2009-07-02 Debunking Canadian health care myths —
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.”
2009-07-02 Plotting in Python: matplotlib vs. PyQwt —
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.
2009-06-26 Immature Quiescent Output —
Lately my Google searches have led me, now and then, to weird
articles that seem to have been machine-translated by software
from three years ago. From what seems to be a description of
Google Wave: “You can profit by it offline and hardly give up
someone the bounce incorrect your messages when you throw down
a relation.”
2009-06-26 Sarychev Peak Eruption, Kuril Islands —
“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.
“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.
2009-06-23 3D in matplotlib —
Matplotlib, the very nice python plotting library, used to be able to
produce 3d plots, and now it doesn't (although it can produce image plots). But
you can now get 3d support in the svn builds, and it’s coming soon to
the official release.
2009-06-22 Kodak Kills Kodachrome Film After 74 Years —
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.
2009-06-18 iPhone Getting Faster —
Several recent reviews of Apple’s new iPhone 3G S are breathless
with praise for its overall snappiness. It almost sounds as if
this phone may be as fast as Apple pretended its previous
version was. Read the reviews carefully, however, and note when
the authors mention that they are viewing webpages over WiFi.
It’s not clear how enjoyable the browsing experience is over
AT&T’s 3G network.
2009-06-17 Exclusive: Interview with Prof Seth Kalichman, author of Denying Aids —
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.
2009-06-04 Google's Wave of the future is genius, but will it work? —
A rare piece of recent journalism about Wave that actually contains
some insight.
2009-06-01 Sam Ruby: Google Wave —
He goes into a few intreresting issues (for exammple, the
implementation of unicode) a bit more deeply than the current
round of excited journalism.
2009-05-29 Sandro Tosi is Writing a Matplotlib Book —
2009-05-27 Another Naughty Dilbert Strip —
I had to read this twice before I got it, and now I'm sorry that I
did.
2009-05-26 Why not to use Microsoft applications for real work —
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).
2009-05-25 Alumni Try to Rewrite History on College-Newspaper Web Sites —
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.
2009-05-22 Gnuplot pictures in latex-beamer —
The "invalid syntax" website has a useful note about using figures
generated from the LaTeX terminal in gnuplot in a LaTeX-beamer
presentation.
2009-05-19 Django tip: Caching and two-phased template rendering —
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.
2009-05-07 Installing matplotlib - the hard way —
Rosarin Roy explains how he compiled matplotlib (a python plotting
library that I use all the time) manually on linux.
2009-04-28 ElementTree: Surprise in Handling Attributes —
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.
2009-04-27 The X11 mess on OS X and how to fix it —
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.
2009-04-21 Parasite breaks its own DNA to avoid detection —
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.
2009-04-16 FileFormat.Info: The Digital Rosetta Stone —
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.
2009-04-15 LaTeX Help on the iPhone —
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.”
2009-04-03 Assorted Experience: Why I love matplotlib + python —
Kaushik G praises a neat little feature of matplotlib that I
never noticed, and is thanked by the developer who created it.
2009-03-29 3D Plotting Software for Python::Part 1::PyX —
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.
2009-03-21 Userfriendly it ain’t —
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.
2009-03-18 More Quack Medicine on PBS —
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.
2009-03-13 I Pity the Young —
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.
2009-03-03 Rachele hates her new Macbook: Gnuplot does not work as well —
“The purpose of this blog is to document annoying things about
my new macbook and to list solutions to my problems if I find them.”
Rachelle is annoyed by the behavior of gnuplot on her Mac: “Gnuplot
does not have the functionality that it did in linux.” Linux and
other unix programs often don’t work quite as well when ported to the
Mac. “Lots of display
windows for graphs pop up and never go away (aquaterm) when gnuplot
is closed. The terminal does not indicate when the plotting is done
(by giving a new prompt.) And no buttons for instant autoscale and no
dragging to zoom. ... Locked in aspect ratio on graphs.”
I think most of these issues will go away if she uses x11 rather than
the Macintosh Terminal and aquaterm. Do any of the Mac-and-gnuplot
experts here have any suggestions for her?
2009-03-03 Tom Harkin’s War on Science —
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.
2009-02-17 HTML5 Canvas Terminal for Gnuplot —
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.
2009-02-09 The Sun - The Big Picture - Boston.com —
Stunning images of our sun. My favorite is the movie of a
collision between a coronal mass ejection and a comet.
2009-01-30 Junkfood Science: Mercury in HFCS —
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”.
2009-01-29 Attenborough Reveals Creationist Hate Mail for not Crediting God —
“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.’”
2009-01-28 Watch movies from the National Film Board of Canada. —
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.
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.
2009-01-27 Gnuplot on OS X 10.5.x: Installation Problems —
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.
2009-01-22 Wired Thinks it has Found a Google Docs Design Flaw
—
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.
2009-01-13 What is this Avahi crap? —
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?
2009-01-08 Synectady —
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.
2009-01-07 Alaska authorities delayed arrest of woman connected to Sarah Palin, drug investigator claims —
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.
“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.
2009-01-07 Gapminder World Chart for 2006 —
This beautiful chart compares the world’s territories by income and
infant mortality.
This beautiful chart compares the world’s territories by income and
infant mortality.
2009-01-05 A Word of warning concerning EXIF and the iPhone —
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.”
2008-12-12 Dumbing Down the Cloud —
“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.
2008-12-12 Bad science: It's not what the papers say, it's what they don't —
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.
2008-12-12 A 10 minute tutorial for solving Math problems with Maxima —
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.
2008-12-09 The Importance of Mathematics —
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”.
2008-12-09 Installing Python 3 on Mac OS X Leopard —
Here is a set of instructions for installing the new python, with
gnu readline, on OS X 10.5.5.
2008-12-08 Layout Gala —
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.
2008-12-08 Getting Started with Gnuplot —
I can’t believe I'm just discovering math-blog. Follow the link
for a brief introduction to gnuplot, and another mention of
Gnuplot In Action by Philipp K. Janert, now available in a
preliminary form for download.
2008-12-01 Podcasts of non-commercial and public radio shows —
From 43 Folders, a list of places to get downloads of
noncommercial radio shows.
2008-11-07 Forcing font embedding in PDFs generated by gnuplot —
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.
2008-11-04 NetworkX for Python —
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.
2008-10-24 Matplotlib Gallery —
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.
2008-10-06 Photographs from the Scopes “Monkey Trial” —
“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.”
2008-09-26 Explore Evolution: the Latest Tactic of the
Stealth Creationists —
An insightful review of a pseudo-textbook from the charlatans at
the Discovery Institute, exposing their latest attempt to sneak
their superstitions in to our childrens’ science classes.
2008-08-12 Apple’s Deceptive iPhone Advertising —
Apple’s attempt to portray
the iPhone 3G experience as just as fast as a real computer hooked up to the
real internet is a shameful
demonstration of flat-out fakery.
2008-08-05 Free and Cheap Topographic Maps —
The great Cool Tools website has a fine and useful article about
topographic maps. These are maps that show elevation contours and
are indispensable for hiking. They explain how to download free
ones, how to overlay topography on Google Earth, how to order
cheap ones, and how to get that nifty map paper to use in your
printer.
2008-08-04 Callpod’s Amusing Dragon Specifications —
A company plays games with units and specifications. I show
them how they can play better.
2008-07-30 Does Serbian Culture Celebrate Genocide? —
Karadzic lives and acts very much in
a tradition expressed in Serbian epic poetry, that quite
unambiguously celebrates genocide.
2008-05-22 Musopen puts classical recordings, scores in public domain —
From Ars Technica, a writeup of the Musopen website, whose
purpose is to commission performers to record classical
works and put the audio, along with the printed score, in
the public domain.
2008-05-08 Dairy Queen's Creepy Advertisement —
My friend sent me an email with a request to go to a petition site and sign up against an advertisement for Dairy Queen. Now if this were the usual crap about sex and violence I would not be signing, unless it were a demand for more sex and violence. But this is something else entirely.
2008-05-06 Measles on the Rise Due to Superstition —
The biggest outbreak of measles since 2001 has been caused
by people refusing to vaccinate their children either
because of religious reasons or an unfounded belief that
vaccinations lead to autism or other diseases. Before the
development of the vaccine in 1963 measles was a terrible
public health problem; the vaccination program was so
successful that transmission of the measles virus was
completely halted in 2000. Now, partly thanks to shady
opportunists like
Gary Null pushing
vaccination paranoia, one of the great success
stories of modern public health medicine is being
undermined, and we are once again facing the possibility of
measles becoming endemic in the U.S. for the first time in
almost 50 years.
2008-05-02 Does Gary Null Have a Real Ph.D.? —
If Gary Null and his staff took a minute off from
threatening to sue me for attacking his credentials to ask
me to back up my assertions, this is what I would tell them.