Thanks to Corey for this.
This guy, Evan Miller, put together some proper Math to produce a better way for ordering things with positive and negative ratings. You know, things like music lists, movies, products, anything that gets rated.
Also, I see his site says he’s a PhD student in University of Chicago’s Economics program. That’s supposed to be a good school for econ. Seems bright, got some good-looking writings on his homepage.
Science!!
I found this and thought it might be useful to someone. Paying it forward.
How to restore your hacked WordPress database from Google Cache through Ruby
“The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.” – Thomas Merton, American Trappist monk (1915–1968)
I’ve been experimenting with the Merlin Mann-popularized tip of appending text to a file from Quicksilver. And it’s cool. But, I like a good chunk of whitespace to separate some things. But how to get the whitespace in there? Hitting return just saves the text and closes the window, and putting a \n just adds those characters to the file.
The trick to getting new lines or blank lines in Quicksilver is to either press control or option while hitting return. Then, you can add empty lines to your heart’s content. It’s awesome.
Also, bonus tip: If you’re in Quicksilver and you want to browse your user directory/desktop, just press ~ after activating Quicksilver. Then you can use the arrow keys to browse starting at your home directory. I didn’t know that this existed until 5 minutes ago, but I want to start using it more.
When I went to the GTD conference, I saw David Allen use his two-minute timer during the presentation. I thought it was a good idea, and based on a conversation I just had with Thomas, I finally looked one up. Allen’s was only for Windows, but I found free ones for Windows and OSX. Sorry Linux users, go compile your own.
Whoops, 2:15. Gotta go.
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Knux. Thanks, Billeh!
Wow. (From: The Great Ruby Shootout)
While Chas and I were snowboarding in West Virgina, we visited the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank. They have an enormous radio telescope — the largest moving structure on land, they claim. It’s built out of over 2,000 panels, and at the meeting of every 4 panels is a motor so that those panels can be adjusted relative to each other to produce a perfect reflecting surface.
The receiving equipment is mounted above the dish, and is kept around 15 Kelvin all of the time with liquid hydrogen. The electronics are all hand-made on-site, and mounted in brass. Brass is the only metal they have that will not shatter at operating temperatures.
Interesting fact: The area is covered by the National Radio Quiet Zone. It is 13,000-square miles of almost total radio wave silence. This only applies to ground-based transmitters; DirectTV and other satellites still blanket the area with transmissions.
They are absolutely ruthless about limiting interference. They have crews that will trace down any type of oscillating interference in the surrounding areas. They actually repair or replace old appliances for homeowners in the valley. No digital cameras are allowed within a safety zone, but regular film ones are. In fact, they have a large number of old vehicles in their fleet, not because they can’t get new ones, but because new ones are filled with electronics. They can only use diesel vehicles because diesels don’t need spark plugs, which generate RF interference.
When we took the tour, the guide did a physics demo with a Faraday cage, and a digital camera. Way cooler and more informative than any of the Physics classes I took in school.
I wonder if there’s a lower incidence of cancer among people who live in this area. Might be interesting to do a study and settle all the “OMG THERE’S RADIO WAVES IN YOUR HEAD, GIVIN YOU CANCERS”.
Also, you might be interested to know that there is allegedly a large chunk of ECHELON located down the street.
This is a info post for people having problems. Generally Ruby is great, but due to some old development I was doing, my gems got screwed up. The best way to fix this for me meant reinstalling OS X Leopard. This might have come from different package managers running at the same time, like Fink and MacPorts, but ultimately, I had to clean things up.
In addition to a fresh install, I also had to manually remove Ruby from seven locations on my hard drive. They are
Now that this is done, I’m going to reinstall by
Likely queries to end up at this page are:
This is related to our new project. Also, HappyJoel is god damned hilarious. Keep an eye out for him in the near future.
“So uh, if you’re still alive, and I’m still alive, we should hang out” lol