Wow! Here's a fancy-schmancy video of a Brit taking a Bugatti Veyron up to its top speed at the Volkwagen test track in Germany. "The tires only last 15 minutes at top speed but that's OK: the gas will only last for 12 minutes."
UPDATE: Here's another review of the Veyron by Jeremy Clarkson with a great little note about collisions at 200mph:
Happily, stopping distances become irrelevant because you won't see the obstacle in the first place. By the time you know it was there, you'll have gone through the windscreen, through the Pearly Gates and be half way across God's breakfast table.
From the same article:
From behind the wheel of a Veyron, France is the size of a small coconut. I cannot tell you how fast I crossed it the other day. Because you simply wouldn't believe me. I also cannot tell you how good this car is. I just don't have the vocabulary. I just end up stammering and dribbling and talking wide-eyed nonsense. And everyone thinks I'm on drugs.
20:56 | link | | |
Grr. There are unfathomable deeps surrounding authentication with the Wolfram smtp server when connecting from outside their network. My email will stay on my office computer, accessed via emacs through ssh X forwarding. Back to Mathematica coding - I've had enough lisp for the night.
On the bright side, I'm now using my new squeaky-clean & organized .emacs and .gnus files that I came up with during all this. A general cleanup can violate Grohens' Law of Information Conservation if you're not careful. I tossed code only if I couldn't remember what it was for or the last time I used it. It's still hanging around in old files, though, in case I really need some of it.
20:13 | link | | |
I don't hang out much in the fever swamps of the net, so I was surprised to find a crackpot-Ronulan convergence at the Lew Rockwell website and blog: the paleos are hot for Dr Ron.
06:33 | link | | |
I used to go into the office in Champaign every day, driving half an hour each way listening to the radio or somesuch. One year I was going to work in the middle of the night to accomodate our other schedules, so I had a front-row seat for Mars' show in the eastern sky. Must've been mid-2003.
Nowadays my trip to the "office" involves stepping over the kids' toys without spilling my coffee, and plopping down in my chair in our old library at home. "Old" because it's now more a computer lab than a library, but old names hang around.
Digression is the soul of blogging, ain't it? Back to the subject, my periodic self-discombobulation. It's time for the great year-end emacs init file reorganization and email shuffle.
I've always downloaded my email to my work computer and stored it in gnus's nnml format. Now that I work from home 99.9% of the time, my plan is to get all my email archives in place here at home, then read Wolfram's imap server from here. I'll rsync back to work periodically so stuff can be backed up responsibly there.
I used to start a new mail directory each year - Mail-2002, Mail-2003, etc. Last December I was too lazy/busy to switch things over and kept using Mail-2006. Meanwhile I started using emacs' planner mode to keep track of everything and now it has scads of links to messages in the Mail-2006 dir, so I'm going to keep it all in one vast directory.
[Sat Dec 29 22:30:02 CST 2007] [billw@billwlx plans]$ du -sh /billw/Mail-2006 1.6G /billw/Mail-2006 [Sat Dec 29 22:30:33 CST 2007] [billw@billwlx plans]$
In transferring my work gnus and planner settings to home, I was also compelled to clean up and organize my .emacs file. This year's MVP in the file organization department is Ken Manheimer's allout package. As I wrote to Ken when I started using allout,
Using allout is like putting on glasses - I've been able to improve and clarify code in every file in which I've used it. Sure, any outline mode could help with that, but they all have arcane or busy navigation & show/hide commands. The genius of allout's hot-spot navigation makes it all as easy as putting on a pair of glasses. Hmm... that sounds like promotional copy - feel free to use it if it answers a need :-)
That's about it - no conclusions, no big ideas - just a note for future reference.
23:00 | link | | |
Gitcher edumacation jargon here!
We'll envision process-based manipulatives in order to effectively exploit impactful scaffolding and morph interactive life-long learning into strategic infrastructures.
Now we need some grants to apply for.
09:36 | link | | |
A great series of photos and comments here (part 1) and here (part 2). Maybe that's why I've let my beard go the last few months...
17:21 | link | | |
New to me at least: Michael Knox Beran. Here's an initial collection of his essays I googled just now, a Christmas present for you, with incipits:
It was bound to happen sooner or later. Each new book on the founding of our republic might as well contain the scholarly equivalent of the surgeon general's warning affixed to our beer bottles. "Warning: Studying the Men Who Founded the United States May Be Dangerous to Your Moral Health."
Last year's Ralph Waldo Emerson bicentennial was a melancholy anniversary: though a few of Emerson's verses are still read, and one or two of his essays still cherished, he has been largely forgotten. Worse, education theorists have hijacked and debased what is most useful and attractive in his philosophy of self-reliance. Ever since John Dewey, in his 1916 book Democracy and Education, drew on Emersonian self-reliance in his effort to liberate children from the "autocratic" authority of their teachers, the educrats have worked overtime to transform Emerson into a prophet of classroom anarchy, a philosopher of the flimsier forms of self-esteem, and an apologist for a cavalier egotism that ruins lives.
If there's one thing progressive educators don't like it's rote learning. As a result, we now have several generations of Americans who've never memorized much of anything. Even highly educated people in their thirties and forties are often unable to recite half a dozen lines of classic poetry or prose.
A few years before my grandmother died, she cleared out her house, and gave me some of her souvenirs of Lincoln. There was nothing extraordinary, nothing rare, nothing valuable in the collection: a bad oil painting, a couple of framed copies of Brady portraits, a facsimile of the letter to Mrs. Bixby on the death of her sons in battle - the kind of things many Americans had in their houses a couple of generations ago. One item, however, struck me, the little legend printed at the top of the Bixby letter. "The famous Bixby letter," the legend declared, "the model of perfect English." Reading it, I couldn't disagree. Some have contended that Lincoln's secretary, John Nicolay, actually drafted the letter; if he did he had succeeded wonderfully in mastering his boss's style, in reproducing the precision of his language, the severe grace of his sentences.
In a recent address to the bishops and priests of St. Peter's, Pope Benedict called for a greater "continuity with tradition" in the music of the Church, and spoke of the value of the Church's older musical traditions, among them the baroque sacred music of the 17th and 18th centuries and Gregorian Chant. The address followed the pope's issuance, in July, of an Apostolic Letter (accompanying letter in English here) in which he permitted broader use of the Latin Mass, the "Tridentine" rite authorized by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century and promulgated most recently by John XXIII in 1962.
In 1859 Abraham Lincoln expressed the fear that the "principles of free government" in the United States would one day be supplanted by those of "classification, caste, and legitimacy."
Lincoln fought a civil war to stave off that threat; if he were alive today, he'd have to fight his own Bicentennial Commission, too.
When Chambers abandoned the secular millenarianism of socialism and made his stand for God and liberty, he told his wife that "we are leaving the winning world for the losing world." The words have in retrospect been thought too pessimistic. But conservatism, however superficially optimistic it may be, must always be sustained by a deep core of pessimism. The conservative who wishes to prepare himself for the coming battles will find much instructive material in Edward White's book on the Hiss Case; but he will do even better to turn again to Whittaker Chambers's book, and relive that man's fall from grace and his ascent.
16:38 | link | | |
Storekeepers think Christmas ends tomorrow, so that's when they start selling off all their "holiday" goods. We know that Christmas is just getting started... bargains ahoy!
16:32 | link | | |
The time associated with an indulgence doesn't mean that the indulgence gets you out of Purgatory that early. I see this error a few times a week since I've subscribed to the blogs of various medieval scholars; most recently here.
Until indulgences were reformed in 1967 by Pope Paul VI with his Apostolic Constitution Indulgentiarum Doctrina, each indulgence was given a period of time - for example,
An indulgence of 300 days every time the three following ejaculatory prayers are said, to obtain a happy death:
- Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I give you my heart and my life.
- Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, assist me in my last agony.
- Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, may I die in peace in your blessed company.
Roughly speaking, the 300 days means that the prayer is the equivalent to doing 300 days of penance now, while you're still here. Here's a more technical explanation from catholic.com:
Before Vatican II each indulgence was said to remove a certain number of "days" from one's discipline - for instance, an act might gain "300 days' indulgence" - but the use of the term "days" confused people, giving them the mistaken impression that in purgatory time as we know it still exists and that we can calculate our "good time" in a mechanical way. The number of days associated with indulgences actually never meant that that much "time" would be taken off one's stay in purgatory. Instead, it meant that an indefinite but partial (not complete) amount of remission would be granted, proportionate to what ancient Christians would have received for performing that many days' penance. So, someone gaining 300 days' indulgence gained roughly what an early Christian would have gained by, say, reciting a particular prayer on arising for 300 days.
To overcome the confusion Paul VI issued a revision of the handbook (Enchiridion is the formal name) of indulgences. Today, numbers of days are not associated with indulgences. They are either plenary or partial.
There. Now I've got that off my chest.
And hey - it's Christmas! (which starts after midafternoon prayer in the Liturgy of the Hours)
16:13 | link | | |
A fun twist on an old tune from Indiana University's Straight No Chaser, via Dylan.
21:57 | link | | |
A delightful essay by Mortimer Adler by way of a commenter at Anecdotal Evidence. Incipit:
You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.
I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love.
07:56 | link | | |
Via Anecdotal Evidence:
"Since publishing became luxurious see what has happened to bookshops. They are infamous greeting-card stores, littered with trash. The only decent and civilized people left in the books business are those who have shambly stores on Fourth Avenue. Do I want La Rochefoucauld, Saint-Simon, La Bruyère or Dio, and I am being literal, I have to go to used-book dealers. Should I desire to procure Strabo or the elder Pliny or Alexander von Humboldt, do you imagine I should have the least luck in buying these on Fifth Avenue? Suppose I desire Whiston’s translations of Jewish Antiquities by Josephus, where do I get it, in a meretricious book house which looks like a Greyhound bus – or in the shabby stalls on Fourth Avenue? I have found a rare Guerrera, a fifteenth-century Spanish monk who did some marvelous chapters of Heliogabalus and Otho, in an immense loft glutted with all sorts of volumes that would entice a fevered brain. You can’t even get literary staples in the new, gimcrack bookshops, Ruskin, Burton, Coleridge’s Letters, Sartor Resartus, the City of God by St. Augustine."
07:49 | link | | |
Calling all Command Module pilots: in the Apollo lunar program, one unlucky guy got to stay in orbit around the moon while the other two landed, got out and had fun. You had to keep a guy in orbit in case the lunar lander didn't make it all the way back to the command module - the guy left behind in the CM would then have to find the lander and dock with it in lunar orbit.
For next time, NASA's looking into an automated search-and-dock ability in the command module so all the guys can go have fun on the moon. Then if the lander doesn't make it all the way back to orbit the CM can hunt them down itself. Pretty cool stuff.
07:59 | link | | |
Does anyone have access to the calendar notice in the March-April, 2006 issue of Notitiae (475-476, page 96)? According to the newsletter of the USCCB's Committee on Divine Worship (September 2006, pages 34-35), this notice changed the age-old practice of transferring Annunciation and St Joseph to the Monday and Tuesday of the 2nd week of Easter when their usual dates are outranked by Holy Week and the octave of Easter. Instead, this year St Joseph will be anticipated 4 days early on March 15th while Annunciation will be transferred as in the past.
(Note that in Catholic calendar lingo, "transfer" means to move to a future date; "anticipate" means to move to a previous date.)
I'm interested in the text of the notice in Notitiae because I've written an emacs package that calculates each day's ordo. In the program, I've implemented the old rule that transfers both celebrations to the 2nd week of Easter, so my program is wrong for 2008.
To fix it, I'm hoping to learn whether this anticipation of St Joseph is a one-off change only for 2008 or something more permanent, and whatever reasoning supported the decision. Perhaps the article in Notitiae provides that information.
Below are the years (between 1800 and 2100 AD) in which St Joseph needs to move one way or another to make way for a celebration of higher rank. As you can see, there were no personal computers the last time this happened (1951); the next time we need to worry about it is 2035 :-). Nevertheless, I'd like to encode the correct rule in my program so it can be better used for historical and calendrical research.
Thanks!
16:15 | link | | |
It's an exciting time in rocketry - stuff's starting to happen with NASA's new Ares rockets.
16:11 | link | | |
Which is not what you get from Santa Hillary. We'd rather keep our own money and educate our own children, thankyouverymuch. Does she even know where government money comes from?
"Isn't this like when you get presents from family members and you know they charged it on your credit card?" —Ann Althouse
11:42 | link | | |
This is just pathetic. Alfred, you need to take some lessons from the masters.
From: Attorney Alfred Fernandez <rpd.editor@charter.net> Subject: Hello To: undisclosed-recipients:; Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 4:15:23 -0800 Message-ID: <20071220071524.HUTMQ.464707.root@fepweb13> X-Sent: 5 hours, 31 minutes, 14 seconds ago Reply-To: alfred_fernandez107@yahoo.it Attention: I am Attorney Alfred Fernandez , a solicitor at law, On the 11th of march 2004 my client, his wife and their only child were killed by bomb blast through terrorist attack here in Madrid hiitrain station all the occupant of the coach were killed. I seek your consent to present you as the next of kin of the deceased Please send me an email to my private address so i can have you presented as the next of kin :@ alfred_fernandez107@yahoo.it Awaitng your prompt response.
11:37 | link | | |
As Kathy Shaidle says, this is just a fine piece of writing.
11:00 | link | | |
He must have worked in publishing a long time ago. Here's his take on TV scriptwriters taking to Youtube to get their ideas out:
It's as if the Linotype operators went on strike and decided to publish their story in four color offset!...
I knew some old Linotype operators at TSI Graphics back in the early 90s. By then there were no old "hot metal" Linotype machines left; their operators had moved on to an arcane German mainframe-based typesetting language called MOPAS. My first job at TSI was to babysit the mainframe and queue up H&J (hyphenation and justification) jobs and print runs.
10:17 | link | | |
The old Vriner's Confectionary in downtown Champaign was a landmark for most of the last century. Here's a good article on the family from Champaign-Urbana's excellent new publication Smile Politely, and here are some memories of their old place.
09:58 | link | | |
The other day I woke up thinking about fake vomit - the stuff you used to buy at the gag store at the state fair along with itching powder and whoopie cushions and those hand buzzer things. I awoke wondering whether fake vomit is still made in America or had it been shipped off to China along with all our other noble manufactories? And what did the Chinese think of it - the guys working in the fake vomit factory? (In my sophomore year of college we shook our heads when we learned that a classmate had dropped out of school to go to work at the onion ring factory.)
Waking up like that is strange enough. But later that same morning as I scanned the blogs, I found this story. Rest easy, America - not everything has been shipped to China.
Chicago's venerable gag factory Fun, Inc., was profiled in the Tribune last Wednesday. Fun, Inc. is the home of the finest hand-made fake vomit in the land, made tenderly by a company vomitmaster who keeps his secret recipe close to the chest.
21:40 | link | | |
They're saying 6-8 inches with 40mph winds by noon today. Thomas De Quincey got it right:
Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fireside, candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without...
00:13 | link | | |
Here's a new website from the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy: Biblia Clerus. The idea is to present the Bible with each chapter/verse keyed to patristic commentary, liturgical texts, etc.
17:16 | link | | |
Andrew Cusack is putting his redesigned website to good use with a multi-post celebration of the late Ian Smith, starting here.
17:32 | link | | |
It's rather cool to write dense convoluted Mathematica code to solve a problem, but the higher the density the harder it is to modify. Assumptions about the problem get superglued into the code; when the problem changes a bit, you have to go in and atomize the whole thing in order to change the code's basic assumptions. That's what I've been doing this morning with another guy's Mathematica code.
Or I could make the necessary changes by adding even more density and brittleness, guaranteeing that the next guy to work on the code will hunt me down and shoot me.
My coding style is distinctly uncool, like your Dad's station wagon, but all the assumptions are (usually) sitting right there out in the open in small easy pieces that can be changed in a couple of moments.
12:32 | link | | |
You may remember The Landmark Thucydides published in 1996; the same folks have now published The Landmark Herodotus. Here's a review in the NYT.
09:46 | link | | |
The remodeling work is finished at Hot Wok Express, 1102 W. University Ave., U, and the restaurant has reopened with a look that's "newer and nicer," owner Greg D'Amico says.
The menu and hours are the same, but Sunny Pook, the original owner of the place, is back to run the restaurant, D'Amico said.
23:36 | link | | |
22:08 | link | | |
Here's a fun article from David Warren in the newly-resurgent Western Standard (painless registration required). One of his many astute observations:
Verily, while I have never found a historian who has run with it, I have noticed that every major reform of the Protestant Reformation moved Christianity in the direction of Islam, including scriptural literalism, legalism and the deconsecration of clergy.
21:43 | link | | |
We made it back to Illinois behind one ice storm and ahead of the next.
20:00 | link | | |
ssh'ing via putty from the in-law's Windows box to my linux box at home, running emacs in a terminal. Will it all work?
08:41 | link | | |
Here's a good little essay on a difficult task that NASA made look easy: entering lunar orbit for an Apollo landing.
23:02 | link | | |
20:41 | link | | |
So I'm writing some Mathematica code and doing test runs that take a minute or two. In those couple of minutes I could try to think about some other set of code and be crudely interrupted before I can even finish thought one, or I can check the blogs. Blogs ahoy.
One of Joseph Haydn's Masses is chugging along in my headphones when suddenly JACKSON FARGIN' BROWN jumps out at about 100 decibels. Some idiot blogger has set up his/her blog to play Mr Brown's "Somebody's Baby" when it's loaded. Grr...
18:31 | link | | |
Dang - I love these animated weather radar images from wunderground. Here comes 2-4 inches of snow:
17:52 | link | | |
Take a look at Hidden Violations by the Illinois-based Small Newspaper Group. As Mark Shea might say, it's reason #345234234 to homeschool.
16:36 | link | | |
The praying skeleton image on this page of my blog brings in more visitors from Google than anything else; it generates over three times the traffic of the next referrer, a page at a pyblosxom website.
16:00 | link | | |
A huge compendium of original sources and commentary on ancient and medieval Roman law. O for more time.
14:16 | link | | |
I heard Haydn's Lord Nelson Mass today - yes, it's named after Horatio Nelson, the famous British admiral, philanderer and Protestant. WTF, you say? Here's the history from wikipedia:
Though in 1798, when he wrote this Mass, Haydn's reputation was at its peak, his world was in turmoil. Napoleon had won four major battles with Austria in less than a year. The previous year, in early 1797, his armies had crossed the Alps and threatened Vienna itself. In May of 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt to destroy Britain's trade routes to the East.
The summer of 1798 was therefore a terrifying time for Austria, and when Haydn finished this Mass, his own title, in the catalogue of his works, was "Missa in Angustiis" or "Mass in Time of Distress." What Haydn didn't know when he wrote the Mass — but what he and his audience heard (perhaps on the very day of the first performance September 15) was that on Aug. 1, Napoleon had been dealt a stunning defeat in the Battle of the Nile by English forces led by Admiral Horatio Nelson. Because of this coincidence, the Mass gradually acquired the nickname "Lord Nelson Mass." The title became indelible when in 1800, Lord Nelson himself visited the Esterhazys (accompanied by his British mistress, Lady Hamilton), and may have heard the Mass performed.
For Haydn, however, writing the Mass in the late summer of 1798, the mood in Eisenstadt was one of foreboding, to the point of terror, and this is what we hear as the great work opens. Haydn chose to write it in the key of d minor, which is seldom used but may have an intriguing provenance. In 1788, Haydn had attended the first Vienna performance of Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni." From contemporary accounts, we know it made a great impression on him, and in Don Giovanni, the most memorable scene portrays the unrepentant anti-hero being dragged down to the underworld. Here, according to Landon, the listener hears, "perhaps the first time in music history, the presence of real fear, nay terror." This music is all in d minor. It is easy to imagine that when Haydn, ten years later, wished to evoke this emotion in his music, his ears were still ringing with Giovanni's terrible d-minor fate.
14:03 | link | | |
Some great pictures from Bernard Zee - they start out good and get really interesting toward the end. Check out the transonic oblique shockwaves as an F-18 flies just below the speed of sound about 20 feet above San Francisco Bay heading towards Berkeley on a bombing run.
13:57 | link | | |
Here's an interesting summary of ancient solar eclipses and contemporary accounts of them. The neat thing about eclipses is that their details can be computed down to the minute even across a few thousand years, giving us prefectly precise dates for some historical events.
13:47 | link | | |
Don't stop my flow with some stupid dialog box:
Come to think of it, that's a lot like working from home with a kid with Aperger's Syndrome.
11:23 | link | | |
There's a very light dusting on parts of our brick sidewalks and the edges of the streets this morning, but that was enough for the kids to burst out in joy - "happy first snow day!" they cried just now. You can barely see it in the last 3 frames here:
08:44 | link | | |
This isn't quite a picture of panic:
FEATURE-Philippine Catholics afraid of Muslim homeland deal
05 Dec 2007 00:04:18 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Manny Mogato
DATU BLAH SINSUAT, Philippines, Dec 5 (Reuters) - When Christians in the southern Philippines heard that the government and Islamic rebels had agreed to expand a homeland for Muslims on their island, they panicked.
"We started buying some weapons to defend our families and community," said Berting, a coconut farmer, whose farm sits in the heart of a mainly Muslim province in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.
Berting, who declined to give his last name, is a Catholic whose grandfather settled in the area nearly 80 years ago when Christian farmers moved to the lush jungles and valleys of mostly Muslim Mindanao.
A conflict between Catholics and Muslims has raged on the island for the past 40 years, resulting in the deaths of 120,000 people. But now the sides say that they are close to a final peace deal and might sign an agreement next year.
After a decade of stop-start negotiations, the government and the country's largest Islamic rebel group agreed last month on the boundaries of a proposed homeland for Muslims, who make up around 20 percent of Mindanao's population.
08:11 | link | | |
Many of JS Bach's works were written for specific liturgical celebrations. Here's a rundown with dates for 2006-2010.
15:49 | link | | |
NASA is planning the last repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope.
11:28 | link | | |
A handy summation of The Golden Compass from Amy Welborn for those of us with Treppenwitz. And it looks like it's time for the nitwits at the USCCB to clean house and hire Steven Greydanus to do movie reviews.
Naturally, there's a Treppenwitz blog.
11:05 | link | | |
A new article from Theodore Dalrymple in the December 2007 New English Review. Incipit:
Quite often one reads that such-and-such a country - the Congo, for example - is impoverished in spite of its abundant natural resources. The tone is usually pained and a little surprised; the writer seems to think that natural resources ought to develop themselves and benefit populations without human intervention, by jumping out of the ground and distributing themselves equitably, for example.
12:18 | link | | |
Doctors have been trying to diagnose King Lear for more than two centuries. They haven't succeeded, of course, for a couple of reasons that are not mutually exclusive: first, King Lear does not exist, and second he is not available for tests or examination. The latest technology, no matter how sophisticated, will never settle the matter. No imaging studies for King Lear: he was born much too soon for them, and now will never be diagnosed properly.
22:44 | link | | |
Speaking of takedowns, here's Anthony Daniels (a.k.a. Theodore Dalrymple) on Khalil Gibran. Incipit:
Among my mother's books was a copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I remember still the cream color of the cover, adorned with a soft-focus drawing of a young man with a thin moustache staring, Svengali-like, into some kind of philosophical infinity. Although—or was it because?—The Prophet was so popular at the time, selling by the million worldwide, I resisted reading it. I suspected that its profundity, or rather its straining after profundity, was bogus, and I was right. It is precisely in its ersatz quality that its popularity resides.
22:39 | link | | |
The New Criterion has a takedown of Lewis Lapham's new magazine, Lapham's Quarterly, whose byline is "Finding the present in the past, the past in the present." That's odd, since Mr Lapham's strength lies in finding the past in the future.
22:13 | link | | |
OK, so there are no google hits yet for "spes salvi" "robert heinlein". Did anyone else think of Woodrow Wilson Smith while reading Benedict XVI on the drawbacks of living this earthly life forever?
13:57 | link | | |
For years I've avoided using emacs' tags table functions, but I finally had to break down and read about them tonight to search eficiently through a huge collection of Mathematica packages and applications.
After reading the fine manual it was easy to create a tags table of Mathematica function definitions and variable assignments:
cd topdir; find . -name "*.m" -print | grep -v BrowserCategories.m | \ etags \ --language=none \ --regex='/\([A-Za-z0-9$]+\)[ \t]*=/\1/' \ --regex='/\([A-Za-z0-9$]+\).*:=/\1/' -
The second regexp choked on a particular BrowserCategories.m; since they don't contain the definitions I'm looking for I removed them from consideration.
The two regexs find these sorts of things:
fact[1] = 1; fact[n_] := n fact[n - 1]
22:13 | link | | |
at Instapundit. That'll make a good weekend project. Excerpt:
The shot of the garage electrical panel shows a flashlight, a 10 lb ABC fire extinguisher, the T-handled thing is a curb key for shutting water off at the meter, and the map shows where everything is. The curb key has had the handle ends ground to large screwdriver-tip size so it can be used to open the meter box cover. No additional tools needed. (And, while the garage has a large fire extinguisher, there's also a smaller one in every closet. Extinguishers are cheap.)
Why a map? Not everyone will always remember where stuff is, and if Uncle Harry is visiting he won't know at all. On the map is the address and subdivision name (the blue tape is covering my address) along with emergency phone numbers. Critical tools are all right there. The pic of the water shutoff shows a 1/4 turn ball valve; faster and easier to use than the typical round-handle gate valve. The gray pipe is a "safety sleeve" to prevent a weed wacker from cutting through the plastic water supply pipe.
The picture of the electrical receptacle shows a number; that's the circuit breaker number that controls the circuit the outlet is on. If one has to shut down a circuit quickly because of a dangerously malfunctioning appliance it's pretty helpful to know which breaker to flip.
15:37 | link | | |
There wasn't enough room for lead with all the asbestos they put in it.
12:22 | link | | |
Drinking the Google Koolaid: here's what I used to set up gnus with gmail's imap server, from Alexey Simakov in Moscow, Russia.
06:18 | link | | |
A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.—Lord Peter Wimsey
Left column Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.—St John of Patmos
Right column Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
