This looks really useful: Google Reader (the web-based feed reader that I use to read the news) can create a feed from a page that does not publish its own RSS by “periodically visit[ing] the page and publish[ing] any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.”

‘“Your personal interests certainly drive what you’re interested in,” said Peter Farago, vice president for marketing at Flurry.’

Beautiful photographs of a handful of beautiful, newly discovered species.

Via boingboing, a lively, well-written, and spot-on article by Michael Kinsley on just what is so tiresomely wrong with the typical newspaper article.

Firefox may crash, but it’s better at displaying type.

I’m using the very fast Google Chrome browser for linux, and like it well enough to use it as my default. But I prefer mouseless selection of links, and the options for this are not yet mature. Gleebox looks excellent, but installing the current version (0.6) rendered the browser almost functionless. The only other option is Crossfire, which still needs development but at least works in most pages.

Aaditya Bhatia demonstrates how pretty plots can be produced with gnuplot, pointing out that those who complain of ugliness have failed to learn how to use the program well.

The click-grammer and graphical interface in Apple’s latest Finder is still inconsistent, arbitrary and confusing. I only know this because of excellent articles such as this one. Because of stuff like this, and far worse, I use the unix shell on OS X to deal with files, and don’t touch the Finder.

Michael Schurter presents a speed comparison. The comments on the page are informative, too. I should consider switching from elementtree to lxml.

A commonly used XML parsing library for Python (the one that I use to make this website) gives you a segfault if you feed it an XML declaration of a certain variety.

Nice example using Basemap and matplotlib to plot Flickr geotagging counts on the globe.

“It used to be that business owners often struggled to afford advertising for their products or services. Google AdWords has changed that by offering an inexpensive way to spread the word. But if you don’t do some careful planning, you can easily find yourself spending thousands of dollars with little to show for it.”

A detailed look at the headaches that result from trying to collaborate through email, and how Wave seems to provide a more natural solution.

Wave feels like a native application on the iPhone, partly because it is optimized for WebKit and partly because it exploits “app mode,” which hides most of Safari’s UI.

A few people on the Apple discussion boards have found a problem with Snow Leopard, where the system has deleted their home directories after logging in to the guest account.

Balanced and informative writeup of the technology behind the Google creation and prospects for the future. Contains a rare intuitive description of the workings of the Operational Transform.

This article praising the “Brooklyn-based alt-Sephardi indie band DeLeon” embeds an entertaining YouTube video of their song “La Serena” from a live concert. Their album is available from Amazon.

Sir David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries are being made available online via the BBC Wildlife Finder. Perhaps it’s overloaded, but all I get are Flash boxes that say “This content doesn't seem to be working. Try again later."

Mr. Chuy explains how to compile gnuplot on Apple’s Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6).

Mr. Ontureño provides a tutorial showing how to do tricks with the axes in gnuplot.

If you know what a violin plot is and you use Matplotlib (the python plotting library), you want to see this.

“Public Radio Exchange is an online marketplace for distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming.” With a free account, you can “Listen to and rate thousands of radio pieces”.

Ars Technica skims the history of Apple’s laptop computers. I was sad that one of two I've owned, the “Lombard”, was skipped over in favor of the “Wallstreet” that preceded it and the “Pismo” that followed it. And I thought the author was too easy on the Duos; the 2300c, my other Apple laptop, always felt like a struggle to use, with a terrible, mushy keyboard and overall slowness. The Duos, while innovative, might fairly have been included in the “stinker” section. There is some revelatory history here: it turns out that what has become the standard design of the modern laptop apeared first in Apple’s PowerBook 100, introduced in October 1991.

A useful introduction to the page or back-forward cache and how it works in webkit (and therefore in Safari on the Macintosh).

My first robot for Google Wave I call Plotzie. It draws sparklines from your data.

... using sneaky URLs.

I just discovered an obscure bug that turned my website into a bunch of blank pages for users of Internet Explorer.

Philipp K. Janert’s book, Gnuplot in Action, is now offically out. The subtitle, “Understanding Data with Graphs,” is a clue to the depth and usefulness that this book appears to have, based on my skimming of the index and one of the free sample chapters. Gnuplot is the framework for detailed examples, but the book is much deeper than a manual for a particular program. It has many examples of various types of graphs and how they can be applied to the problems of understanding data. The best deal would be to buy the printed book and get the free PDF ebook.

Another useful note on the Gnuplot Tricks website: how to change the ratio of the three axes in a 3D plot independently.

I hope Robert Scoble is exaggerating when he says, “I thought Google was going to be a better company than Microsoft. It’s not any different except it has a better cafeteria.”

This article by Glenn Fleishman should calm some people down: “The headlines on many tech sites trumpet, 'WPA Encryption Broken!' Hardly. A very small area of the Wi-Fi encryption method that's part of WPA and WPA2 is exploitable under very particular circumstances that don't reveal your network key or allow data to be intercepted and decrypted.”

How to use the XMPP protocol (part of Google Wave) to have your phone talk to your lights.

Nathan Schneider, writing in the NY Times, tells me more than I want to know about his emotional reactions to Anselm’s ontological argument. Along the way, he senses “the whole enormity of a God wrapped around my little mind.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

There are enough fixes in this update (example: “maximizing a window that is partially offscreen will no longer cause it to be behind the Dock”) to make it worthy of download consideration.

I’ve long been convinced of the truth of the article’s conclusion: probability theory, in some form, should be taught to the young.

Sounds like useful stuff.

Several articles about Google Wave have been pessimistic concerning its adoption, due to the assumption that everyone playing must have Wave installed, and that, for example, a Wave user would not be able to communicate with a user of old-fashioned email. But here is a report of a campout-contest where one of the developers won a third prize by whipping up a Wave-email gateway.

They claim that they warn you of delays “6 hours before airline alerts.” There is a free web service and an offering in the iPhone AppStore. This looks really useful, especially in light of the typical quality of flight status information offered by the airlines (I’m at the gate, it’s already 20 minutes past boarding time, there is a big empty space where the plane is supposed to be, and the board says, “on time.”)

Mr. Dash has good wishes for Wave, but is pessimistic about its adoption, because “the Wave way is not compatible with the Web way.” He has an interesting argument, pointing out along the way that one of the foundations of the Wave protocol, XMPP, “is way too complicated for any normal human to deploy”.

Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock, the innovative “hyperlocal” city news site, has been bought by MSNBC.

We love feeding the birds, but water is helpful too, and attracts plenty of them. However, bird baths dry up quickly and get dirty every day. Here is a do-it-yourself system for solving both problems: “I have created a pictorial documentation of my low-maintenance bird bath, which has a dripper and a timer-controlled flush hose that cleans the bird bath once a day. I've included construction details in case anyone wants to borrow some of the ideas.”

“you can assign tags to task items that trigger alarms when you are in certain situations. For example, you can have a task to 'buy batteries' and assign it a tag of 'store' ... you connect the tag 'store' with a situation in which you are near your local hardware store ... I have a task called 'buy muni pass' which is only available a few days before the end of the month and only from certain retailers. I walk by a place that sells them, but I always forget to buy them during the window and I usually remember when I'm nowhere near the store.”

J. Zeldman recommends an article by Joshua Schachter explaining why URL shorteners are bad and you should never use them (and adds an extra reason himself). They are right: these things are stupid and harmful and you should never use them unless there is no other choice. Publishers should use short URLs so that people will not need to shorten them. Zeldman uses some canned website software that has a URL shortening plugin, but it’s easy enough to use short URLs when you roll your own, as I do. A URL does not need to include the complete title of your article, the name of the author, and how you were feeling when you wrote it. It’s just an index into your content; it does not need to carry its own parcel of information.

There are several goodlies in the new matplotlib, including a return of 3D plotting.

“Mpmath is a pure-Python library for multiprecision floating-point arithmetic. It provides an extensive set of transcendental functions, unlimited exponent sizes, complex numbers, interval arithmetic, numerical integration and differentiation, root-finding, linear algebra, and much more. Almost any calculation can be performed just as well at 10-digit or 1000-digit precision, and in many cases mpmath implements asymptotically fast algorithms that scale well for extremely high precision work.”

Flip Tanedo writes on the website of the US contingent to the Large Hadron Collider, musing on the applications of Google Wave to scientific collaboration. He touches upon mathematical collaboration and LaTex (there is a LaTex extension to Wave!), as well.

Wave dips its toe tentatively into the iPhone waters, has some trouble staying afloat.

Although, because of stuff like this, I’m unlikely to ever again purchase any new Apple hardware, here is a useful article about doing what the title says, with an assortment of other helpful tips.

Guss’ Pickles is leaving the Lower East Side and heading for Brooklyn because of high rent and a parking meter. I don’t meet many Americans my age, where I live now, who have eaten pickles bought from a barrel on the sidewalk in front of a shop occupying the first floor of an ancient tenement, unless, like me, they were lucky enough to grow up in the shadow of the eponymous side of the Manhattan Bridge. Those pickles were good.

“One handy module I recently ran across is matplotlib.finance. It isn’t featured in the documentation (as far as I know), but contains functions that allow the user to pull stock prices from yahoo as a list of tuples or as array objects.”

The goal of China's next space program is to is to build a space station orbiting earth, and they are being mighty careful about who will get to inhabit that space station.

The insight of the article “Unwebbable” by an expert in web accessibility, Joe Clark, is that certain standard document forms convey their structure and semantics through visual layout and formatting, and that they can not be satisfactorily translated to HTML. The assumption implicit in the article is that there exist some documents that can be satisfactorily translated to HTML.

L. M. Orchard demonstrates the new drag-and-drop facilities in html5.

Robert V. Thompson describes a conception of “god” that reminds me of Stuart Kauffman’s. He has a book on the subject, as well.

Ed Brayton’s thoughtful summary of some of the issues raised by the IGs report on Bush’s illegal domestic surveillance.

Another neat trick from the Gnuplot Tricks website

The current state of typography on the web.

If you would like to make broken axes plots using gnuplot, like the one shown here, this article will show you how.

Rhonda Hackett, a Canadian clinical psychologist living in the US, writes a lucid article in the Denver Post:

“The U.S. has the most bureaucratic health care system in the world. More than 31 percent of every dollar spent on health care in the U.S. goes to paperwork, overhead, CEO salaries, profits, etc. The provincial single-payer system in Canada operates with just a 1 percent overhead. Think about it. It is not necessary to spend a huge amount of money to decide who gets care and who doesn't when everybody is covered.”

Eli Bendersky compares the two frameworks in a useful and informative article. I didn’t know about PyQwt, although I’ve been using matplotlib for a while now.

“A fortuitous orbit of the International Space Station allowed the astronauts this striking view of Sarychev Volcano (Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009.” Go to the link for the stunning full picture.

Kodachrome was superb technology. It took me a long time to learn how to use it, and then it became obsolete. But not really obsolete: film and digital are different media, although that’s not widely understood. Now, obsolete or not, it’s gone.

Richard Wilson interviews the author of a book about the strange and sad story of AIDS denialists.

... all AIDS denialists pave the path for fraudulent cures and snake oil treatments. AIDS denialist[s] say that HIV does not cause AIDS, leaving open the question of what should be done to treat AIDS? Among the most notorious AIDS denialists are those who sell remedies, such as Matthias Rath and Gary Null who sell vitamins and nutritional supplements they have proclaimed treat HIV/AIDS.

A rare piece of recent journalism about Wave that actually contains some insight. But can you read it? For a while the Chicago Sun-Times wanted to make you pay after the article had aged for a month, as they regard aged news as more valuable than recent news. But it seems that it has aged sufficiently now (August) to be free again.

He goes into a few intreresting issues (for exammple, the implementation of unicode) a bit more deeply than the current round of excited journalism.

I had to read this twice before I got it, and now I'm sorry that I did.

The title of the linked article is “Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics” and was published in BMC Bioinformatics 5:80 (2004).

An article just appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education (found via Slashdot) that closely parallels some thoughts that I recently wrote down the subject of the problems that the ubiquitous recording of life in general and the ease of finding the resulting embarrassing details online might create for the generation recently graduated from college.

The "invalid syntax" website has a useful note about using figures generated from the LaTeX terminal in gnuplot in a LaTeX-beamer presentation.

Adrian Holovaty describes a method for solving the problem of caching the static part of a page while allowing another part of it to remain dynamic, in the context of Django templates.

Rosarin Roy explains how he compiled matplotlib (a python plotting library that I use all the time) manually on linux.

Nick Bastin gives an example showing that, while ElementTree’s behavior is, in a sense, correct and consistent, it is probably surprising and should be made to be correct and consistent in a less surprising way. If you use ElementTree (a python module for parsing and creating XML documents, that I use in building this site) you should read this.

You might have noticed that there are some problems with X-windows on recent versions of Apple’s OS X. And you might have been unfortunate enough to have tried to follow some of the plentiful bad advice on the web. The solution turns out to be simple: go here and download a version that runs with your version of OS X, and click to install. This will repair, for example, the bugs in the X11 that came with OS X 10.5.

The parasite Trypanosoma brucei, which causes African sleeping sickness, evades its host’s immune cells by periodically rearranging its DNA. When the host’s immune system has managed to almost wipe out the invader, some of the surviving parasites alter their DNA to change their surface coat, initiating another wave of infection, preventing the immune system from gaining the upper hand, and ultimately killing the victim.

Offers several kinds of conversions and unusual searches, including one that allows you to enter a unicode character and find out all about its representations and uses. You can even run a flash program that will show you the character in the fonts installed on your computer.

The author says: “Need a little help recognizing mathematical symbols or LaTeX commands? I always tend to lookup certain LaTeX commands on the internet when I'm writing. So I decided to write a simple iPhone/iPod Touch app that lets me look up LaTeX symbols anytime when I'm feeling inspired.”

Kaushik G praises a neat little feature of matplotlib that I never noticed, and is thanked by the developer who created it.

Craig Finch notices that 3d plotting support has been removed from matplotlib, and experiments (as I have recently done) with using PyX to make surface plots. He develops a list of advantages and disadvantages; the most serious in the latter list is the inability of PyX to plot numpy arrays.

Stephen Quinney says: “It has long been accepted wisdom that these mouse-driven office ‘productivity’ applications are in some way intrinsically more userfriendly than the command line or text file driven applications we are more accustomed to in Unix. Today I had the opportunity to prove to myself that this just isn’t the case.” I occasionally preach this gospel to those who will listen, but the message is for the most part drowned out by the predominant GUI habit.

Dr. Robert Burton is shocked to discover that public television stations are using health-quack infomercials to help rake in the dough during pledge drives.

Think back to college or high school, and, if you have reached your forties or fifties, there are some memories that will make you cringe.

Dr. Peter Lipson explains how Senator Tom Harkin, who is responsible for the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, is ramping up his assault on science and real medicine. Those who have any tendency to feel complacent about the correction of the Bush administration’s assault on science need to read this shocking description of a complementary assault coming from the Democrats.

This is fairly neat, especially as more browsers support the canvas element now (at least firefox, safari, and opera). The examples worked perfectly using firefox on OSX. It seems to work this way: setting the output terminal in gnuplot to canvas produces a javascript file that you can include in a page to display the graph, with some interactivity possible.

Stunning images of our sun. My favorite is the movie of a collision between a coronal mass ejection and a comet.

I am delighted to discover the excellent website Junkfood Science, offering “Critical examinations of studies and news on food, weight, health and healthcare that mainstream media misses.” Follow the link for a timely dose of perspective on the worry of the day: mercury in high fructose corn syrup. “There will always be people who try to scare us about some food [...] by telling us a small amount of some ‘toxin’ [...] has been detected. This is our heads up that we are being manipulated”.

“Sir David Attenborough has revealed that he receives hate mail from viewers for failing to credit God in his documentaries. ‘They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.’”

Free of charge, but streamed into an inconvenient Flash container, with a dark, intrusive NFB logo blighting every film. A great resource nonetheless, with quirky animated trifles and serious documentaries.

If you’ve experienced problems trying to compile gnuplot or run the gnuplot binary on Macintosh OS X 10.5.x, some recent comments on the gnuplot page might help you.

Employees of Wired are shocked to discover that their shared Google documents can be edited by anyone on the internet after they set them up to be edited by anyone on the internet. This article is the result. It attempts to blame the situation on a “design flaw” in the interface for setting permissions; apparently the flaw consists in the system not magically knowing who a user is before he signs in. You see, the Wired people clicked the box that says “Let people edit without signing in” but somehow thought that Google would know if they were on the list of approved editors anyway. By magic.

I know it’s supposed to be the linux version of zeroconf or Apple’s Bonjour, or whatever it’s called: some kind of autodiscovery for the network. But on both Ubuntu machines at home that use wireless networking, I had to root it out and destroy it before those machines could establish and reliably maintain an 802.11 connection. After getting rid of the Avahi crap, they work perfectly. Anyone care to explain to me why this is included and turned on by default, when it is so likely to create problems?

I enjoy the work of Charlie Kaufman and look forward to experiencing his Synecdoche, New York. I would like, in the meantime, to notice that its punning title was anticipated in 1970 by Peter Lubin in his essay “Kickshaws and Motley”, the subject of which is either Nabokov’s or Lubin’s love and use of words.

From the article in the Telegraph:
“Kyle Young, a drug investigator and state trooper, emailed the Public Safety Employees Association last week to say a search warrant for Mrs Johnston's house was delayed, according to the newspaper report. ‘It was not allowed to progress in a normal fashion, the search warrant WAS delayed because of the pending [November 2008 presidential] election and the [...] Drug Unit [...] and the case officer were not the ones calling the shots.’” This Mrs Johnston is the mother of Levi Johnston, who is notoriously engaged to Mrs Palin's daughter, Bristol. She “was arrested on Dec 18 and on Monday pleaded not guilty to six counts of possessing and selling OxyContin”. It would have been so entertaining to have this bunch running around the White House.

This beautiful chart compares the world’s territories by income and infant mortality.

Rui Carmo notices weird bugs in the EXIF metadata created by Apple’s iPhone. For example, “two photos taken on Dec 31st 2008 had the date one year in the future.”

“Rands” makes a good case for “Dropbox”, an online, quite automated, versioning storage system. This is worth keeping an eye on, although I think I'll stick with git and servers that I control for now. More Dropbox love by David Weintraub.

If you are following the execrable antics of the anti-vaccination frauds such as Gary Null, you will be fascinated by Ben Goldacre’s article in The Guardian:

On Tuesday the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro all reported that a coroner was hearing the case of a toddler who died after receiving the MMR vaccine, which the parents blamed for their loss. Toddler 'died after MMR jab' (Metro), 'Healthy' baby died after MMR jab (Independent), you know the headlines by now. On Thursday the coroner announced his verdict: the vaccine played no part in this child's death. So far, of the papers above, only the Telegraph has had the decency to cover the outcome. The Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro have all decided that their readers are better off not knowing.

Antonio Cangiano from math-blog provides a well-organized summary introduction to the use of Maxima, a free, open-source symbolic mathematics program that runs on OS X, linux, and, I'm sure, elsewhere. I've used Maxima and it is an excellent and serious tool, similar to the Macsyma of long ago.

Another discovery courtesy of the math-blog: a video of a superb lecture by the mathematician Timothy Gowers. He explains some strange and beautiful theorems, and points out the organic interconnectedness of disparate fields of mathematics, and the impossibility of deciding which are the most “important”.

Here is a set of instructions for installing the new python, with gnu readline, on OS X 10.5.5.

An obsessively useful gallery of three-column (or three-block) web page layouts using css, with code to download: “All layouts use valid markup and CSS, and have been tested successfully on Internet Explorer/win 5.0, 5.5, 6 and beta 2 preview of version 7; Opera 8.5, Firefox 1.5 and Safari 2”. The css markup is included in the html file, which makes it convenient to browse the code.

From 43 Folders, a list of places to get downloads of noncommercial radio shows.

Hugh Anchor solves this problem: you are using the PDF terminal in gnuplot but you are submitting a manuscript to a journal that requires a PDF with all fonts, even the base fonts, to be embedded.

A python interface for graph and network theory, that can use Graphviz and matplotlib for drawing. (The documentation has a bunch of dead links at the moment.) Also see igraph.

Matplotlib is a very mature plotting library for the python scripting language. Here is a new gallery of examples in the form of thumbnails that serve as index entries to example code. This makes it easy to find out how to make the type of plot that you need; it's a great approach to documentation.

“Marcel C. LaFollette, an independent scholar, historian and Smithsonian volunteer uncovered rare, unpublished photographs of the 1925 Tennessee vs. John Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ in the Smithsonian Institution Archives.”