[FRIAM] Semantic Web Talk December 7
The December meeting of the New Mexico Oracle Users Group will feature a talk on Oracle's RDF / Semantic Web technology, how it works, it's implementation, and what it can do. NCGR is hosting the meeting, and we'd like to have a full house. The link to the meeting information is at http://www.nmoug.org/meetings.html. // Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Food for Complex Thought
Owen's comic strip on chaos made me think of a photo I took a few years back in Artesia, New Mexico, which I offer for your amusement. ;; Gary inline: chaos-cafe.jpg FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] New to FRIAM list
Hi Ted, and welcome to the list. Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I don't know what CAS is. Computer Aided Simulation perhaps? I assumed that it was just me, but a trip to the disambiguation page for en.wikipedia.org didn't turn up anything promising, nor did a generic Google search (I assume it isn't Chemical Abstracts Service, nor Children's Aid Society, nor Casualty Actuarial Society...). Reminds me of an old joke from the AI heyday of the 1980s, about two guys sitting in adjacent seats on the airplane, and through casual conversation they learn that they are each going to a different AI conference in the same city. They talked in such broad generalities about their work that it was nearly an hour before they realized that one was a computer scientist going to an Artificial Intelligence conference, while the other was a rancher going to an Artificial Insemination conference. ;; Gary On Jan 28, 2009, at 5:19 PM, Ted Carmichael wrote: Hi, all. The FRIAM list welcome email said I should introduce myself, so here it is. My name's Ted Carmichael; I'm a PhD candidate in the College of Computing and Informatics, at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. I've been interested in CAS for the last 3 or 4 years; ever since I took an introductory course in it, I've been hooked. I think what I enjoy most is how applicable CAS is to many different fields. I'm computer science, but I enjoy learning a little bit about a lot of subjects. So this field is perfect for me. The professor who taught the intro course is now my thesis advisor. Last year we formed a research group here, with faculty from economics, biology, sociology, political science, theater, and philosophy. So that's a lot of fun. Some of us are also trying to create a symposium for next fall, through AAAI. I'll send a seperate email out about that, so you all can look at it, see if you might be interested. Thanks a lot! Cheers, Ted FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Stevey's Blog Rants: Rhino on Rails
On Feb 12, 2009, at 8:07 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote: For some while I've been kind of surprised, in a detached sort of way, at the general disregard that the FRIAMers I talk with hold for C++. [...] Hi Doug, Interesting topic! I don't know if I'm a typical FRIAMer (there is probably no such thing), but I am a long time geek with 25 years in the software industry (semi-retired/self-employed as of last summer). I started out programming in Lisp in the mid-1980s, just before AI Winter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Winter) set in. In my opinion, it was a knee-jerk reaction to abandon Lisp because of its association with AI, and always felt that the software industry took an incredibly wrong turn when it moved to languages and environments that puts more burden on the programmer, i.e. C/C++ (again, my opinion). Lisp seems to have been making somewhat of a comeback lately, but time will tell. I think a lot of some FRIAMers' reactions (mine included) to C++ has to do with valuing programmer time and energy over that of the hardware. The need to quickly build prototypes with limited programmer time favors higher level languages like Python. Of course, I've heard similar reactions to Java, which I haven't found that bad (I've been programming in Java since 1997). A good IDE, e.g. Eclipse, helps a lot. [...] One explanation that has been given me was Well, C++ is prone to horrible memory management errors. To which I respond: not if you code properly. And when you do make (the inetivable) memory allocation/deallocation/reference error, there are tools that will help you track the problem down posthaste. Valgrind, for example. Purify, for another. Well, you could say the same thing about any software tool - if you use it correctly, it is fine (a VERY BIG if), and there are tools to help you cope with the inevitable mistakes. I coded C++ for several years in its early days (late 80s, early 90s), and didn't care much for it. Chasing down memory leaks were bad enough, but holding onto freed memory was even worse, and nearly impossible (in those days) to find, since it usually resulted in core dumps long after the original error had occurred. No doubt the tools have improved, but is that how I really want to spend my time? I'd much rather concentrate on the problem, not arcane details like manual memory management. I like to think that my mental CPU cycles are worthy of something more interesting like the problem I'm trying to solve. Another reason that has been repeatedly given for C++'s disfavor is, It takes too long to develop C++ expertise. I guess I don't buy that either. I don't really think the level of expertise necessary to gain proficiency in C++ is all that much different that FORTRAN, Java, Pascal, LISP, or any other major language. I haven't actually heard anyone say that it takes too long to learn, but I can believe it. C++ has always seemed to be an overly complex language, what with multiple ways of passing and dereferencing pointers, passing complex structures by value with bitwise copy, multiple inheritance, templates... I suppose I understand the FRIAM community's interest in Netlogo, but it still seems to me to be a toy language, in which you can develop small prototypes, but you can't scale a Netlogo application beyond serial computing environments. Translated: you can't develop interesting real world problem solutions in Netlogo. I haven't used NetLogo personally, so someone else can comment on whether or not it would be practical to do real world systems with it, but as I understand it, NetLogo makes it easier to build agent based models. But again, the main point for a small group is that getting proof of concept solutions up and running quickly is very important, and with limited staff, it makes no sense to waste valuable programming time on something like memory management, which a garbage collector is perfectly capable of doing very well. And when your bread and butter (ideally) is complex systems, why not at least start with a tool that closely matches one of its problem domains, i.e. agent based modeling? So, I guess it really doesn't surprise me much that Google picked the language set that they did, given the company's technology focus, and the collective power provided by that selection of languages. What they picked probably makes sense. Java is industrial strength enough to do the server side of a lot of application software; Javascript capable and enabled browsers are safe to take for granted for the client side; C++ provides low level access to hardware. Python seems to be at least holding its own for a general purpose language and as a scripting language in competition with Perl and Ruby, and in a lot of cases can supplant Java for the server side application software. See for example reddit.com, which started out written
[FRIAM] Stevey's Blog Rants: Rhino on Rails
Thanks to Owen for introducing those of us who were unfamiliar with Steve Yegge to his blog (http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com). I found the guy sufficiently entertaining (as well as insightful) to follow the link from the blog to Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants (what a great name!). In one of his posts (http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel ), Steve Y writes quite an interesting, and of course, highly opinionated, discussion of programming languages (including the ever popular C++ bashing that some of us have indulged in here). His high opinion of the use of Lisp (and C) in the early days of amazon.com, and his equally low opinion of the use of C++ later on in the company, are particularly entertaining. More fuel for the fire :-) ;; Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] (no subject)
You haven't lived until you've eaten a pasty (pronounced PAST EE, and not to be confused withthe minimalist apparel worn by certain entertainers, so I've been told) on a -20 degree winter day in the upper great lakes region. One of the main ingredients is, of course, rutabaga. A pasty is sort of like a pot pie, folded over into a half moon shape. I've been told they originated with the miners of the region, as they were a complete meal that was easy to carry down into the mines. Some references: www.pastys.com, www.hu.mtu.edu/vup/pasty/recipes.htm . Mmm, make mine with gravy, eh?! ;; Gary On Mar 28, 2009, at 6:20 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Pamela, have never eaten a rutabaga. I have stood at the produce in Whole Foods and admired their fortitude, but i have actually never even knowingly MET a person who has consmued a rutabaga. Are you prepared to introduce me to rutabaga's. A way of cooking them that makes them taste like pancakes with maple syrup, perhaps. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology, Clark University (nthomp...@clarku.edu) http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Online university
At the risk of sounding like an ivory tower, anti-capitalist prig (I'm not in academia, and worked in industry for more than 20 years), I doubt I would support the motives of a university whose internet presence has a .com suffix. What were they thinking? ;; Gary On May 8, 2009, at 2:29 PM, Alfredo Covaleda wrote: Hola Have you checked the recently opened University of the People http://www.uopeople.com/ . Recently means last week. Are you talking about a model like this. Alfredo FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Store the equivalent of 25 DVDs on a surface the size of a postage stamp
All three links are interesting, but I notice that the IBM article is almost seven years old - surely it must be ancient technology now? On the other hand, I'm really looking forward to that new MacBook Pro complete with focused ion beam microscope based HD-ROSETTA drive :-) ;; Gary On May 8, 2009, at 1:58 PM, Steve Smith wrote: And the analog versions have some compelling features as well! LANL Spinoff http://www.norsam.com/ Long Now http://rosettaproject.org/archive/suggest-resources/ Hola A trillion bits per square inch (25 millions of textbook pages on a surface of a postage stamp). http://www-304.ibm.com/jct03001c/press/us/en/pressrelease/22049.wss éxitos, Alfredo CV FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Bono's call to action for Africa | Video on TED.com
Maybe a failure of content negotion of my browser or something, but the link gave my Safari a 404 Not Found error. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/bono_s_call_to_action_for_africa.html worked for me. Being only a remote admirer of sfComplex (Ecuador is too far from Santa Fe for face-to-face communication other than over video conferencing), I'm surprised by your comment. From what I've gathered from reading its mailing list, the complex sounds pretty successful to me for only being a year old. I hope it lives up to its potential. ;; Gary On Jul 13, 2009, at 10:47 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: OK, here's another. And why I'm sickened by the failure of the sfComplex. http://www.ted.com/talks/bono_s_call_to_action_for_africa.html We have such an opportunity to make a difference. Really. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Roundabouts: not for the timid
Having lived most of my 50 years in the USA and having just completed my first year in another country (Ecuador, which does have roundabouts), I think I am beginning to understand why. Note that I'm not trying to defend what it is to be American, let alone its consequences as played out on the world stage, but just would like to give a bit of insight into our collective psyche. Nothing scientific, mind you, but I have tried to analyze why I initially didn't like roundabouts, even though I am starting to warm up to them. In the process, I think I have learned a great deal about what it is to be an American. Despite paying lipservice to eschewing the government imposing rules on us, we Americans are amazingly legalistic (no wonder we have so many lawyers per capita). So, we demand that our individual rights be honored, right down to not having to negotiate with someone else for something as simple as a spot in traffic lane. As a society, we agree to take turns through things like traffic lights: I am fine with yielding when it is someone else's turn, as long as it is understood that when it is *my* turn, nobody else had better get in my way. None of this touchy-feely negotion crap involved with something as simple as crossing an intersection, just give me the green light and get the hell out of my way (strident sounding language, but I think it does capture some of the emotional undercurrent of American culture). In a traffic circle (roundabout), you have to actually communicate with other drivers by looking them in the eye to see if they are going to let you change lanes. No wonder Chevy Chase got to look at the Arc de Triumphe in Paris with his family all day long from a traffic circle in European Vacation. I think this may also shed some light on why we Americans don't much like soccer (as an American, I can't quite bring myself to refer to it as football :-) To those of us who don't watch soccer very much, it never is clear who is in control of the ball. Give us good old American Football, where one side has absolute possession of the ball as long as they can keep it. They have four tries to score or capture territory (very warlike game, it is), and if not, then it is unambiguously the other team's ball. ;; Gary On Jul 18, 2009, at 11:17 AM, Robert Holmes wrote: So why don't they use roundabouts over here more frequently? In the UK they prove to be much safer and have a higher throughput than traffic light controlled junctions. -- Robert FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Rule driven agent-based modeling systems
Unfortunately, a glaring hole in SPARQL is lack of add or update capability. Jena (http://jena.sourceforge.net), the framework sponsored by HP Labs, includes an implementation of a proposed update language for SPARQL - see http://jena.sourceforge.net/ARQ/update.html. The other major framework for RDF is Sesame (http://openrdf.org), and they appear to emphasize their own propietary language (SeRQL) that is considerably more powerful, but only supported by Sesame. All the same, semantic web technology is worth keeping an eye on, even if it is still in its infancy. ;; Gary On Aug 25, 2009, at 10:04 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: Russ Abbott wrote: But they give up SQL in the process. Now, I've always thought SQL was ugly. But at least its declarative. I believe many of these graph database / triple store packages support SPARQL.. http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] I'm looking for a word
I get unduly hung up on unparsable grammar, where probably my brain just needs to fill in one missing word, so help me here: did you mean virtually *any* object. Or, did you mean that the software is able to object (Your honor, I object!), and do so virtually? Assuming the first, I would think polymorphic might fit the bill. Time flies like an arrow, Gary On Sep 7, 2009, at 2:14 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: This is to the programmers on this list. I'm looking for a word that refers generically to software that is open to virtually object in its host language. The best way for me to explain it is with examples. In Java, the various collection classes each have this property. A List can be a list of anything. (Note that this isn’t about generics such as Listtype. It’s about the fact that the List functionality does not limit the sorts of things one can put into a list. Typed lists are simply a way of ensuring that a program gets its types right. That's a separate consideration.) Other examples include map and reduce in functional programming. They are open if not to anything at least to lists of any sort and to functions or any sort that operate on elements in those lists. Another example is a genetic algorithm in that it does not limit the function that is used as a fitness function or the possible population elements. Again, these can be anything. So is there a generic word for software with this sort of downwardly open property? It may be something like structural in that the software defines an operational structure but not the elements that occupy the structure. Is there any commonly used word for this? -- Russ P.S. This demonstrates that one can have an idea before having a word for the idea. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Snow Leopard
The Ars Technica review of Snow Leopard that Tom Carter pointed out the other day got me sufficiently excited to order it, and a friend who is returning from the states next week can bring it to me here in Ecuador. While I'm waiting, I am looking into how best to install it on a separate partition of my MacBook Pro, in order to gradually migrate applications and user data over from my Leopard partition. The main applications that I use extensively and would have any concerns over are Skype and Sketchup. Skype sounds potentially problematic (users have reported it taking more CPU on Snow Leopard than on Windows running under Parallels on Snow Leopard). Sketchup, Office 2008, and Photoshop CS3 sound good to go, and I would hope that the OSX apps like Mail and Safari would be fine as well. And they released 10.6.1 yesterday. I'll post about my experience after I have given it a try. ;; Gary On Sep 11, 2009, at 4:04 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: How many of us have tried Snow Leopard? -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Keyboards [Was: Re: comm.]
The construction sounds nice, but what's with that whole glob of keys on the right side, making you reach several inches further to get to the mouse? You know, the ones with numbers on them? I ain't no freekin' accountant, I want my numbers on the top row, above the Q W E R T Y keys just like on my old Royal manual typewriter. And CAPS LOCK to the left of the pinkie? Puhleeze! Enough to give an Emacs junkie pinkie tendonitis. :-) :-) Now here is a real keyboard for Unix Emacs geeks: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard (available at http://pfuca-store.stores.yahoo.net/ haphackeyser.html) Been banging away on mine for quite a few years now. ;; Gary On Sep 15, 2009, at 8:33 PM, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: Douglas Roberts wrote: Stupid new soft keyboard. I miss the old clicky-clicky IBM ones. ooh I've got a `daskeyboard' for my birthday with IBM clicky-clicky keys and no labels on any of them. Nice. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] The victims of the H1N1 virus
Having been a Java hacker on a multimillion dollar Y2K remediation project for two years from 1997-1999, I've often wondered how much of the whole thing was hyperbole, and how much was real. According to Wikipedia's article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y2K), about $300 billion US was spent worldwide on the effort. Just as with H1N1, the dire predictions never materialized, but it is far from clear whether or not this was becasue of the effort and capital spent. Same with the massive military spending in the 1980s: did the Soviet Union fall because of it, or simply because some critical mass of something had been reached? Sounds like some good candidates for a bit of Agent Based Modeling, but then cynicismhistory seems much harder to model than to rewrite/ cynicism . ;; Gary On Sep 20, 2009, at 10:05 AM, ERIC P. CHARLES wrote: Jochen, I have been wondering that as well. I keep having flashbacks to the imminent demise of the technological world at the stroke of midnight, new years eve, Y2K. Certainly there is a pandemic in the limited technical sense that the disease has spread globally. However, the implied meaning of the term (taken advantage of by politicians, some scientists, and the drug industry) of something that will kill many, many people seem not to have materialized. It may yet, I suppose. The level of near- panic, and the resources spent pre-planning, at Penn State is quite impressive. They are acting like it is polio, or the pneumonic plague. I'm sure some industry sale's rep will retire happily off of our vaccine purchases alone. Of course, when all is said and done the evil global corporations will be vindicated either way. If a bunch of people die, then the evil corporations will say how right they were in warning us and emphasize that we should give them more money next time. Alternatively, if few die, then the evil corporations will say how good it was we bought their vaccines and did every thing they said (also demonstrating the effectiveness of my elephant repellent necklace). Orwell would definitely understand. Eric On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 10:20 AM, Jochen Fromm jfr...@t-online.de wrote: What happend with all the victims of the H1N1 swine flu virus? Is it possible that a bit of the hype was generated and exaggerated by the pharmaceutical industry itself to sell a bit more swine flu vaccine? The swine flu vaccine has recently been approved and bought by governments around the world, certainly a multi-million dollar business. Somehow, the hype was largest when the vaccine was under development and nearly finished. This makes me wonder if it is possible that the pharmaceutical industry generates the threat of a possible pandemic to make money, just as the industrial-military complex is able to generate the threat of WMDs to create revenue. A ministry of defense which triggers a war and a ministry of health which causes a pandemic - this sounds like George Orwell. Is our fate in the hand of evil global corporations? -J. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Something for the more pragmatic members of Friam
Peter is quite a good writer. I worked through most of his online book Practical Common Lisp and really enjoyed it - see www.gigamonkeys.com/book . ;; Gary On Sep 24, 2009, at 5:15 PM, Fred Seibel wrote: My son Peter's book Coders at Work is out and currently #7 overall at Amazon. Coders at Work is a book of QA with fifteen of the leading lights of the of software industry. You can see the full list at http://www.codersatwork.com Peter has also put up a little essay on his blog at http://www.gigamonkeys.com/blog/ on the topic of the number of women included in the list--only one-- that I am sure many on Friam would find interesting. Best Fred FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] FYI: More mumbo-jumbo @ emergence
On Oct 2, 2009, at 1:56 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: I agree strongly with Roger and Nick. The point of doing research is to advance the field -- among other things by sharing one's results with others. Most scientific publishers don't add much value to what they publish. The reviewing is done by unpaid reviewers. There are quite a few fully reviewed open publication channels. Quality is no worse there than in for-profit journals. Look for example at the PLoS journals. Also, look at JASSS. Compare the quality of those article with the quality of articles published in the Journal that started this thread: More mumbo-jumbo @ emergence. Furthermore, it is always OK to publish pre-prints of journal articles. These are author-formatted versions of published articles. Pre-prints allow the contents of articles to be made available without charge without giving away the formatting added value contributed by the publisher. The NM-INBRE project (www.nminbre.org), helps new biomedical researchers in NM universities get started on the road to funding. While at NCGR, I interviewed professors and students to find out what their most pressing issues were. One of the most frequent problems they cited was lack of access to journals such as Cell. Institutional subscriptions are incredibly expensive, so researchers at universities with especially inadequate funding often just do without. And back in the good old days before the internet, didn't publishers usually send the author a bunch of reprints of the article for the author to freely distribute? Perhaps once published, the most appropriate thing is for the author to announce the article as Glen did, and offer to send a free reprint (electronic these days) to anyone who offers. ;; Gary -- Russ A On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:56 AM, Roger Critchlow r...@elf.org wrote: On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 10:07 AM, glen e. p. ropella g...@agent-based-modeling.com wrote: Thus spake Steve Smith circa 10/02/2009 07:40 AM: But I understand Glen being careful about sending it out to a list that archives such that the paper is effectively been placed in a public repository. [...] That said, I hope Glen (and others) *will* freely circulate their work to their colleagues according to their own judgement about what supports their work (and Science in general) vs what undermines it (breaking contracts or good faith understandings?). Exactly. To be clear, I won't re-publish the article. But I'm happy to send a copy directly to any colleague who asks. This came up, again, this week with a pre-undergraduate researcher, ie unfunded and unaffiliated, who wanted articles on subject. I searched arxiv.org, plos.org, and google scholar without finding much on subject that wasn't encumbered by a king's ransom in use fees, however it turned out that researcher at university had a web page of publications which linked to pdfs of his publications, of the publications of all his students, of his out of print book, dissertations, etc, et anything else that could further the progress in his field of research. My recommendation was to google author names to find other online archives of papers and follow the trail of pdfs. Life is short, the mean time to expiration of a good ideas even shorter when starved for companionship, the mean number of readers of a scientific paper who actually make something out of the experience is probably less than 1, probably much less than 1. You can collaborate with the publishers, make your work artificially scarce, so they can sell it again, and again, and again to those who can pay. Or you can actively attempt to find a reader who will make something of your work. The publisher doesn't care if anyone ever makes anything of your work, they priced the book or the journal so their business expected to make a profit the day of publication. That's why the books and journals are getting more expensive so fast that libraries are spending so much time figuring out what not to buy, what subscriptions to cancel, what departments can't defend themselves. Which is making it all still more expensive for those who continue to buy. And those online copies aren't priced at what the market will bear, they're priced to make subscriptions look like a bargain. If you don't actively promote the availability of your work, of your discipline, of your ideas online, then who will? Disciplines which make it possible for a pre-undergraduate to find and to read and to learn about their ideas online will recruit pre-undergraduates. Disciplines which abet the publishers in their desire to collect rents in perpetuity on human knowledge will fare differently. Which side are you on, boys? -- rec -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's
Re: [FRIAM] Facebook: OK, now what!?
I just don't understand this Web 2.0 culture. Heck, I can't even bring myself to send a text message. Must be getting old :-| Gary On Nov 22, 2009, at 11:13 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: Thanks for the help, good examples. One question has popped up for me: You can link twitter to facebook, so that all/some of your tweets appear in facebook too, as a status update. Not sure I grok it all, but if I'm going to be tweeting, I'd like it to also be published in facebook, right? Anyone try it any of the automatic tweeter - facebook apps yet? http://mashable.com/2009/05/25/twitter-to-facebook/ -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Dunbar numbers and distributions
On Nov 25, 2009, at 12:26 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: On Nov 25, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: snip Nobody has a hundred friends, so the word, friend, is being extended in a creepy Orwellian way to include strangers. I disagree. I was surprised to find just how many work, family, school, church, complexity, .. friends I *do* have. [...] I'll easily top 200. So would anyone I think who's got diverse contexts mentioned above. No strangers. And not including everyone I do know just to keep the list tight. -- Owen Such a social butterfly! I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me! [Stuart Smalley] :-) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Health care [was Sources of Innovation]
I don't personally think Doug's comments were all that cranky, but then I've been on this list for a long time - it seems to me more like he was playing Devil's Advocate. But to John's sincere question, I also wonder what generally happens to uninsured people who come to a hospital emergency room - I've always been fortunate enough to have health insurance in the USA. Just from a faith in my fellow man perspective, I hope that those with truly life-threatening injuries are almost universally treated, at least until the emergency has passed. But after such emergency treatment, I wonder what happens. Or similarly, what happens to those who come in with non-life-threatening conditions - the urban legend is that they are treated and the hospitals suffer terribly by being so over-burdened; I don't know if that is true or not. I guess I come down on the side that says access to at least basic health care should be a basic human (oh no, he's going to say it!) *right*. Now, I don't believe we are born with some nebulous, touchy-feely notion of rights as in right vs. wrong, but I do think it behooves a society that wants to succeed to *create* basic rights that it is willing to fight to provide. Most civilized countries in the world at least pay lip service to human rights, and most financially well-off countries consider medical care to be such a human right - if not for the moraility of it (another hard to defend concept perched on a slippery slope), then for the sheer economics of it: outside the USA, it seems pretty well agreed that providing at least a minimal government run health care system is more efficient than privately run systems. Being even more of a curmudgeon than Doug (IMHO), I wonder what would happen to people without insurance if they were to show up at wealthy private hospitals, collapse on the floor, and proclaim that they are too sick to leave. See if the administrators would call the police to forcibly remove these people from their sick beds. Maybe it would at least draw some media attention. Maybe they could even have a tea party while there... ;; Gary On Feb 16, 2010, at 11:01 AM, Douglas Roberts wrote: Again, apologies to all for my cranky outburst yesterday. I suppose I teed off on the broad nature of the question: ...what happens if an uninsured person suddenly needs massive medical treatment to avoid death or crippling consequences Given that out the the 350 million US population there are many millions of people who fit that definition, there are numerous answers to the question. There is no single policy that defines how to handle a sick, uninsured person. One of but many of the huge gaping flaws in our society. Which naturally is a reflection on but one of the huge gaping flaws in our own collective character. --Doug On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 8:49 AM, John Kennison jkenni...@clarku.edu wrote: Thanks Owen and Eric for giving me a simple answer to my simple question. Thanks also to Doug for the reassuring private email he sent me. I do have a question for Doug: I don't see how the facts that you list pertain to my question of how uninsured people are treated when they suddenly need medical help. The facts that lots of people get poor health care, or even that the question is naive don't really give me the information I asked for. From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore [o...@backspaces.net] Sent: Monday, February 15, 2010 5:36 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Health care [was Sources of Innovation] On Feb 15, 2010, at 11:15 AM, John Kennison wrote: I was thinking about what Eric said and realized that I don't know what happens if an uninsured person suddenly needs massive medical treatment to avoid death or crippling consequences. If he can't pay, do we just let him suffer the consequences? At this point, I just want to find out what the current practice is. The question of what we should do is another matter. I believe all emergency rooms are required to provide care, whether the person is insured or not. I've been in the emergency room every year with family members needing care and they always are clear that payment and/or insurance is not mandatory. Also, NM, and most states, provide insurance for those who cannot afford it. I forget the name it goes under, but my son Gil is insured with it. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St.
Re: [FRIAM] PLEASE DON'T READ Nick's post: Schroedinger's What is Life?
On Apr 27, 2010, at 1:50 PM, Steve Smith wrote: How about whale piss from Moby Dick? Any of that in the glass of water (a little harder to detect)? It should be easy to detect, since whale piss is made of the radioactive element Urineium :-) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] WTF: CIA edition | The Bloomington Alternative
Some of my personal favorites: As of when I left the states three years ago, Toyota still proudly wrote on some of their pickups the acronym for Toyota Racing Development (TRD, just pronounce it :-) Maybe urban legend, but General Motors had to quickly change the name of one of their early economy car after introducing it to the Latin American market, not considering that Nova literally means it doesn't go (no va); Bumper stickers aren't very popular here in Ecuador, but one of the few that I've seen is for a famous Chinese restaurant in Quito, which reads (with the heart symbol) I love Ho's. ;; Gary On Dec 26, 2010, at 12:27 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: Hard to believe. Sorta like when I convinced Shell Oil NOT to name their new research group SHell Institute of Technology! http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2010/12/25/10621 -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Charging agents for the computations they do
Interesting idea. Most Common Lisp implementations compile to native machine code, so it might not be too hard to instrument the generated code to do some kind of bookeeping. There are quite a few open source implementations out there, e.g. Steel Bank Common Lisp (www.sbcl.org) or Clozure Common Lisp (trac.clozure.com/ccl). ;; Gary On Mar 7, 2011, at 12:38 PM, Russ Abbott wrote: I'm considering the development of an ABM in which the agents are charged for the computations they do. But I can't think of a language that facilitates that. I know that in most languages one can look at the real-time clock, but I can't think of a language in which one can look at a dynamic count of (virtual) instructions executed -- or even an dynamic measure of the amount of CPU time devoted to executing the instructions of each agent. Am I missing something obvious? Can anyone help. Thanks. -- Russ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Airstrikes in Libya. Is it necessary?
I fear that this sounds like blaming the victims (i.e. the Libyan people), but I haven't heard discussion of the difference between how Egypt managed its overthrow of its dictator versus how Libya has attempted to do so. At least from just watching the two situations unfold on network TV (CNN BBC), it seems that the Egyptian revolution was essentially peaceful, with passive resistance to the status quo by a large number of unarmed people. Perhaps Mubarak was just that much less of a tyrant than Gadhafi, or maybe it really does show the power of nonviolent resistance. In any case, the Libyan rebels took up arms early on, and in a sense empowered Gadhafi by giving him an excuse for retaliating. I wonder what would have happened if the resistance there had remained peaceful. Thoughts? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Rossi mini reactor 2.5 mo. at 10 kW gives 18 MWh using up 100 gm Ni and 2 gm H, Sven Kullander interview 2011.04.06: Rich Murray 2011.04.07
I don't know if the device is real or not, but I can't find any way of attributing good motives to these guys: if they are simply trying to put one over on the world for fame and fortune, they shame on them (and on us for falling for it). If they truly have produced cold fusion, then witholding details of a technology with such far-reaching positive implications, in order to increase their economic gains, is also reprehensible. But then, my money is on the former. ;; Gary On Apr 8, 2011, at 12:16 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: Sorry if this is a repeat question .. I've been skimming mail lately due to homework! So the question is: Has anyone reproduced the experiment/device? I realize Rossi is applying for a patent and is therefore somewhat protective, but U of Bologna is quite respectable, the oldest university in europe. So UofB must be interested in protecting their reputation .. thus would like a duplicate made by independent researchers under some sort of protective agreement. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] off topic....., but still
For the record, and the millions who will read the FRIAM archives in the next centuries, of course Doug is referring to the death of bin Laden, and not saying that the world is a better place without MLK. Amazing to see the collective conscious at work in that mini exchange. Of course, one would hope that in another 100 years, whatever takes the place of web browsers would automatically make the connection and annotate the exchange accordingly. BTW, I agree with MLK's sentiment, but then thankfully I didn't lose anyone on 9/11. ;; Gary On May 3, 2011, at 11:13 AM, Douglas Roberts wrote: The world's a better place without him. ~Doug Roberts On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. ~ Martin Luther King Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ http://www.cusf.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org -- Doug Roberts drobe...@rti.org d...@parrot-farm.net 505-455-7333 - Office 505-670-8195 - Cell FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] vol 95, issue 97
Thanks Nick, someone needed to say that. Sure there are tangents, but as mailing lists go, FRIAM has a pretty high signal to noise ratio. It also has a quite diverse group of participants and lurkers. Sometimes we agree, sometimes we don't; sometimes we like to jump on the unpopular side of a controversial topic, other times we echo the politically correct view. For the most part, we have fairly thick skins, though we don't usually need them. It would be a shame if we kept the tenor so neutral as to never offend anyone. But if someone really finds us that offensive, then like you said, the exit sign is brightly lit. Their loss. ;; Gary On May 6, 2011, at 9:03 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: RussG, A message such as you wrote is ambiguous because it is a demand TO the list to be taken OFF the list. If you simply wanted to be taken OFF the list, the instructions for doing that are at the bottom of every post from the list. So, it sounds like you want us to talk about the decline of the relevance to the list for your concerns. I agree that some focus and restraint is important in a forum such as FRIAM. As a heavy poster to the list, I feel the sting of your comments, and will try to make my contributions sharper in the future. But I have always found the list pretty responsive to any topic that is introduced in a reasonably compact manner (not a skill of mine). So, if you are still with us, I would urge you to put a question or concern to the list and see what we do with it. If nothing of value comes of that, then use the instructions at the bottom of the list, or write Steve Guerin as sgue...@redfish.com and you will be free! All the best, Nick FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] [sfx: Discuss] The Torture Of Gmail
I've been using gmail via IMAP for at least five years, and haven't found it to be bad at all, though I'm not that fond of its web interface either. I started using gmail with Thunderbird under Windows XP, and switched to using it with Mail.app on OS X about three years ago. I haven't had any serious problems. I started with a whole bunch of nested folders in Thunderbird from 20+ years of POP3 accounts when I switched to gmail IMAP. First, set up a gmail account and enable IMAP via the web interface. Then add the IMAP gmail account to Thunderbird or Mail.app. I generally didn't explicitly create folders in this account, but instead dragged individual folders from the POP3 accounts onto the gmail account. I was able to drag folders (even heirarchies of folders) from the POP3 accounts to the gmail account. In cases where I had folders with many subfolders (e.g. a Friends folder with subfolders for each friend), I did explicitly create the parent folder, and then dragged one or a few subfolders onto it. If the parent folder has messages in it (e.g. in my Friends folder, I also keep messages from misc. friends that I have had very few messages from, and so particularly want to have their own folders), then select all the messages in the folder and explicitly drag the messages into the newly created folder. Since IMAP keeps the client and server in sync, this process also creates the folders on the gmail server. The process is slow and manual, but worked well for me. In the end, you have nicely backed up email that you can access either from your laptop/desktop mail app, or from any computer via the web interface. Also, when I switched to Mac, all I had to do was create the account in Mail.app, and all the folders and messages magically appeared (while burning up a lot of bandwidth - thanks, NCGR for the T3 connection :-), since they already existed on the server. I suspect the idea of lots of nested folders is pretty old fashioned (like me :-) Gmail talks about labels instead of folders, which are basically tags. If the labels have embedded slashes, its IMAP treats these as nested folders, so you can have it both ways, although it is a bit ugly to have labels like Friends/Santa Fe/FRIAM/Owen. ;; Gary On Jun 9, 2011, at 9:30 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: Like many a damn fool, I'm seriously trying to use Gmail, via the web interface. Now, I (possibly mistakenly) presume you, fellow gmail users, are not going through the tortue I am. In plain words, it Sucks. Really! So I must ask you to answer one of two questions: 1 - How do you bear it? .. Do you have a stunt to make the web UI more usable? 2 - If not, do you access gmail in some other way? An email client? Or some other way to avoid the Horror Of It All? I will go through a couple of weeks and hope for the best. But clearly if you can handle this, you have Given Up. -- Owen -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Santa Fe Complex discuss group. To post to this group, send email to disc...@sfcomplex.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to discuss+unsubscr...@sfcomplex.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/sfcomplex.org/group/discuss FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Santa Fe
Actually, I was thinking priceless. ;; Gary On Jul 26, 2011, at 7:11 PM, Douglas Roberts wrote: Either that, or precious. Sort of like FRIAM, come to think of it. On Jul 26, 2011 5:58 PM, Robert Holmes rob...@holmesacosta.com wrote: Is that special or special? —Robert On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Douglas Roberts d...@parrot-farm.netwrote: Yes, everybody here is special. --Doug FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] CouchBase, SQLite launch unified NoSQL query language
If you're willing to drink the RDF koolaid, there is also SPARQL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARQL). Gary On Jul 30, 2011, at 10:29 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: Re: our Friam chat yesterday about the new databases that are not relational i.e. do not store data as tables of independent records which are joined for complete access. The new trend is called NoSQL and choses to avoid relational storage so that it can be massively distributed across multiple servers and geographies. But these new data storage systems have a problem: they do not have a unified access API or language while relational databases are generally unified by SQL, the Structured Query Language (which most data base vendors augment .. so SQL is sorta a subset) On a nifty play on words, the new standard interface language for NoSQL storage is UnQL (pronounced Uncle) http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/395469/couchbase_sqlite_launch_unified_nosql_query_language Quote: Hoping to unify the growing but disparate market of NoSQL databases, the creators behind CouchDB and SQLite have introduced a new query language for the format, called UnQL (Unstructured Data Query Language). The impetus for UnQL is to create some form of commonality among non-SQL databases, said James Phillips, a co-founder and vice president of products for Couchbase, which oversees the document-oriented CouchDB database. UnQL, pronounced Uncle, could be considered a superset of the SQL syntax, Phillips said. It can parse all statements formulated in the SQL language and supports a number of new operators and expressions as well. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Apple Stops Samsung From Selling the Galaxy Tab in the European Union
Looks like Apple is doing pretty well for itself: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/08/10/apple-closes-as-the-most-valuable-company-in-the-world/ ;; Gary On Aug 10, 2011, at 1:28 PM, Joshua Thorp wrote: Don't you think Apple has been rewarded for all of these things? What more do they need? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Academic papers are hidden from the public. Here’s some direct action. ? Bad Science
journalz.com ? On Sep 17, 2011, at 12:22 PM, Sarbajit Roy wrote: Thanks for saying this. As a non-academic without access to JSTOR, its so frustrating when a google search throws up relevant academic papers in JSTOR or similar databases, and I can't read them. H.. as an Indian (forrmer) hacker lets see what can be done to strike a blow for hactivism. Sarbajit FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Activity over holidays?
I'm going to be in the Santa Fe area from 12/27 until 1/3 (first visit to the states since I left in 2008), and would love to get together with FRIAM friends, old and new. I know this is probably the time of least activity, but I was wondering if there will be a WedTech on the 28th? I certainly would like to get together for FRIAM - do you still meet at St. John's? What time? Also, does anyone have advice on how to get around SF (or between Pecos and SF) without a car? I don't suppose that in the three years I've been away that reliable bus service has magically sprouted. Or inexpensive taxi service. I've gotten spoiled with the taxis in Quito, where a 15 minute taxi ride usually costs under two dollars. This will be just about the first time since I was a teenager that I haven't had access to a car (I let my NM license expire, and haven't yet bothered with getting one for Ecuador). Thanks, Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Oh my gawd...
I've forgotten the message that spawned the thread, but I'll expose my incompetence in math to say that I was also thinking that 1 is prime. The informal definition that I remember says that a number is prime if it is an integer evenly divisible only by itself and 1. Well, 1 clearly is divisible by itself (1/1 = 1) and divisible by 1 (1/1 = 1), so by that informal definition, it must be prime. The perils of natural language and informal definitions. ;; Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] SF_x/FRIAM/WedTech activities this week?
I'm in town (actually in Pecos) this week, and wonder if there will be any complexity-related activities this week? WedTech tomorrow? FRIAM friday? ;; Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: Winds of Change
Care to elaborate on 'we created small crises to create change.'? Don't remember where I saw it (bumper sticker, email...), but I'll consider thinking of a corporation as a person when Texas puts one to death. Gary On Jan 8, 2012, at 3:21 PM, Paul Paryski wrote: And as long as corporations are considered to be legal persons who can make unlimited political contributions and create super pacs, nothing will change. I believe that, unfortunately, real change will only come with tragic, painful crisis and perhaps collapse (ref. Jarred Diamond). This was one of the conclusions a number of us in the UN came to and we sometimes created small crises to create change. cheers on a snowy day, Paul FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Tech has arrived
Even as a geek, I have to marvel at technology: this American (me) sitting in my house in the Ecuadorian cloud forest, watching the Super Bowl on ESPN Latino being broadcast over a South American satellite, and rather than listen to the Spanish commentary, listening on my laptop to streaming audio from BBC 5 in London. ;; Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gun | Video on TED.com
Thanks for such a balanced and thoughtful message. Thank goodness for ramblings and ramblers Gary On Feb 14, 2012, at 2:19 PM, Steve Smith wrote: Some people say we never use nuclear weapons. The truth is we use nuclear weapons every day to keep the world safe... -The Honorable Andrew C. Weber, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs If you came upon two men in the road with one fist gripping eachother's collar and the other cocked back ready to strike, but not yet having struck, would you call that Peace? - The Dalai Lama, Spiritual and (formerly) political leader of the Tibetan people and a worldwide Buddhist Community rambling personal anecdote /rambling personal anecdote - Steve On Feb 12, 2012, at 6:23 PM, Owen Densmore wrote: When I spent 2 years at Syracuse University helping 273 draftees avoid going to the failed Vietnam war, I was completely surprised by the military: they were smart, willing to listen, and amazingly, decided to let 273 war protesters not go to the war. This was in stark contrast with the civilian authorities (the Draft Board) who were deaf, dumb and blind in comparison. So this led me to watch this strange TEDx where the talk was on Why I chose a gun http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_van_uhm_why_i_chose_a_gun.html -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Self publishing
Here is the core dump of the recently defunct Code Quarterly magazine (FRIAM connection: this was started by Peter Seibel, who is Fred Seibel's son). Of course, the target audience and contributers are geeks rather than scientists, so I'm not sure if there is much to learn for science journals... ;; Gary On Feb 15, 2012, at 5:13 PM, Russell Standish wrote: [...] My second data point is an electronic journal Complexity International which was started by a friend of mine in 1993. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] MacBook Pro Recommendations
I'm getting ready to buy a new MacBook Pro, as my 2007 pre-unibody 15 machine is getting a little long in the tooth (I will fix it up a bit to serve as a backup). I'm looking for opinions on which to get. It will be used my main machine for software development, including Java, iOS, Lisp, Clojure, JavaScript, who knows what else... Here are some questions along with my own thoughts to get the ball rolling. I'm sure I want to stick with a MacBook Pro, since I anticipate doing some iOS development. Unfortunately, Apple holds all the cards there (I want to stay in their good graces, so hackintosh is not an option). Also, I have a fair amount of software for the Mac, and it works quite well to run Windows and Linux as a VM under VMWare, Parallels, or VirtualBox. I see my main options to be the just released (and barely shipping) MacBook Pro with the retina display (higher resolution), one of the later generation 15, or one of the discontinued 17 machines. I'm leaning against getting the new one, since it seems very difficult to repair (iFixIt did a review, and they didn't even try to take the battery out, as it is glued inside the chassis). That leaves me with the 15 or 17 MBPs. So, on to some questions. 15.4 vs 17? Is the extra screen real estate worth the cost and extra size and weight? Glossy vs. antiglare display? My last real experience with the glossy display is with Karen's 2007 MacBook, which I find hard to read. ;; Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] CPD debates pages
Way cool, Josh! My only problem with it has been signing in from Chrome on OS X. A window pops up, but before I can even read it, it is immediately closed. However, I seem to already be signed in. Somehow it seems to be taking my credentials from a cookie or something. Gary On Oct 3, 2012, at 4:23 PM, Joshua Thorp wrote: The site I've been working on this summer just went live on youtube: The live debate stream should be available there this evening (if everything goes right!). http://www.youtube.com/thevoiceof Check it out. Also on yahoo and aol: http://news.yahoo.com/thevoiceof/ http://thevoiceof.aol.com/ cheers, --joshua FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] Windows Resource Monitor
Nick, Are you still in Santa Fe? I'm not, but if I was, I would help out in person at the next WedTech (hint for those who are there in Santa Fe). Surely your buddies wouldn't charge you $200 for a bit of hands-on help (I'd do it for a cup of coffee :-) Gary On Feb 7, 2013, at 2:57 PM, Nicholas Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Thanks owen. I did lots of stuff LIKE that, but may not have recognized a helping hand when it was proffered. With your reassurance I will plunge back in. The response to this inquiry has led me wonder some wonderings about the folks on the list. Is it the case that: (1)I am the only person on this list that owns a PC (2)I am the only person on this list that owns a PC who has had this sort of problem (=”resource leakage”?). (3) I am the only person on this list that owns a PC who is too cheap to pay the 200 bucks to get it fixed by an expert. (4)I am the only person on this list that owns a PC who is too cheap to pay the 200 bucks to get it fixed by an expert and who also too dumb to know how to use the resource monitor to fix it, myself. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] E-reading device
To me, it's debatable whether switching from hardcopy books to ebooks is a net environmental plus. However, living down here in Ecuador makes it a real pain in the butt to get hardcopies of technical books, especially in English. So far, I've been reading PDFs on my laptop, but the screen is too far from my face to really take advantage of its resolution. So, I'm considering either an iPad or some sort of Android tablet. A smaller form factor like Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 would be fine for material that can be reformatted on the fly, but I really prefer pre-formatted PDF ebooks. I'm afraid that a seven inch screen would be too small for most PDF ebooks. Does anyone here use a tablet to read PDFs? I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] E-reading device
Thanks for your input, everyone. It sounds like I would be happy with an iPad. I haven't been able to try an iPad 3 or 4 yet - believe it or not, the newest iPad for sale here in Ecuador is the iPad 2, and it runs about $700 for a 16GB wireless model. So, stores aren't too big on letting you play with them. I have tried a few books on a friend's iPad 2, and was a bit bothered by the lower resolution (as compared with the 3 and 4) at typical book reading distance. Echoing Roger's experience of reading on a phone, I do have an iPhone 4S, and find it surprisingly usable for re-formattable text. I've read around 20-30 novels on it, and with +3 reading glasses, I can read tech book sized PDFs in landscape mode (not that comfortably, though). Now, I guess my big decision is iOS vs Android. I used to be nearly an Apple fanboy, but am starting to view them as the new 800 pound gorilla. It just seems wrong to support a platform that only supports software sold and approved by a single vendor, that can only be developed in one language. Has anyone had a chance to see the Nexus 7 or 10? ;; Gary On Feb 9, 2013, at 1:30 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Nearly all my tech books are on my iPad. Its a bit heavy, especially compared to the kindle. But the battery life is fine and I find it great to use. But all the others are good too, I'm sure. But one huge piece of advice: make sure whatever you do end up with has a reader for *all* the formats. OReilly for example gives you pdf, epub, mobi, and sometimes the apk format. And it does make quite a difference. I hope the ebook format madness stops in the near future, Tom may be able to update us, but you should not get a device that will not read all the big three: pdf, mobi, epub (mobi is the kindle version and kindle reads it.) IIRC, the iPad book reader handles more than one format. And I think all devices have a pdf reader, either built in or as an app. I would try whatever you are considering, especially the various file formats. I'd beware of the kindle books themselves, at least for tech books, they do not come in the multiple formats and have many silly errors that are slowly being fixed. The kindle app is available everywhere, even as a webapp. -- Owen On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Gary Schiltz g...@naturesvisualarts.com wrote: To me, it's debatable whether switching from hardcopy books to ebooks is a net environmental plus. However, living down here in Ecuador makes it a real pain in the butt to get hardcopies of technical books, especially in English. So far, I've been reading PDFs on my laptop, but the screen is too far from my face to really take advantage of its resolution. So, I'm considering either an iPad or some sort of Android tablet. A smaller form factor like Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 would be fine for material that can be reformatted on the fly, but I really prefer pre-formatted PDF ebooks. I'm afraid that a seven inch screen would be too small for most PDF ebooks. Does anyone here use a tablet to read PDFs? I'd appreciate hearing of your experiences. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] cloud backup recomendations wanted
I don't think you ever described your workflow. If you do, we could probably be more helpful. ;; Gary On Feb 21, 2013, at 11:40 AM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.com wrote: kicking the tires of skydrive like what I see so far. it could be useful as part of my work flow- I don't know what kind of limitations are on a free account. I'd need to dig around to see if they have web and or cloud development and collaboration tools- by that I meen I don't know if they have ways to test PHP and or javascript code (for example) before it's live. Thanks for the link. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Wow. 6 whole days without a Nexus 4 post.
Chrome is nice, unless you need to run Java 7 applets or web start apps on a Mac. Chrome for Mac is 32-bit only, and Java 7 for Mac is 64-bit only. On Feb 26, 2013, at 11:12 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Where I think google does have identity is in the browser. Chrome is abs fab, must have, and way ahead of the pack. V8 redefined javascript. So they do own their destiny there, although unfortunately for them, chrome is not pre-installed on mac and windows. No problem for us but quite an issue for others. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Wow. 6 whole days without a Nexus 4 post.
How about altavista.digital.com? On Feb 26, 2013, at 8:02 PM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.com wrote: Anyone else remember when google was this small internet search engine that hardly anyone had heard of because they were off using yahoo? (or possible lycos?) FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Friam Mail Llatency (Warning technical)
Owen, I've certainly been seeing some FRIAM messages out of order (especially about two days ago), but I never got around to looking at the headers as you suggested. Gary On Mar 10, 2013, at 9:42 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: OK, I presume this means I'm the only one seeing this problem? So I'll start messing with my hosting service etc. Damn. If any of you looked at this, do let me know so I do not Flail In Darkness. -- Owen On Sat, Mar 9, 2013 at 11:40 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: I've been getting friam email out of order and/or delayed and decided to poke at it a bit, mainly because my mail path is a bit complex being forwarded from my hosting service to gmail. Here are two headers, reformatted for readability and normalized to PST. They both show a considerable delay coming out of hostgo, friam's hosting service (marked via **) Could any of you check either these two emails or any others that were delayed for you and see if you say a delay from milan.hostgo.com? Don't forget to normalize to UMT or PST or whatever. And let me know if I'm mis-interpreting the header data! There are other header elements within the time stamps, some of which may point to problems (friam bounces for example and possible spam/authentication notations), but for now I'm only interested to see if other folks see delays in the outgoing hostgo server. If so we can submit a hostgo service request. Now back to our regular programming! -- Owen Roger Critchlow: The Professors’ Big Stage [9:43:14] Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2013 10:43:14 -0700 [09:43:14] Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:43:14 -0800 (PST) X-Received: by 10.112.87.132 with SMTP id ay4mr1336534lbb.87.1362764594229; Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:43:14 -0800 (PST) [09:43:14] Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:43:14 -0800 (PST) Received: by mail-la0-f50.google.com with SMTP id ec20so1934769lab.37 for friam@redfish.com; Fri, 08 Mar 2013 09:43:14 -0800 (PST) [9:43:22] Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:43:22 -0500 Received: from mail-la0-f50.google.com ([209.85.215.50]:40515) by milan.hostgo.com with esmtps (TLSv1:RC4-SHA:128) (Exim 4.80) (envelope-from rogercritch...@gmail.com) id 1UE1K8-0003cg-EX for friam@redfish.com; Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:43:22 -0500 [9:43:25] Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:43:25 -0500 Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:50882 helo=milan.hostgo.com) by milan.hostgo.com with esmtp (Exim 4.80) (envelope-from friam-boun...@redfish.com) id 1UE1KG-0003f7-TE; Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:43:25 -0500 ** [4:06:03] Sat, 9 Mar 2013 12:06:03 + (UTC) Received: from milan.hostgo.com (unknown [216.218.220.34]) by heather.textdrive.us (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 22A9D2968B2; Sat, 9 Mar 2013 12:06:03 + (UTC) [04:06:05] Sat, 09 Mar 2013 04:06:05 -0800 (PST) Received: from heather.textdrive.us (heather.textdrive.us. [199.192.243.48]) by mx.google.com with ESMTP id tm6si11197883pbc.55.2013.03.09.04.06.05; Sat, 09 Mar 2013 04:06:05 -0800 (PST) [04:06:06] Sat, 09 Mar 2013 04:06:06 -0800 (PST) X-Received: by 10.68.136.138 with SMTP id qa10mr10834943pbb.20.1362830766092; Sat, 09 Mar 2013 04:06:06 -0800 (PST) [04:06:07] Sat, 9 Mar 2013 04:06:07 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.216.116.6 with SMTP id f6csp28660weh; Sat, 9 Mar 2013 04:06:07 -0800 (PST) Curt McNamara: Learning by transcribing/translating [20:03:05] Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2013 22:03:05 -0600 Received: by 10.42.130.200 with HTTP; Thu, 7 Mar 2013 20:03:05 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.42.130.200 with HTTP; Thu, 7 Mar 2013 20:03:05 -0800 (PST) [20:03:06] Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:03:06 -0800 (PST) X-Received: by 10.50.187.225 with SMTP id fv1mr553402igc.74.1362715386032; Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:03:06 -0800 (PST) [20:03:06] Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:03:06 -0800 (PST) Received: by mail-ia0-f179.google.com with SMTP id x24so1105863iak.24 for friam@redfish.com; Thu, 07 Mar 2013 20:03:06 -0800 (PST) [20:03:07] Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:03:07 -0500 Received: from mail-ia0-f179.google.com ([209.85.210.179]:58751) by milan.hostgo.com with esmtps (TLSv1:RC4-SHA:128) (Exim 4.80) (envelope-from curt...@gmail.com) id 1UDoWQ-0001ST-Af for friam@redfish.com; Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:03:07 -0500 [20:03:09] Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:03:09 -0500 Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1]:51506 helo=milan.hostgo.com) by milan.hostgo.com with esmtp (Exim 4.80) (envelope-from friam-boun...@redfish.com) id 1UDoWT-0001T6-9C; Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:03:09 -0500 ** [01:26:53] Sat, 9 Mar 2013 09:26:53 + (UTC) Received: from milan.hostgo.com (unknown [216.218.220.34]) by heather.textdrive.us (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 4119A296A09; Sat, 9 Mar 2013 09:26:53 + (UTC) [01:26:55] Sat, 09 Mar 2013 01:26:55 -0800 (PST) Received: from heather.textdrive.us (heather.textdrive.us.
Re: [FRIAM] WYSIWIS
Speaking of color, and humorous variations on WYSIWIG, my favorite is WYSIWIP, which said that (pre-Windows, DOS) Microsoft programmers drink Coca Cola, whereas Mac programmers drink Mountain Dew: Coca Cola goes in brown and comes out yellow, whereas Mountain Dew goes in yellow and comes out yellow (What You See Is What You Pee). :-0 Gary Mac programmers drink On Mar 17, 2013, at 11:27 AM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: As for WYSIWIS... this has been a problem with *color* forever, and myriad strategies have been adopted to mitigate it, from the Pantone(tm) color specification system to elaborate attempts to resolve the mechanical/optical as well as *perceptual* differences between reflective (print) and emissive (computer screens) and between additive and subtractive color. And referencing the uncanny valley... getting it almost right can be more disturbing than merely in the ballpark. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Now for something completely different: Mac iPad Mini Phone
I don't have one, but plan to get one when it comes out with a higher resolution display. Gary On Mar 17, 2013, at 9:43 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: There, that got your attention. [Doug sez: yawn!] I'm thinking about my next phone, the contract is reaching an end. Google/Android: Fail (Thanks Doug) Moz still interesting. But. Sooo.. It occurred to me to consider an iPad Mini. But they don't seem to get a lot of press. I did run across this: http://www.imore.com/using-ipad-mini-phone .. using it as a (wifi) phone .. although I think it can also have a cell sim, yes? So here's the question: do any of us have an iPad mini, or a similar small tablet. If so (ok, two questions), can you use it as a phone? Tell me more! Thanks, -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Now for something completely different: Mac iPad Mini Phone
I like to put on +3 reading glasses and pretend I have the eyes of an 16 year old :-) On my iPhone 4S, with the higher pixel density, i can read a full page of an average tech book, in portrait mode with the reading glasses. But it would be considerably more comfortable to read on a slightly bigger device. I haven't actually seen the current mini, but the pixel density is considerably lower than on the full size iPad, and I'm sure I would be able to see pixelation with on the mini. As far as WiFi goes, I could use iPhone as a personal hotspot and get the mini without the cellular, but it would be less hassle with cellular built in. Gary On Mar 17, 2013, at 9:49 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: I should-a known: http://bitwhich.com/2013/02/15/how-to-use-ipad-as-phone/ Why the hi res display? Do you mean the sub-pix retina display? Or more pixels? What's the issue? -- Owen On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 8:46 PM, Gary Schiltz g...@naturesvisualarts.com wrote: I don't have one, but plan to get one when it comes out with a higher resolution display. Gary On Mar 17, 2013, at 9:43 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: There, that got your attention. [Doug sez: yawn!] I'm thinking about my next phone, the contract is reaching an end. Google/Android: Fail (Thanks Doug) Moz still interesting. But. Sooo.. It occurred to me to consider an iPad Mini. But they don't seem to get a lot of press. I did run across this: http://www.imore.com/using-ipad-mini-phone .. using it as a (wifi) phone .. although I think it can also have a cell sim, yes? So here's the question: do any of us have an iPad mini, or a similar small tablet. If so (ok, two questions), can you use it as a phone? Tell me more! Thanks, -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Yet Another, Tower of Babel, Cambrian Explosion
I don't do much web development, but it seems to me that it would be better to treat HTML/CSS (and maybe even JavaScript) as the assembly language of the web. Let the browser digest it, humans shouldn't have to look at that cruft. Write your web content in whatever you're comfortable with (Python, JavaScript. and dare I say it - Lisp or Clojure), and have whatever web server/plugin you deploy to do the translation. If the web hosting service doesn't accommodate your preferred language, then find another web hosting service. Of course, some web content is already this way - most people who use WordPress or Blogger don't end up writing that much HTML - they use a GUI builder to customize it, and/or change its appearance with themes. ;; Gary On Mar 20, 2013, at 10:24 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Well, here's the puzzler for me: Why is CSS an entirely different syntax than JSON or even HTML? Fail! I guess Sass/Less may get close, as well as CoffeeKup http://coffeekup.org/ which just sez: WTF, lets just mash them all up, no prob. I would like a markdown equivalent to CSS. Seriously. Could anyone think about it a bit and suggest how it'd go? JSON is the closest I can get. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] beyond reductionism twice
Quite a few of us on the list worked for Stu at BiosGroup a decade ago. I was just a software geek there (not a scientist), so I'm not qualified to criticize the veracity of his ideas, but I will say that he has an amazing charisma and made many of us True Believers. Rock Star doesn't seem quite right, but he did manage to inspire a lot of us with a cheerful but humble confidence. Maybe demigod would be more like it. Of course, the fact that it was a startup and we all had visions of IPOs (sadly never happened) dancing in our heads probably added to his appeal. ;; Gary On Mar 25, 2013, at 4:33 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Kaufman also neglects Prigogine in his books. Curt Glen wrote: Stu Kauffman on the varieties of laws and entailments. Wow, seriously? A paper on the exact same subject as Robert Rosen's big works and not a single citation of Rosen, even to call him wrong? What am I missing? Have you *met* Stu? My experience is that he does not reference his sources very thoroughly (even to dismiss them). He's a rock star (in his own mind)... does Mick Jagger acknowledge his influences (I actually don't know)? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] mooc for credit?
http://digipen.edu, anyone? :-) On Mar 31, 2013, at 12:55 PM, Roger Critchlow r...@elf.org wrote: The rankings at http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings are interesting, because I run out of non-US universities that I recognize in the rankings long before I run out of US universities that don't appear in the rankings. When I visited the site last spring they were listing tuition costs, too. US education is priced like US health care, insanely more expensive than the rest of the world, 5 to 10 to 20 times more expensive. What happened to free education? People figured out how to make a profit from it and maximized the profit at the expense of the education. Free education had no business model, so some bean counters made one up. Lots of places still do free education, but not in the USA. I don't see MOOC's as a replacement for traditional education. It's a an outreach tool, a recruiting program that finds the people who can apply themselves to a subject and benefit and remain interested in the subject. It finds them much more efficiently than admitting applicants to a four year program. Really good students are really rare. Most of them would never consider applying to a top 20 university. Most of them would never come to the attention of a top 20 university admissions program. MOOC's can find those rare students, make them aware of their abilities, and bring them to the attention of the best schools. If a school can find one Andrew Viterbi equivalent and educate him or her, the consequences are breathtaking. Of course the students of a MOOC won't learn as much computer graphics as full time students in an on campus course. But the on campus course students probably won't learn as much computer graphics as the students at Digipen.com taking c++, physics based modeling, linear algebra, and computer graphics for their first year classes. But the motivated independent learner will probably out strip them all. -- rec -- On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 10:05 AM, Bruce Sherwood bruce.sherw...@gmail.com wrote: Ed's post is highly cogent, and based on tons of experience. One of his points that I had missed in my own analysis is the key difference between an on-line course taken by on-campus students and remote students who lack the supporting social infrastructure and may be consumed by job and life responsibilities (my mature high school physics teachers were an unusual bunch). That difference may account for the reported success of the on-line intro physics course at Arizona State. Another point Ed correctly makes about Udacity's CS 101 and computer graphics MOOCs that I too should have made is that both these courses, while interesting experiments, are indeed very far from equaling the breadth and depth of corresponding one-semester university courses. Bruce On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 9:48 AM, Edward Angel an...@cs.unm.edu wrote: Dave, I don't think interesting describes my response to this post. More like disgusted. I would have said outraged but I'm getting too used to seeing nonsense on the web to respond as I used to. Although I agree with most of the points you and Bruce made, I disagree in a couple of important places but more than that I object to the characterization of what is going on in the post and how willing people are to accept some of its statements, most of which are a total misreading of what is going on with universities and MOOCs. If I were to make a single statement about how to understand what is going on, I'd harken back to Deep Throat and advise people to take his advice: Follow the money. It amazes me how many people are willing to see the faculty as the bad guys on the credit issue and not even look deep enough into the issue to see that is not the case for most of them. i've spent over 40 years in academia, a lot of battling administrators and often other faculty about these issues. But with regard to MOOCs, it's hard not to be a little sympathetic to the situation college presidents find themselves in, especially at public institutions. Budgets in states, including California and Washington, have been cut dramatically. Although there is some idealism in universities' support of MOOCs, they are not charitable institutions and other than a few elite universities which can afford to support experiments with MOOCs that provide high level classes for a global audience, the vast majority of universities are struggling to support their own students. From the administration's perspective MOOCs appear as a possible cost cutting measure, one that may be necessary even if quality declines a bit. Most of the faculty who are against MOOCs are fighting to preserve quality. Maybe that's a losing cause but not something they should for which they should be reviled. These issues have been discussed in detail in the Chronicle but
Re: [FRIAM] Cell phone turns 40
Thanks a lot, dude. The second post that makes me feel incredibly old at 54 :-) I certainly remember life without cell phones, trying to find a public phone and the right change. Incredible how much things can change in such a short time (including the differing perceptions of what constitutes a short time). The other post was Owen's note about John Resig. Since I'm not active in the JavaScript world, I had only heard his name, so I did a bit of digging. Holy crap, one of the recognized experts on JavaScript, author of two books, Dean of Computer Science at Khan Academy, so busy that he doesn't want job offers or speaking engagement offers... Back in my day (said with the crotchety old man voice), someone with that kind of notoriety would be assumed to be at least in his 40s or 50s (of course there have always been exceptions, e.g. prodigies like Mozart). This guy is freaking 28 years old! Look at www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team - not many gray hairs there. Actually, it makes me feel rather hopeful about the future, but at least a little intimidated... ;; Gary On Apr 3, 2013, at 11:02 AM, cody dooderson d00d3r...@gmail.com wrote: Happy birthday cellphone http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/3/4177844/the-cellphone-is-forty-years-old-today FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud storage
I haven't thought that much about it, but it just occurred to me that it might be fun to build a distributed, RAID-inspired el cheapo cloud storage system. Sign up for about ten services each offering 5 GB of free storage, and think of each as a member of a RAID system, and stripe blocks of files onto them. Voila! 50GB of free, redundant storage. If one or two of the services went out of business, you could dynamically rebuild your RAID by signing up for another free service (with appropriate driver/adapter software). Great for us penny pinchers! ;; Gary On Apr 3, 2013, at 3:50 PM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: Matthew Yglasias has a piece on Slate about Amazon's new cloud storage service and how it's likely to kill Dropbox. Naturally I signed up. But I already have a Dropbox account that's not full. I also have Goggle Drive and Microsoft Skydrive accounts. (I also have a Cloud Experience account.) I'm sure I don't need all of these, but I haven't spent the time to decide what I really want to do. Has anyone thought about this? My needs are pretty modest. I tend not to store videos or music, just text and software. -- Russ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] Silicon Valley of South America
Maybe just a pipe dream at this point, but maybe I can have my cake and eat it too: http://www.cuencahighlife.com/post/2013/03/31/Ecuadore28099s-ambitious-e28098City-of-Knowledgee28099-project-aims-at-attracting-the-worlde28099s-top-talent.aspx Since I live a couple of hours from there, I'll be following this closely. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] just the facts
I also spent 15 minutes or so perusing some of the more politically polarizing topics, and it didn't take long to realize the site tilts pretty heavily toward the right. It's easy to cherry pick just the facts that support one's own position. Does anyone have suggestions for a site that actually accomplishes what this one purports to do? Of course everyone's idea of what is right vs left differs. My brother considers Fox News to be objective and CNN to be liberal. Other friends find CNN to be conservative and Democracy Now to be objective. Personally, I think CNN does a reasonable job of being in the middle, DN cherry picks for the left, and FN cherry picks for the right. ;; Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud storage
I dropped my previous MacBook air once and crashed the hard drive. Fortunately, I had a Time Machine backup from only an hour before. I was either on Snow Leopard or Lion, don't remember which. It went without a hitch and took around three hours to restore the newly installed 500 GB drive with about 300 GB of data. I haven't used the cloud for backup, as I have maximum of about one megabit of bandwidth. ;; Gary On Apr 6, 2013, at 9:42 AM, Robert J. Cordingley rob...@cirrillian.com wrote: So has anyone successfully restored an entire system from the Cloud (or a Time Machine come to think of it)? How easy was it? Any statistics on success rate? Some TM instructions require 'your original Mac OS 10.5 Leopard DVD' but I upgraded to Mountain Lion on line and have no corresponding original DVD. If I stop backing up will my system crash but only till then (Murphy's Law)? -- Robert C FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud storage
As Russell and others have pointed out, TM provides a hybrid of version control and backup. I wonder if it would be feasible to use SVN to manage an entire operating system? You could in essence do hourly commits of '/' with periodic pruning, but I'm sure it wouldn't be as simple as that. Would obviously need to exclude some things like device files. The performance would likely stink big time, too. Gary On Apr 8, 2013, at 6:48 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Mon, Apr 08, 2013 at 12:49:47PM -0600, Steve Smith wrote: Doug! Just curious why you Mac guys are buying backup systems, when there is a perfectly good way to use rsync. Here's my nightly backup script, which currently sends my nightly incrementals to a cheap 3TB USB3 external drive: I occasionally use TM (mostly for my wife) to simply go find an event where she deleted or overwrote something she needed. Usually I can find in e-mail the date/time of the triggering event, usually several days to a few months previous, and then go bumble around in the Time Machine until I *see* the (usually a flurry of) changes and forensically can figure out exactly *what* changed and *guess* why, etc. A point and click later and we are back to the earlier state, and if I'm wrong, another point and click and we are at another state, and rsync doesn't solve this particular problem. If I need to do that, I use a version control system - eg subversion - if my wife needs to do that, she is SOL :). I'm not going to try to teach her subversion. Fortunately, that has never happened. I have used rsync for about 15 years now, before that using QIC (150MB) and Exabyte tape storage (4GB). This gives single spindle protection. I have never lost data (well nothing significant, anyway), even though I have had to restore from backups maybe 5-10 times in that period due to hard disk failures. Time Machine would be nice (provided I could develop trust of it). Unfortunately, I'm Linux, not Mac, so its not an option :). If someone implements a transparent copy on write versioning file system, I'd probably install it on my home partition, just in case I even need to solve a problem like the above. Subversion is too expensive for /home. Alas, even though some experimental versions exist, none have made it to prime time. Someone was asking how to do encrypted cloud offsite backups. You can use gpg for this. In practice, though, I don't see how you could do incremental backups with gpg in the pipeline, so probably you would need to maintain another local disk for encrypted data, and then mirror the encrypted data offsite with rsync. Of course, that assume your cloud provider gives you ssh access to allow the use of rsync. Are there any such enlightened services around? -- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Cloud storage
I can't imagine doing any kind of work that evolves over time (even a few days' time) without using some kind of revision control system. I don't know how much people use git for purposes other than software, but it seems like a reasonable means of backing up and tracking revisions of any type of file. Github offers private repositories starting at $7 per month. I investigated whether any of the cloud storage providers also offer any type of revision control. Gary On Apr 8, 2013, at 10:16 PM, Tom Johnson t...@jtjohnson.com wrote: I, too, am paying for a large Dropbox account, but here are a couple things I don't like about it. I use it to share the development of a lot of projects. But if one of the team members deletes a file, it is deleted for all of us. Hey, let me manange MY file system, please. There is a tool called Packrat, which allows one to recover deleted files, but since I don't have to use it every day (gracias a dios), I can never remember how to open up good ol' Packrat. All DropBox would have to do is put a button/icon on my homepage and let me dive in. Or down. One can't share individual files, but only complete folders. That, too, is less than ideal. So like Russ, I'll go ahead and install the Amazon tool and give it a test drive. -tj FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Tablet PCs and Microsoft
Keep us informed on how you like the Galaxy Tab. I keep debating between an iPad or an Android tablet (or maybe even a MS Surface). I want to do some development for a tablet platform, but would like to actually use the platform that I develop for. The idea of a single vendor specifying that the only way to install software on your own device is to go their store really pisses me off, but then hardware wise, the iPads are really solid. And speaking of keyboards, I have heard that they work well on iOS, but you can't use a mouse or trackpad - WTF? Apparently, you can't even run any software to add such capability to iOS without jailbreaking it. What a bunch of crap. Feeling rather curmudgeonly today :-) Gary On Apr 12, 2013, at 3:14 PM, Jochen Fromm j...@cas-group.net wrote: Arrggh , but you can't type on these iPads and Android tablets. It is of course crisis, not crises. Can you connect suitable keyboards to Android tablets? Jochen Sent from Samsung tablet Jochen Fromm j...@cas-group.net wrote: I have bought a new Tablet PC this week, a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1) running Android. What kind of tablets do you use? I assume iPads ? I heard Microsoft slides in a crises because Windows 8 is not selling well among business customers and normal consumers buy iPads or Android tablets instead of Microsoft PCs. Jochen Sent from Samsung tablet FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Twitter / txjs: It's a good day for JavaScript! ...
Okay, I'll bite. What is the inside joke about undefined is not a function? Gary On Apr 15, 2013, at 9:59 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Sorta an in-joke but: https://twitter.com/txjs/status/323781055855337474/photo/1 -- Owen Twitter: more info per sq in FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] digital ethics
In keeping with warez, you could have Journalz, Paperz, Resultz, Rezearch :-) On Apr 19, 2013, at 8:25 AM, Sarbajit Roy sroy...@gmail.com wrote: Seconded. If a resource is available it ought to be availed of. Its upto the copyright holder to protect his work (and royalty stream). I'm trying to put together a Pirate Party in India for this. Sarbajit On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 2:51 AM, Stephen Guerin stephen.gue...@redfish.com wrote: What about independent researchers not associated with a library system trying to browse academic papers (funded by taxpayers) held behind academic journal paywalls for $35/copy? -S FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Spam Problems?
I got one of the two that you received. I've never understood how (or if) only subscribers can post lists can work. Can anyone post if the From: header of their email is a valid user? That would be super easy to spoof. In the case of the two spam messages, how would that apply? I.e. are dena...@yahoo.com and ghell...@yahoo.com members of the list? On Jun 17, 2013, at 11:08 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: I've gotten two spam emails that may have come from hacked email accounts. Anyone else get similar ones? -- Owen -- Forwarded message -- From: John Hellier qhell...@yahoo.com Date: Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 3:45 PM Subject: FW: John Hellier To: cjungm cju...@gmail.com, Dad boatyard...@sbcglobal.net, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net, Eli e...@sparkrelief.org, ewhitmore ewhitm...@gmail.com hello! http://ns2.rxmedicalweb.com/qxiswhwq/esg/wczrt/ynmu.html John Hellier -- Forwarded message -- From: Dena Aquilina dena...@yahoo.com Date: Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 8:55 PM Subject: [sfx: Discuss] RE: Dena Aquilina To: discuss lists disc...@lists.sfcomplex.org, Don Begley donbeg...@jjwalker.biz, Dorothy Massey doro...@collectedworksbookstore.com, Drew Trujillo eve...@drwoohoo.com, Ed Angel an...@cs.unm.edu Hello! http://swf-siegen.de/nbsquh/gmeuo/lrahk/jdx.html?krp=zez Dena Aquilina -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Santa Fe Complex discuss group. To post to this group, send email to disc...@sfcomplex.org To unsubscribe from this group, send email to discuss+unsubscr...@sfcomplex.org For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/a/sfcomplex.org/group/discuss FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Obama on NSA Surveillance
A big problem with teaching internet literacy is that it would amount to teaching moving target: change is so hard to teach, since it keeps changing :-) On a tangential note, I'm trying to come out of retirement (sabbatical :-) after about five years, and whoa, it's incredible how much has changed, even though I've tried to stay more or less current the whole time. Forget SourceForge, it's all on GitHub now! Does anyone even consider the possibility that a user might have JavaScript disabled in their browser? You wouldn't get very far these days. What's this cloud thing again? Makes me want to give up and go back to watching X-Files reruns :-) ;; Gary On Jun 18, 2013, at 11:48 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: I'm starting to think the Root Cause is simply ignorance. I don't mean that to be as harsh as it sounds. It's simply that not only the core tech changes rapidly, but now the whole web-app ecology has caught people by surprise. I know this via two recent family events. One was that we found a web site that simply did not run with Snow Leopard. Obsolescence and upgrade is a sneaky way to push folks into unfamiliar territory, and much more likely to make mistakes. This is especially true with Apple's Back To The Mac approach which tries to converge the iPhone/Pad/Pod/TV world with the more standard desktop. And behind this BTTM is much more use of the cloud, and more exposure. The second was a lament by a family member that they couldn't do things as easily as they once could. And this is a person who put together a Linux system a in the '90s! The problem here was similar. Way too many accounts, logins, passwords .. and lack of password standards .. along with the evolution away from the computer to the cloud .. and with so many devices to keep coordinated. Although similar to the first obsolescence, I think the second is more subtle. Do you remember migrating from your first computer to a second? Surprised all your email disappeared? And all the subtle configurations that had to also be migrated? Then the shock when you had both a desktop and a laptop and the email got split between the two until you grok'd IMAP and/or gmail/yahoo/ms .. all of whom took care of you but to whom you gave huge access to your information? Remember changing ISPs in the early days and having to tell everyone you have a new email address? .. and you then figured out you needed your own DNS? It goes on. The fact is that we need to license use of the web just as we do driving or amateur radio. Yup. An internet merit badge! I'm quite serious .. we somehow have migrated slowly but surely into the hands of a not very nice future via the lack of reasonable internet education. And every computer with poor security hygiene is a threat to me, not just the computer's owner. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] JavaScript GUI Libraries
I'm starting to develop (as an unpaid volunteer) an application for the local medical clinic, and I'd like to deploy it as a browser application (rich internet app). Of course, I cold just use plain old HTML and CSS, but I'd like it to be much more interactive, basically like a desktop application. It would seem the best (for some definition of good :-) technology for the job would be JavaScript on the front-end (although I could do it in Java with Swing or JavaFX and deliver it as a JNLP app). Anyway, does anyone here have any preferences for a GUI toolkit for JavaScript? So far, I've been looking at Dojo, JQuery, YUI, Ext JS, and the Google Closure library. As I'm pretty new to the whole JS world, I'm thoroughly confused (maybe that means that I'm on the right track :-). I'd really appreciate feedback. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] JavaScript GUI Libraries
Point well taken about esoteric and cool versus pragmatic and well worn. The most certain route in software, like in most undertakings, is usually the familiar. The problem with the familiar is that many on the list, including those of us who are ourselves well worn (at least worn), are enamored with (might I go as far as to say addicted?) to the cool and esoteric, whether it be software tech, complexity science, philosophy, politics... So, I'm not just looking for a solution, I'm looking for a fix :-) However, I was honest with my stakeholders and let them know that I'm being a bit selfish, in that I'm not doing this not just for them, but for me, using it as a justification for spending the time to learn some new stuff. The easiest implementation would likely be a traditional two-tier client server system, with the GUI and application logic done with Visual Basic talking to a MySQL server. Nothing wrong with that, maybe I'll even consider it when I grow up :-) ;; Gary On Jul 1, 2013, at 11:20 PM, Robert J. Cordingley rob...@cirrillian.com wrote: Then you might consider who's going to maintain it when your not available and what level of skill may be needed. Esoteric and cool is... well esoteric and cool. Pragmatic and well worn and well known might lead you to consider more mundane but well used tools especially on the server side like PHP and MySQL and perhaps WordPress and the thousands of themes and plugins. Many WP themes are responsive/mobile friendly right out of the box saving tons of work - some premium some free. Thanks Robert C FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [WedTech] JavaScript GUI Libraries
Also a very good point. Sometimes it's good to hop down from one's high horse into the muck, and in the words of a redneck comedian whose name escapes me now, simply git 'er done. For every time there is a season, a time for cool new stuff, and a time for LAMP :-) The situation may indeed call for the latter (e.g. OpenEMR, which is PHP based). If I go with the latter, perhaps I can bug you (and not the list) with PHP questions. Keeping it real, Gary On Jul 2, 2013, at 10:03 AM, Robert J. Cordingley rob...@cirrillian.com wrote: In the interests of the medical clinic I wonder what packages are already out there that lead or support standards in EMR and for a successful project how one would best align one's goals with theirs? Robert C On 7/2/13 8:39 AM, Gary Schiltz wrote: Point well taken about esoteric and cool versus pragmatic and well worn. The most certain route in software, like in most undertakings, is usually the familiar. The problem with the familiar is that many on the list, including those of us who are ourselves well worn (at least worn), are enamored with (might I go as far as to say addicted?) to the cool and esoteric, whether it be software tech, complexity science, philosophy, politics... So, I'm not just looking for a solution, I'm looking for a fix :-) However, I was honest with my stakeholders and let them know that I'm being a bit selfish, in that I'm not doing this not just for them, but for me, using it as a justification for spending the time to learn some new stuff. The easiest implementation would likely be a traditional two-tier client server system, with the GUI and application logic done with Visual Basic talking to a MySQL server. Nothing wrong with that, maybe I'll even consider it when I grow! up :-) ;; Gary On Jul 1, 2013, at 11:20 PM, Robert J. Cordingley rob...@cirrillian.com wrote: Then you might consider who's going to maintain it when your not available and what level of skill may be needed. Esoteric and cool is... well esoteric and cool. Pragmatic and well worn and well known might lead you to consider more mundane but well used tools especially on the server side like PHP and MySQL and perhaps WordPress and the thousands of themes and plugins. Many WP themes are responsive/mobile friendly right out of the box saving tons of work - some premium some free. Thanks Robert C FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] OSX Memory Management - Apple/Mac FanBois only
Steve, I think your experience is in line with mine. My mid-2012 retina MBP (with an obscene 16GB of RAM) occasionally gets in a nearly zero free memory state. My only really big RAM user is VMWare Fusion running Windows 7 (I usually only give it 2GB of RAM, and it runs fine). By the time it gets in this state, there is usually about 4GB of inactive memory shown in the Activity Monitor. Doing a command line purge returns most of that. A full reboot, followed by opening all the same apps and docs shows much less memory used than before the reboot. I'm getting to be less of a fanboi for Apple than ever. Gary On Jul 5, 2013, at 3:27 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Owen ( and other OSX fanbois) - I'm guessing that a few others here will be interested in the technical details of this topic... I did not become interested in OSXs memory management until about 6 months ago when my PBPro with 4G running 10.6.x started throwing me the rainbow frisbee of death (or at least tedium) often. I began to look at the process table (via Activity Monitor) and noticed that *all* my applications seemed to be bloating up with memory... as if each and every one had memory leaks. Firefox, Thunderbird and Skype were the most notable. I kind of assumed that the problem was a system library that they all shared, and aggravated by the fact that they were all naturally wanting/needing/using lots of their own internal cache (well, maybe not Tbird so much?)... I also assumed that I had not updated my system properly (I tend to be pretty cavalier about keeping up with suggested updates, but trust the system (at large) to know what needs to be updated and not leave anything in the cracks)... I recently finally buried that machine after stripping it down to replace the charging port only to find afterwards that the problem was NOT that my battery was zeroed and my charge port too fried to take power... I finally gave up and blamed the easy/last-resort logic board failure. I give my machines a lot of abuse. One of the SFX interns inherited the one my wife ran over in Iowa (shattered screen... he used it with an external monitor). Anyway... back on topic. The 15 2010 MBP I bought to replace it had 8G and Mountain Lion installed. I assumed (hoped futilely) that my problems would evaporate with a full (up to date) fresh system (10.8.4 install and max memory). I didn't fret about it much but within a few days I started noticing (mostly because my previous machine had taught me to compulsively check the Memory Usage monitor) that I was operating on virtually 0 free memory as before. The big difference was that I was not getting the whirling frisbee of death very often and nearly 1/2 of the memory is labeled Inactive, though under the 4G 10.6 circumstance I also had significant Inactive memory available at all times... I am postulating (very tentatively) that this new machine/configuration is more efficient at reclaiming Inactive Memory just-in-time... perhaps because it has the quad-thread version of the duo core or perhaps 10.8 fixed it up, or because my old system was just poorly configured (memory management libraries out of date?). One thing I am wondering is if others have had this problem (saturating physical memory and NOT getting efficient reclaiming of Inactive memory)? Or if others understand whether this is a real problem or just my lame understanding of how the memory management is supposed to work (I would sort of expect the Apps themselves to be managing memory more effectively than they seem to themselves, not just trusting the VM to keep them out of trouble?). - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] OSX Memory Management - Apple/Mac FanBois only
Forgot to mention that I'm on Mountain Lion, so no, it doesn't do any better :-( ;; Gary On Jul 5, 2013, at 3:45 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: On my non-SSD mini, before the change to SSD, I often had the experience you mention. Since then, no. But likely the behavior is still the same, just that the SSD manages it better. Before SSD, I had to run purge in a terminal to get the memory back. I'll try starting lots of apps and see what happens on the new mini/SSD. Would be nice if Apple, finally, learns to handle swap space better. Maybe Mountain Lion did so? -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] OSX Memory Management - Apple/Mac FanBois only
On Jul 5, 2013, at 3:57 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Gary/Owen - Thanks for the quick response from both of you. I forgot about Purge... it seemed like such a kludge I guess I dropped it from my memory soon after learning about it.My analytic approach to some things has me trying to unearth root causes when a simple, practical relief is nearby. I think that Mountain Lion did not solve the problem of freeing inactive memory, but it may have solved the problem of letting that step slow down interactivity. I don't see it doing it, even though it must be. Under my 4G 10.6 system, I think that is what was dogging my system... OSX having to stop everything while it freed some inactive memory. Gary, are you saying that you not only get your physical memory saturated (with a bunch of Inactive) or that you see that causing problems at the user level (spinning wheels!). I still get spinning whatchamcallits, even with Apple's own apps (especially iTunes - I have my music library on my Time Capsule, served over the wireless network, so it's primarily the first time after not having that volume mounted for a while). Same goes for Mail.app - spinning wheels at times. Spinning wheels are more frequent as free memory gets lower, but even with lots free, still some spinning. I must say that despite not really being a fan of Microsoft, Windows 7 does perform very well (even in a 2GB VM). If I had it to do over (or next time), I would look into a laptop with Linux as the installed OS, and running Windows under VMWare or VirtualBox. I mainly went with another MacBook Pro in case I want to do iOS development, and to stay in Apple's good graces, a Hackintosh doesn't cut it. ;; Gary I would guess that with an SSD, that step, while maybe handled poorly otherwise becomes below the noticeable threshold of the user? I'm also unclear on exactly how virtual memory is handled on these new high-memory machines. I grew up in the era where physical memory was tiny (by today's standards) and virtual memory management was critical to time-sharing... as far as I can tell from my activity monitor/process table, none of my applications are actually *using* swap space? Isn't that the point of an indicator that you actually HAVE free memory available? I would expect a tool that also showed how much swap space was being used by what processes, and in fact if I dredge my own memory might find that some of the tools from the golden days of UNIX are still relevant! - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] OSX Memory Management - Apple/Mac FanBois only
On Jul 5, 2013, at 4:26 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: I have a copy of W7 to put on my PBpro and am sorting out how to manage that now... Fusion, Parallels, WINE, BootCamp? Sounds like you are happy with Fusion? I've been happy with Fusion since v2 (I'm at 5 now, and have paid for the upgrades). I got Parallels free with the laptop, and tried it for a while, but I was so used to Fusion's UI that I stayed with it anyway. I tried VirtualBox for a while just because I like open source on principle, but it certainly isn't as polished as Fusion (or Parallels). ;; Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] PRISM/AP kerfluffle, etc
What I don't understand is why Snowden went public using his real identity. Why not just be the Deep Throat of the intelligence community? Surely he could have divulged just enough to whet the appetite of the some select journalists without being the only one to have access to the information, thus giving himself deniability. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
[FRIAM] JavaScript Ray Tracing
I'm starting to do a bit of dabbling in mobile development, and have been looking at PhoneGap, which uses HTML/CSS/JavaScript. To get an idea how performant JavaScript is, I looked for a JS web app that would be processor intensive. I found a web app that does ray tracing directly in JavaScript (www.slimeland.com/raytrace). Just for grins, I did some runs in all the browsers on my MacBook Pro (as well as iOS Safari on my iPhone 4S). I don't know how the algorithm would perform if written in C or Java, although I suspect it would be a couple of orders of magnitude faster on either. Anyway, I loaded the Original JS Raytracer Scene preset and then ran once with 100x100 resolution and again with 200x200 resolution. The table below has the results for the pixels per second achieved (hopefully this message stays in plain text, otherwise the table will look really look like crap...) | PPS (100x100) | PPS (200x200) ||--- Safari |1610| 575 Firefox |1480| 735 Chrome |2422| 1140 Opera |2235| 1200 IE 10 (VMWare) |1180| 660 iOS Safari | 185| 80 - I'm beginning to share the enthusiasm many FRIAMers have for JavaScript. The fact that the same code runs on such a variety of browsers and devices is way cool. ;; Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Democracy + Market Economy == Open Source Governance?
Proprietary Code (PC :-) has a place if people are willing to put up with it, but then most people don't realize there are alternatives. That old Freedom vs. Security thing seems apropos here. Many people are quite willing to put up with a little less freedom for a little more security. I'm not sure where I come down on the issue of whether or not those who are so disposed deserve neither. Sometime I empathize a lot with the libertarians, but given our millions of years of evolution, largely as a communal species, I suspect that libertarian thinking is mostly an adolescent point of view. Gary Sent from my PC email client (Mail.app) running on a PC OS (Mac OS) running PC hardware (MacBook Pro) - geez, what a hypocrite I am :-) On Sep 13, 2013, at 7:11 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Marcus/Glen/et alii - I just listened to Amy Goodman's interview with Robert Riech on his new film, Inequality for All. I was caught enough by the following statement he made to look it up and consider it further (cut and pasted from the DN! website transcript): This economy is not working for everyone. And one of the points we make in the film, which I have been writing about, but the wonderful thing about the film is that you can dramatize something, is that the economy is not something out there, it is not kind of a state of nature, the economy is a set of rules. It is based upon, basically, rules that are decided upon by our democracy. And if our rules are generating outcomes that are unfair, that don’t work very well, that don’t spread enough of the gains of economic growth to enough people, we change the rules. [...] Isn't a Democracy a system for supporting code development? And isn't Economics the primary execution environment for that code? It seems like much of our discussion about transparency in government and accountability is not unlike demanding that we be able to read the code that is being executed. Democracy itself is the act of writing code; the rules of execution of everything from government itself (compilers, interpreters, system libraries, OS) to economics to criminal justice (exception handling?) IS there a large enough contingent of aspiring technocrats such as ourselves who might understand this parallel well enough to drive a phase change? Proprietary Code *still* has a huge place in our technosphere, but Open Source (including Open Hardware) has become incredibly powerful just as the *very ideas* of Democracy and then Free Markets once were themselves. Just a thought... - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Wonkbook: Obamacare's web site is really bad
Regardless of the wisdom of their choices for software stack, I'm really impressed to see a government agency using open source, and moreover, publishing it. I guess I won't hold my breath for NSA to publish their algorithms on GitHub, though... Gary On Oct 4, 2013, at 7:06 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: On Fri, Oct 04, 2013 at 11:04:36AM -0600, Marcus G. Daniels wrote: On 10/4/13 10:13 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: So much for CMSs! God they suck. The repository has basically nothing in it. Some jquery files and some Ruby Jekyll code, and a file from Google Search Appliance, and some stubbed out HTML. https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov No application logic at all, no SQL, no Java, no C#, nothing. Ridiculous and depressing. Marcus The result of subcontracting out on freelancer.com, and picking the lowest hourly rate? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] When one zero is just not enough: JavaScript’s two zeros
Wow, obviously not one of the Good Parts that Crockford refers to:-) Gary On Oct 5, 2013, at 11:18 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: This series on numerics is both useful and entertaining! Believe it or not, JS has +/- 0. http://www.2ality.com/2012/03/signedzero.html It may seem weird but it does come up in some cases. A possibly more important part of the series is just what IS an integer in JS. Most of us consider it a 32 bit integer but that's not the case: http://www.2ality.com/2013/10/safe-integers.html -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Historical Software Collection
Wow, that’s cool. It’s a shame that so much software will never see the light of day. Many billions of dollars were spent developing software in the 80s for the DOD as well as Soviet agencies. I’ve heard it argued that the USSR lost the cold war mainly because the USA made them spend so much on defense, and quite a sizable chunk of that was for software. Gary On Oct 29, 2013, at 11:31 AM, glen e. p. ropella g...@tempusdictum.com wrote: https://archive.org/details/historicalsoftware This collection contains selected historically important software packages from the Internet Archive's software archives. Through the use of in-browser emulators, it is possible to try out these items and experiment with using them, without the additional burdens of installing emulator software or tracking down the programs. Many of these software products were the first of their kind, or utilized features and approaches that have been copied or recreated on many programs since. (historic software, vintage software, antique software) -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com Give good people the power to do good and that power eventually will be in the hands of bad people to do bad. -- Harry Browne FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] OSX Memory Management - Apple/Mac FanBois only
I jumped on board too, and have been happy. Since my hard drive was less than half full, I first created a new partition and installed Mavericks on it. Once I had convinced myself I liked it, I copied data and applications from the old partition to the new, leaving behind whatever cruft I felt I could live without (I could always get anything I left behind from backups, anyway). Once I was really sure I wanted to stay with Mavericks, I just deleted the old partition and added its space to the new. Gary On Oct 29, 2013, at 3:25 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Thanks to both Owen and Marcus for the good reports... While I've never dreaded an OSX update like I have Winderz major releases, I have always avoided being an early adopter... I might just take the plunge. I'm wondering why VM compression hasn't caught on sooner? Has the physical memory curve kept ahead of it well enough, or is the compute-cost simply too high? My mother-in-law's 2009 MacBook (not pro) is grinding a lot on VM (mostly from web browsing)... I was going to look into possibly downgrading her Safari/Firefox to an older version that might not be as memory-hungry, or putting in some extra memory... but maybe upgrading her system to Mavericks will provide the needed relief? Except for the very unfortunate codename Mavericks it sounds very promising... supposedly the name came from a Surf Beach near Half Moon Bay, possibly suggesting a new wave in OS... despite apparently being very similar to Mountain Lion, maybe it *does* portend a new wave. One has to wonder did they just run out of Big Cat names? in the same way that they are running out of decimal digits (10.9) or does this signify a significant change in direction (gearing up for a big change in 11 and naming after surf beaches for the next generation?). Sadly I can't hear the term Mavericks without hearing it in Sarah Palin's pinched Wasila-Whine of a voice. I'll try to superpose the image of a young James Garner making some dry, witty remark near the end of a poker game on a riverboat instead. And who knew that Roger Moore was on that late 50's TV western as cousin Beau Maverick? Just converted to Mavericks and it seem great. And the upgrade was free .. not sure why. Steps: First - Clean obsolete kruft from computer. OmniDiskSweeper (free) is very useful. Also look at apps finding old and unused apps especially ones unlikely to run. Delete with AppZapper or similar .. need to remove prefs etc. - Build a Superduper bootable backup. This is useful both as a fallback, and if you want a clean build, you boot from that and have the installer build on your internal boot disk. Probably need to clear/format/repair the disk w/ DiskUtil. - I searched for a how to migrate to Mavericks article which included all that Then - Go to App Store and download installer (takes quite a while due to size) - When downloaded, pops up the installer. You can quit it and install later if you'd like, in Apps folder - Took quite a while to install as well, but seemed to do a sweet job - Initially asked for lots of permissions and other transition annoyances, but not bad. - Smoothest install I've ever had. -- Owen On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 10:19 PM, Marcus G. Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote: On 7/12/13, 4:08 PM, Steve Smith wrote: My performance problems were solved (pushed back) with 8MB of memory so I'm happy for the moment. I'm expecting that next time I feel like a HD upgrade (the one in it fails, my data hoarding and sloppy housekeeping fills it up, or I upgrade to a new machine) that SSDs will be much more affordable. OSX Mavericks now has compression in the virtual memory system. I've been doing parallel builds all day and I see the Activity Monitor regularly showing 2GB of compressed memory (on an old 4GB 2009 era MacBook Pro). If that had to hit disk, the system would grind to a halt, but it doesn't. It seems to work well. Marcus P.S. Linux has had this for a while in various forms for a number of years, e.g compcache. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at
Re: [FRIAM] OSX Memory Management - Apple/Mac FanBois only
It’s been quite a while since I’ve used Snow Leopard, but under later OS X incantations, it’s under the Apple menu. A quick Google search shows that you need to be updated to 10.6.6 or later in order to have the App Store (I’m assuming you can update to 10.6.6 from an earlier 10.6 version by choosing “Software Update…” from the Apple Menu). Good luck. On Oct 29, 2013, at 7:31 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.au wrote: First thing is to find the AppStore. It's not visible anywhere on the desktop or Applications folder. On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 05:56:28PM -0600, Owen Densmore wrote: I upgraded from Lion. My guess is that if you see it on the AppStore, you can upgrade. If not, there will be several posts on the web on how to do it! -- Owen On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Russell Standish li...@hpcoders.com.auwrote: I gather Mavericks is not available for Snow leopard users? On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 02:25:01PM -0600, Steve Smith wrote: Thanks to both Owen and Marcus for the good reports... While I've never dreaded an OSX update like I have Winderz major releases, I have always avoided being an early adopter... I might just take the plunge. I'm wondering why VM compression hasn't caught on sooner? Has the physical memory curve kept ahead of it well enough, or is the compute-cost simply too high? My mother-in-law's 2009 MacBook (not pro) is grinding a lot on VM (mostly from web browsing)... I was going to look into possibly downgrading her Safari/Firefox to an older version that might not be as memory-hungry, or putting in some extra memory... but maybe upgrading her system to Mavericks will provide the needed relief? Except for the very unfortunate codename Mavericks it sounds very promising... supposedly the name came from a Surf Beach near Half Moon Bay, possibly suggesting a new wave in OS... despite apparently being very similar to Mountain Lion, maybe it *does* portend a new wave. One has to wonder did they just run out of Big Cat names? in the same way that they are running out of decimal digits (10.9) or does this signify a significant change in direction (gearing up for a big change in 11 and naming after surf beaches for the next generation?). Sadly I can't hear the term Mavericks without hearing it in Sarah Palin's pinched Wasila-Whine of a voice. I'll try to superpose the image of a young James Garner making some dry, witty remark near the end of a poker game on a riverboat instead. And who knew that Roger Moore was on that late 50's TV western as cousin Beau Maverick? Just converted to Mavericks and it seem great. And the upgrade was free .. not sure why. Steps: First - Clean obsolete kruft from computer. OmniDiskSweeper (free) is very useful. Also look at apps finding old and unused apps especially ones unlikely to run. Delete with AppZapper or similar .. need to remove prefs etc. - Build a Superduper bootable backup. This is useful both as a fallback, and if you want a clean build, you boot from that and have the installer build on your internal boot disk. Probably need to clear/format/repair the disk w/ DiskUtil. - I searched for a how to migrate to Mavericks article which included all that Then - Go to App Store and download installer (takes quite a while due to size) - When downloaded, pops up the installer. You can quit it and install later if you'd like, in Apps folder - Took quite a while to install as well, but seemed to do a sweet job - Initially asked for lots of permissions and other transition annoyances, but not bad. - Smoothest install I've ever had. -- Owen On Sat, Oct 26, 2013 at 10:19 PM, Marcus G. Daniels mar...@snoutfarm.com mailto:mar...@snoutfarm.com wrote: On 7/12/13, 4:08 PM, Steve Smith wrote: My performance problems were solved (pushed back) with 8MB of memory so I'm happy for the moment. I'm expecting that next time I feel like a HD upgrade (the one in it fails, my data hoarding and sloppy housekeeping fills it up, or I upgrade to a new machine) that SSDs will be much more affordable. OSX Mavericks now has compression in the virtual memory system. I've been doing parallel builds all day and I see the Activity Monitor regularly showing 2GB of compressed memory (on an old 4GB 2009 era MacBook Pro). If that had to hit disk, the system would grind to a halt, but it doesn't. It seems to work well. Marcus P.S. Linux has had this for a while in various forms for a number of years, e.g compcache. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
Re: [FRIAM] more fun in psychology
This is for me, almost too funny. I actually worked with Marcial Losada back in 1986-1987. He was a psychologist in the AI RD group I was in. This is the first I had heard of him since then. I hope most of my other colleagues from over the years have fared better. Gary On Oct 31, 2013, at 12:51 PM, Merle Lefkoff merlelefk...@gmail.com wrote: Having recently read the long essay featured on the cover of The Economist October 19th-25th issue, How Science Goes Wrong, it's really fun to see this. The Economist article goes into some depth on the failure and flaws in the peer review process: Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not. And Roger, especially painful for me, as a full-fledged toiler in the Happiness Industry and a non-academic Ph.D. consultant to boot, is the answer from Losada to the request for a response from the American Psychologist. “I didn’t have the time to prepare a proper response. I am not an academic, I am a consultant to business and I am fully booked for the rest of 2013. The demand for training in my model has taken all my available time. My priority is not to publish, but to attend my clients properly.” TRAINING iN MY MODEL?? Yipes! On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 11:24 AM, Nick Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Roger, Speaking as somebody who can barely get his positivity ratio up to 1/3, let alone 3/1, I am deeply grateful for this post. N Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Roger Critchlow Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2013 10:35 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] more fun in psychology http://narrative.ly/pieces-of-mind/nick-brown-smelled-bull/ and http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/the-magic-ratio-that-wasnt/33279 describe how the principles of positive psychology got their mathematical foundations demolished this summer. A lesson in the hazards of basing your career on a reasonable sounding metaphor. -- rec -- FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com -- Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D. President, Center for Emergent Diplomacy Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA me...@emergentdiplomacy.org mobile: (303) 859-5609 skype: merlelefkoff FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] 11 American Nations
Whose writing is not colored by their cultural biases? I didn't find it to be so slanted that I'd consider it to be “tainted, but maybe that's my own cultural bias in play. It seemed pretty reasonable to me. But then, I haven't read the book itself. Gary On Nov 9, 2013, at 9:51 AM, Parks, Raymond rcpa...@sandia.gov wrote: The concept is tainted by the cultural biases of the author. - Original Message - From: Steve Smith [mailto:sasm...@swcp.com] Sent: Friday, November 08, 2013 10:27 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group friam@redfish.com Subject: [EXTERNAL] [FRIAM] 11 American Nations An alternative view to the (I can't help but hear it in Dr. Suess' cadence) Red-State Blue-State version of Murrica. I don't agree with it in detail but in sweeping generalizations (5.5x less general than red/blue?) it captures what I know our cultural melting pot to be crufted into: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/08/which-of-the-11-american-nations-do-you-live-in/ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Forum hacked
If you send it to me, I’ll gladly tell you that you shouldn’t bother your pretty little head about it. Sorry, I couldn’t resist! :-) Gary On Nov 18, 2013, at 12:52 PM, Nick Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Could anybody translate Owen’s message into ordinary language? Or shouldn’t I bother my pretty little head about it. Meanwhile, this morning, I got an urgent message from an acquaintance asking me to loan him 2500 dollars on account of his being robbed “at gunpoint” in the Philippines. A call to his home revealed that he was safe and sound in Denver. Here is the puzzle. The spoofer gave me nowhere to send my money. Thus, I have 2500 dollars to send and nowhere to send it. The only way I had of getting back to him/her was via the spoofed email address. No link. No bank account number. No phone number in Manila. How does THAT work? Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore Sent: Monday, November 18, 2013 10:13 AM To: Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Forum hacked A forum I belong to has been hacked, including personal info as well as passwords. How do they use this information? I presume they try the hash function on all combinations of possible passwords. (Naturally optimized for faster convergence). They see a match, i.e. a letter combination resulting in the given hash of the password. If they crack one password, does that make cracking the rest any easier? And does salt simply increase the difficulty, and indeed can it be deduced, as above, by cracking a single password? .. or is it all quite different from this! -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Guidance could help.
I think Steve’s suggestions were spot on. Additionally, instead of asking the metaquestion (where do you go to ask said question) on this list, why not just ask the question itself? That is, say a little about what you are thinking for a career goal, and let us chime in. Gary On Nov 21, 2013, at 1:32 PM, Gillian Densmore gil.densm...@gmail.com wrote: Another day as my world oozes along. I'll make this succinct for the benefit of the Technomancers on both lists. Greetings fellow Technomancers: Where and or how does one go about getting some notion of how realistic a career goal is these days? FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Rly
Or, there in the land of eternal sunshine, there is nearly always solar (daylight hours of course). On Nov 26, 2013, at 7:48 PM, glen e. p. ropella g...@tempusdictum.com wrote: A (small) generator is useful, too. http://powerequipment.honda.com/generators/models/eu2000i When your UPS beeps, hop over and start the generator. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] HPSCI Seeks “Continuous Evaluation” of Security-Cleared Employees
On Nov 29, 2013, at 10:04 AM, glen g...@ropella.name wrote: I will give those who want to vilify Manning and Snowden Just to be clear. I support both of them. I think their leaks have made the world a better place. My own comments about whether or not _I_ would trust Snowden should not detract from my support. I think his passport should be reinstated, the government should thank him for calling out the intelligence community, he should be prosecuted for the laws he broke, […] I agree, except I believe he should be *tried* rather than *prosecuted* for the laws he (allegedly) broke. Tried by a jury of his peers (other whistleblowers? :-). I’m a firm believer in jury nullification. and we should modify both the surveillance and whistleblower laws with the lessons we've learned. Gary FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Managing large numbers of passwords
Interesting, but sounds pretty boring. Probably more useful for studying how our minds work than for as a practical tool for remembering passwords. My preference lately is the “password vault” solution of LastPass, 1Password, etc. I’d rather remember one really obscure phrase or made-up word with lots of punctuation than 100 such words or phrases. But then, if my master passphrase or password got cracked, my accounts could be toast. Gary On Dec 4, 2013, at 12:33 PM, Carl c...@plektyx.com wrote: http://m.phys.org/news/2013-12-scheme-visual-cues-people-multiple.html FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Managing large numbers of passwords
More to the point, our brains are too small and our years too few to fill with mindless drivel. Better to use them writing poetry, creating a better world, or even reading and writing FRIAM posts :-) On Dec 4, 2013, at 1:45 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: My brain is too small. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Managing large numbers of passwords
In my as yet brief use of LastPass, it is very good on my Mac (and probably equally good on Windows). I haven’t yet even tried it on my iPad or iPhone, but the problem there is that mobile Safari doesn’t support plugins, so the kinds of content rewriting that the plugins must do to work seamlessly with the browser can’t be implemented. I don’t know if this is just a problem with Safari, but it seems to be a restriction with iOS generally, being a highly restricted ecosystem. I suppose Android would be less restrictive, although I don’t have any experience with it. Gary On Dec 4, 2013, at 1:56 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Agreed. And do you know one of the biggest problems? Phones! Yes, 1Password and others run on phones, but mainly for browser logins. Then cam apps. Browser's could't keep up with the demands of phone apps so the devs had to go to native apps, or more general PhoneGap type apps. Yes iP can work with them but you have to cut/paste to use them which is a total pain in the rear. Possibly apple's new phones with thumb recognition will simplify things .. you'll have a key chain in the sky. But it'll be broken by the bad guys too, I guess. And depends on the apple ecology which I find too incomplete compared with google. -- Owen On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 11:50 AM, Gary Schiltz g...@naturesvisualarts.com wrote: More to the point, our brains are too small and our years too few to fill with mindless drivel. Better to use them writing poetry, creating a better world, or even reading and writing FRIAM posts :-) On Dec 4, 2013, at 1:45 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: My brain is too small. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] UTAustinX: UT.5.01x: Linear Algebra - Foundations to Frontiers | edX
Here’s a new slogan off the top of my head: “If it isn’t virtual, it isn’t real.” :-) I use VMWare Fusion on my MacBook Pro, although I’ve generally been impressed with VirtualBox (the price is certainly right). Lately, I’ve been using a VM within a VM. I need to maintain an app on some Windows boxes, but don’t have one myself (don’t want one). To maintain the app, it is easiest to give them a solution that runs in a VM in one of said Windows boxes. To do so, I run Windows on my Mac inside Fusion. I then tried running Ubuntu under VirtualBox in this virtualized Windows box, but Ubuntu wouldn’t boot. It could be that if the outer host (i.e. my Mac) were running VirtualBox instead of Fusion, it would work, but I haven’t tried that. Instead, I run VMWare Player (the free, as in beer, not as in freedom, software) inside this virtualized Windows box and Ubuntu runs fine there. Surprisingly good performance, for a simple LAMP stack running in this double virtualized environment. Anyway, life without virtualization would be a whole lot less interesting. Gary On Dec 6, 2013, at 12:54 PM, Joshua Thorp jos...@stigmergic.net wrote: This is exaclty how we operate at my company and I have found it to be an incredible time saver. The alternative requires detective work to solve every problem for every user. If everyone is using the same Vagrant box then solving the problems of one user can be applied to all of the other users. I know python is a prime offender on this kind of configuration issues, but this technique is wonderful for many different sorts of software packages… In one go you can have a complete system up and running with potentially many different pieces of software properly configured and running… The instructions typically go, install virtual box, install vagrant, clone this repo, type “vagrant up”… and you are running. —joshua On Dec 6, 2013, at 10:36 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Just curious. Has anyone knowledge of this course and/or the school/instructors? https://www.edx.org/course/utaustinx/utaustinx-ut-5-01x-linear-algebra-1162 One interesting thing in the FAQ was computer requirements: What software do I need for the course? We will utilize VirtualBox, Vagrant, and Git, which are available for free. We have configured a virtual machine for download to ensure that all participants have the same software and environment. With it, you will create a small linear algebra package using Python 3 and iPython Notebooks. Detailed, easy instructions will explain how to download, install, and use the software. If you are registered for the course, you will receive an email alerting you when these instructions become available. You will be able to access them at least a week before the course begins. (Don't be intimidated by the jargon. We'll get you through it.) That, on the one hand, is extraordinarily sophisticated, on the other hand a comment on just how hard it is to configure a desktop environment for class material. Imagine telling someone that you'll have to have a computer within a computer configured correctly to run the Python packages you'll be using! I was more impressed by Stanford's Machine Learning class that just said: Install either MatLab or Octave. All our code will work with that. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Corporate responsibility wrt health insurance
It sure would be a lot simpler if everyone (employers and employees alike) simply had to pay into a single plan, like most of the developed world. But, we’re the USA, and we know better :-) On Dec 6, 2013, at 12:39 PM, glen e. p. ropella g...@tempusdictum.com wrote: However, sometimes the people you think are independent contractors actually aren't (determined by audit or by filing a request with the IRS and/or your state). As I understand it, if these people are determined to be employees, then you are an employer and the rules about providing health insurance plans for part- and/or full-time employees apply to you, whether or not you've incorporated. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Ever read the Google Agreement you signed
I especially give them the right to “publicly perform” something I say when I am discussing inserting things, especially when it refers to places that don’t receive a lot of solar radiation. They are very welcome to perform such things in public. Gary On Dec 13, 2013, at 5:11 PM, Nick Thompson nickthomp...@earthlink.net wrote: Here is the passage from the google contract that applies to your use of their services: 11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services. 11.2 You agree that this licence includes a right for Google to make such Content available to other companies, organizations or individuals with whom Google has relationships for the provision of syndicated services, and to use such Content in connection with the provision of those services. Rememberthat I warned you when you love letters turn up being performed as the libretto for an opera at the S.F Opera. Would you give such power to an organization that cannot spell license? Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: AMC movie theater calls “federal agents” to arrest a Google Glass user :: The Gadgeteer
IMHO (and I’m sure Steve was not trying to equate them), there is a huge difference in the importance of what “real” police officers do and whoever is enforcing arcane laws about copyrighted material. I’ve only been out of the USA for a bit over five years now, and I find that my “new normal” is to see piracy as just a mundane part of life. Here in Ecuador, and I think through much of the less affluent world, piracy of software, music, and video is rampant. Though such piracy is technically illegal (I’m ambivalent about its morality), there appears to be zero enforcement here. There are hundreds of stores in Quito alone that openly sell nothing but pirated music CDs and movie DVDs for about a dollar each, and as long as they pay their 12% to the SRI (Ecuadorian tax agency), they seem to be left alone. Many titles appear within days of a movie’s initial release in theaters, well before its official release on DVD (the quality of copies is notably better after there is an official DVD to copy :-) Such re-filming must be common somewhere (I don’t know how much takes place here, or if pirated DVDs are just burned from sources filmed elsewhere). For those who are still part of the more affluent world, you may have never encountered pirated CDs and DVDs. It is very common, while watching such a DVD, to see someone stand up and walk in front of the camera that is filming the screen. Sometimes, that is more entertaining than the movie itself :-) Gary On Jan 23, 2014, at 10:42 AM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: Could be fishy, certainly sounds unlikely, but with all the interest lately in government gone mad: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2014/01/20/amc-movie-theater-calls-fbi-to-arrest-a-google-glass-user/ -- Owen Meanwhile, it also sounds like the ravings of an Open Carry Gun Nut who innocently swaggered into a Bank, Liquor Store or a Pharmacy and took offense that *anyone* would think she was packing with intent to use. Sure, there will be early adopters and all the surprises that come with colliding with the existing order. This story is *mostly* about the way LEO and Trade Associations can take themselves way too seriously and in particular feel free to err toward false positives without any responsibility for the consequences. Every time I see flashing lights in my rear-view, I have to remind myself that the poor joker with the shiny boots, shiny badge, shiny gun and shiny attitude knows that this might be his lucky stop where he gets to apprehend public enemy #1 or get shot in the face trying... So I *check my own attitude* and let him play Yer in a Heap O' Trouble Boi! in his mirror shades. It seems like a really bad idea... that all that swagger and bluff and attempted intimidation is likely to cause *more* trouble rather than less. I'm sure it cuts down on the petty lip they get from jerks and people who are just having a bad day but I somehow doubt that it reduces the chance of getting shot in the face. If anything, it seems like it *increases* the chances. On the other hand, maybe this is the only way the job can be done... or the only personality type willing to stick their face in a stranger's window and bark at them when all they may have done was had the temerity to drive with a broken tail light, drive 65 in a 55, or cut a light a little short. I think Google Glass is lame (as it stands) but it seems like an interesting social phenomena... I think I've mentioned on this list before, Pat Cadigan's cyberpunkesque Novel Synners, where such technology is ubiquitous in a day-after-tomorrow scenario where there are people who make their living as roughly Live Action Stringers, running their Glass-Like tech 24/7 and trying to *always* be at the right place at the right time*. I think she wrote this in the early 1990s and here we are nearly living it (albeit with cameras in smart phones instead). Carry on! - Steve FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Ga Tech Masters in CompSci
I’m so ambivalent about this and MOO in general. From the standpoint of learning, it offers many advantages, including training many more people who don’t have the resources to attend a college or university (notice I said training, not educating). From a social standpoint, there are so many intangibles to be gained by spending time face-to-face with other knowledge seekers (wow, does that sound idealistic). # Gary On Jan 23, 2014, at 12:53 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Ed mentioned a fascinating Georgia Tech experiment: A $6,000 master's degree in computer science! I believe the program to which he referred to is: http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/ This is amazing if it works. I know, I know, it sucks from any number of view points but just think of the theme: lets make education approachable for today's world, credits and all. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Live QA with Edward Snowden: Thursday 23rd January, 8pm GMT, 3pm EST
You obviously have no future in politics, my friend (nor do most of us here, I’m proud to say). :-) On Jan 26, 2014, at 6:16 PM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Well, if you were to read the content of the thread, it reminds me of an occasional theme that also occurs here. It's the notion that conversations about philosophy are stupid and technical topics are substantive. As a possible target of having that sentiment, I'd like to be clear that I don't hold it. What I do object to are the traps of: - Deadly Embrace: The idea that if we only go at it long enough, we'll agree somehow. In math, convergence. Judging from the length of this type of thread, I think they are divergent. - Semantic Arguments: Endless fine points on the meaning of the words and goal of the conversation. - Ill Defined: This actually is less a problem as we tend to notice the ill defined discussions and correct. But it is annoying. As I am :) - TL;DR: I'd prefer long posts to be in two parts, as is becoming standard on the web: summarize in a paragraph or two the core of the discussion, followed by TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read), followed by the detail, especially when difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. There, that's not so bad is it? -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: NTY: Buy Apple gadgets, use Google services, buy media from Amazon
On Feb 17, 2014, at 9:39 PM, Steve Smith sasm...@swcp.com wrote: On 2/17/14 10:39 AM, Parks, Raymond wrote: What I think I'm hearing from Glen is that while it's nice to use power-planers and router tables to shape wood, one should know how to use the right type of hand-plane, chisels, and scrapers in case you lose electric power. In terms closer to most on the list - programming in the scripting language du jour is fine for productivity, but just in case it falls out of fashion and loses support, you should be able to fall back on a HLL, and, just in case, assembly. In both of my examples, learning the more primitive methods means that one learns the foundational knowledge that makes using the modern methods easier and higher in quality. My mystical version of this is that while it *is* Turtles all the way Down, it is worth knowing the names of the Turtles. I don't honestly expect people to do their development using rod logic but it might behoove any self-respecting hacker to actually understand how such a thing *might* be done... just as Assembly/Machine language is a useful lower-level abstraction for understanding the basis for early HLL's like Fortran IV and ultimately Block Structured (F77 and C?) and then OO (C++/ObjC/Java/etc.)? One *needn't* be proficient in these lower levels of abstraction, just *appreciative?* of how to get from one to another? I'm just sayin’ I’m in violent agreement. While someone can drive a car without being an auto mechanic, I can’t really understand why anyone who drives a car wouldn’t want to at least understand the basics of internal combustion engines, automatic/manual transmissions, hybrid powertrains, and so on. Same with microprocessors, compilers, assembly language, high level languages, lambda calculus. I think that being a hacker is a state of mind that naturally wants to tear things apart to see how they work, and (hopefully) put them back together again. Maybe even put something new together just for the heck of it. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Spelling of Spanish Surnames
While we’re on this subject, I wonder how much regional difference there is in how differently “b” and “v” are pronounced in Spanish-speaking countries. Here in Ecuador, at least the campesinos (less educated country folks) pronounce them identically. For that reason, I very commonly see the same word spelled differently (baca or vaca, barilla or varilla). I believe that more educated folks tend to pronounce “v” more like in English, although much softer. How about in Spain? Even in such a small country as Ecuador, there are many regional differences in pronunciation, for example in certain regions, double L is pronounced sort of like “jy”, i.e. llave is pronounced almost “JYAH-vay” or “ZHAH-vay, while in other regions, it is more “YA-vay”. Gary On Feb 23, 2014, at 9:14 PM, Alfredo Covaleda Vélez alfredocoval...@gmail.com wrote: Frank The X in Ximena, for example sounds in sapnish like a J, wich is your h in hill, for example. Don´t forget the rules of the tilde and the accents. For example Chávez and Chaves have the accent in the first syllable. The Spain in América Latina, in general, has lost difference between the s and the z, and for this reason Chávez and Chaves sound the same. Something similar occurs with González and Gonzales, Both have accent in the same syllable. 2014-02-23 20:36 GMT-05:00 Frank Wimberly wimber...@gmail.com: Xavier and Xalapa come to mind. Both those “x”s are pronounced like “h”. Frank FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] [EXTERNAL] Re: NTY: Buy Apple gadgets, use Google services, buy media from Amazon
Knowing the limits of one’s own knowledge is an admirable trait, i.e. the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. What really gripes me are people who seem to get some kind of perverse pleasure in their own ignorance. “Oh, that’s way too complex for me to understand” is not that uncommon an attitude when it comes to science and tech. # Gary On Feb 24, 2014, at 3:06 PM, glen g...@ropella.name wrote: Personally, all I know about those things is that I'm ignorant enough to be at risk. But, I take pride in knowing what I don't know, and that I don't know it. The real trick is paying close enough attention so that you can change tack when you need to. -- ⇒⇐ glen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
Re: [FRIAM] Oh, sad New Mexico, we love, we love you so | Chris Cervini
As one of the deserters myself, I really don’t have the right to comment, but NM was a special place for me for the 9 years I was there (1999-2008). It certainly wasn’t easy (5 jobs over 9 years), but in retrospect, it was worth it. I admire those of you who are hanging in there and pulling on those oars. ;; Gary On Apr 5, 2014, at 11:26 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: I suppose what can we do is to choose an oar and pull. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
