A List of Links
I suck at updating this. Not that this bears repeating. I've been using Twitter somewhat frequently as an announcement/micro-blogging platform; but those two goals are at odds (if I want something announced, I can't micro-blog when I feel like it).
So here are some cool links I've been discovering over the past few days.
I have way too many tabs open in Safari. They serve as reminders of things I want to read or reply to/ bookmarks / whatever, but they need to be sorted through and closed. If Safari didn't have a "Restore all tabs from last session", then crashes / accidental shutdowns / etc would be horribly difficult. Working on that now and things are already a lot better!
I went on an upgrade spree yesterday / this morning. Updating open source software is fun 'cause there's a lot of updates, always, and I like updating things, intrinsically. However, fink update-all ran into a snag because of a circular dependency with libtool2 and libtool14, but I think it's all been worked out by installing a couple of things once at a time (thus, the tools that need libtool2 can install, the tools that need libtool14 can install, and the two can remove each other's libtool first).
So here are some cool links I've been discovering over the past few days.
- Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics is the Wired summary to the full article, which is here. It's basically a computer program that uses genetic algorithms to find non-trivial invariants in collected experimental data--it starts off with random equations, then figures out which ones are "least wrong" and tweaks them, making them more and more accurate, while also being encouraged to minimize the terms in its invariant result. The result? Science laws. It's really damn cool, especially since we can collect data a lot faster and lot better then we can actually analyze it.
- OmniGraphSketcher is a new Mac app that basically allows you to make graphs. It's not just a point grapher, you can create curves by dragging, you can highlight areas between curves, it's a much more visual way of looking at graphs--something you'd find in an econ textbook rather than in a science lab report. It's pretty awesome, though, I used a couple of its features to help me do a presentation for my ACM class.
- This UNC ad is pretty awesome.. I personally find that the ability of a person to throw a ball through a cloth basket does not actually excite me at all and certainly does not represent the academic institution that the person may be associated with. However, I also got a little bitter at all the really smart people who get scholarships, just because I was a bit bitter that NCSSM administration never cared about me because I didn't win any prestigious scholarships for the school, that was all they cared about academically, and I didn't get robertson and am way too unathletic to get morehead-cain, but I think I do a lot of really awesome stuff.
Frankly, I should stop bitching. UNC is paying me to go to school here (with my combination of merit scholarships and ResNET) That's pretty awesome and probably something that very few people have, and frankly, I should get over this whole low-self-esteem thing. Like now.
Also, I know one of the students who got the Rhodes (she's in my Dutch class) and she's actually really nice and awesome, and all these people probably are too. :) - Always At the After Party (A Liberal on Libertarians)--I think I agree with what was said in this article. A quote from it has been up on my Safari tabs since the first week of February (as I say below, tabs in Safari open for waaay too long) but I never read the whole thing until now. I really don't want to start more political debates versus libertarianism--I did that here already. However, one quote really spoke to me, so I'll quote it again here:
We think that politics is more than an unfortunate necessity required by our inability to live together without killing each other. We think it is, can be anyway, an arena in which we work out and pursue, sometimes with notable success, large and constructive purposes.
I have faith in government. Not blind faith, but faith that government can be and is a good force in people's lives. It's not perfect, as it is made up of men and men are definitely fallible, but it is definitely not despicable. - The True Cost of Credit lets you know what the processing fees are whenever you use your credit or debit card. Very interesting.
- Web Design+, a neat list of how to do various things in web development using standards-compliant code. Seems like a good reference.
I have way too many tabs open in Safari. They serve as reminders of things I want to read or reply to/ bookmarks / whatever, but they need to be sorted through and closed. If Safari didn't have a "Restore all tabs from last session", then crashes / accidental shutdowns / etc would be horribly difficult. Working on that now and things are already a lot better!
I went on an upgrade spree yesterday / this morning. Updating open source software is fun 'cause there's a lot of updates, always, and I like updating things, intrinsically. However, fink update-all ran into a snag because of a circular dependency with libtool2 and libtool14, but I think it's all been worked out by installing a couple of things once at a time (thus, the tools that need libtool2 can install, the tools that need libtool14 can install, and the two can remove each other's libtool first).