's a power user's tool.. and should be recognized as such..

http://i.imgur.com/vznzJMV.png