WSPR

‘There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want.’—D.F.W.

2009/06/29

Academic funding, and medical data

Interesting article over at the New York Times on cancer research strikes a chord in the way academic funding works in general. Too little ...

2009/05/26

Australian five cent piece? Good riddance

In March last year, The New Yorker published an article on the penny in America. Clearly, it’s a ridiculous amount of money, and the articl...

2009/05/01

What's in an ‘a’?

When do you know that you’re correct? For me, in the world of grammar, the answer is rarely . I’m reviewing the changes made to a paper of...

2009/03/31

An abbreviated "git log"

I’ve been getting more into (the version control system) Git as I’ve worked more on LaTeX3 code (mostly though git-svn , although I’m also u...

2009/03/24

Writing via iPhone

I was really hoping that this site would have a decent mobile view for writing. Alas. Here's hoping for MarsEdit for iPhone sooner rat...

2009/03/03

TeX Live 2009 freeze date

I’m not sure how many TeX/LaTeX developers read what I write here, but nonetheless. TeX Live is the major distribution for TeX and LaTeX a...

2009/02/24

Declaring attention bankruptcy

Something changed in me early this year. I don’t think it’s related to my going to Thailand for a holiday, but it might be something to do...

2009/01/29

Academic English

David Foster Wallace : (emphasis mine) In other words, it is when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communi...

2009/01/21

George Orwell on bad English

An article I was reading in the New Yorker on past Presidents’ Inaugural speeches referenced an essay by George Orwell called “ Politics an...

2009/01/19

Harvey (1950)

Just watched Harvey . What a wonderful movie. Puts me in mind of The Man in the White Suit , not for story or anything like that but for the...

2008/12/17

A pursuit of a happiness

A little while ago, Mark Pilgrim itemised a list of happiness-producing goals. Maybe tongue-in-cheek to an extent. While admirable, I fou...

A touch of Sage

I’ve resisted looking into Sage for a while now, because it’s way too late into my PhD to use it for any legitimate purpose. Furthermore, I’...

Responsible drugs

Wherein I meander briefly through the loaded topic raised recently on taking drugs to improve our brains. Opinions are not guaranteed to be ...

No content or no comment

In the distant future I would like to write things here that people actually found useful, helpful, interesting, or simply related to. In th...

2008/12/06

Sleep proof

Some Twitter analysis tool spat out the following image of my averaged number of posts to Twitter: Yikes. See that trend during the wee...

2008/11/26

Silly analogies

While I do love the quote, this is a bit silly : if the read/write head were a Boeing 747, and the hard-disk platter were the surface o...

2008/11/25

Erasing a hard drive

Odd experience. Bought a new 1 TB external drive for backing up my machine (Western Digital, $189 from MSY — laugh uproariously at their we...

2008/11/18

Tables vs. CSS

Jack Shedd says CSS makes certain things remarkably easy. But there is a class of design problems that are nearly insurmountably hard ...

2008/11/17

Movember

Um, go the mo ? You can blame the drunken look on the blurriness of the photo. Or vice versa, perhaps.

2008/10/29

Vista plus one

Microsoft has been talking up their next version of Windows . They seem to be getting the direction right in terms of marketing their progre...

A Good Review

I like it when journals publish articles about academic publishing. Now, this one, called “ A Good Review ”, doesn’t say too much, but it do...

2008/10/24

Email client wishlist

Due to Poul-Henning Kamp, via Karl Fogel : But let me suggest a few pop-up windows I would like to see mail-programs implement whenev...

2008/10/21

Poor writing

I’m currently reading a paper related to my thesis. Remind me not to write like this: In this section, the design of a beam-mass syste...

2008/10/12

US Election 2008 FAQ

I don’t know how this only just turned up in my feed reader, but Peter Norvig of Google fame has a great collection of information about the...

2008/10/04

In an ongoing series…

iTunes 8.0.1 fixes the gutter problem of this insignificant window: Compare : That scroll bar chrome still looks out-of-place, and t...

Diaeresis

Here’re two examples of some odd typography with which I’ve recently become enamoured: Courtesy, who else, the New Yorker. I’m plann...

2008/10/01

2³² − 1 messages

I was so happy to achieve ‘Inbox Zero’. In the final hour, Mail.app had the last laugh: Jokes aside, I’ve found the message count for sm...

2008/09/18

Rands on slides

Rands has written some really great articles on how to give and prepare for seminar presentations (too lazy for links; use Google). Here’s a...

2008/09/13

Oh god, my eyes

A little while ago I complained about the “Podcast Information” window in iTunes. Well, there’s now been an iTunes update, and I’m sad to...

2008/09/10

iTunes’ “Genius” logo

This logo, for iTunes’ new “Genius” feature, is only going to look good once we have displays capable of 200 dpi: Too many jaggies in th...

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