jmyc's comments

Another nice summary of this sort of thing: Fibonacci Flim-Flam

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm

This is a video of one of the in-game tutorials (the tutorial is rendered in-game, with the same camera perspective as a player), it does a decent job of explaining the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmRBvla8tSY

Here it is: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...

Yes, Little Snitch can help Safari pass this browser test (the unusual port was a red flag for me).

HyperCard could be added to the list

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/05/25-years-of-hypercard-t...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard

Britannica articles aren't written by "one person who spent their lifetime researching" that topic.

> Now, in all fairness they do have a cragy coast, but it is very clear the districts are unconscionably gamed.

I'm not sure how it was done in the source for that news article, but gerrymandering-detection algorithms should ignore natural borders in that regard. See, for example, this paper which measures gerrymandering in terms of convexity: http://mathdl.maa.org/images/upload_library/22/Polya/Hodge20...

It's a picture of the NSA headquarters at Ft. Meade. That may be all there is to it.

> On the other hand, you can't really blame Riot...

Of course not, they are free to employ whichever model they want. I think his reply was more directed at the statement: "I think League of Legends or maybe Team Fortress 2 are about as good as it gets..."

LoL is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of "purely cosmetic" and "pay to win" while Dota 2 is on the "purely cosmetic" end. So in the category of Dota-like games, Dota 2 is perhaps as good at it gets, in terms of its free-to-play model.

According to now-declassified documents, the US had the capability but chose not to launch a satellite due to setting legal precedent. I.e., they wanted to launch spy satellites but were worried that if they initiated this, it could be interpreted as an act of war. If instead the USSR was first to launch a satellite and it flew over the US, then the US could do the same in turn without provoking war.

See, e.g. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/sputnik-declassified.h...

Here is some of the transcript from that:

--

> NARRATOR: What Eisenhower most wants is information about the enemy's forces. Early in 1954, he authorizes illegal military over-flights to photograph the Soviet Union.

> R. CARGILL HALL: This was a major presidential decision. These peacetime over-flights of the Soviet Union were very risky, first of all because these aircraft could not operate at altitudes above Soviet air defenses.

> NARRATOR: March, 1954: American fighters photograph Soviet air bases near Vladivostok. In April, American planes again enter Soviet airspace. But in May, Eisenhower's strategy backfires. An American bomber flies into Russia and is attacked by Soviet fighters. The damaged bomber barely makes it home.

> It is 1954, three years before Sputnik. Eisenhower is committed to surveillance of the Soviet Union. But he needs a better way.

--

> By early 1955, Eisenhower is set on creating a reconnaissance satellite. But the Killian Report has pointed out a problem: the legal status of space has not been defined.

> National boundaries extend into the atmosphere, but how far up does territorial airspace go? The answer will be critical to Eisenhower's spy satellite plan.

--

> LEE WEBSTER: When we fired that, we knew we could put a vehicle in orbit, because we had the velocity that it required. If we'd been given the go-ahead, we could have beat Sputnik by a year. We had the hardware over in Redstone, sitting in warehouses ready to go.

> RANDY CLINTON: We could have beat them. And that's the thing that grabbed us, hurt the most, is we knew, ahead of time, that we could have beat them.

--

> Just a few days after Sputnik was launched, Donald Quarles, from the Department of Defense, is in the Oval Office talking to Eisenhower. And one of the points that he makes is that he thinks that the Soviets have done us a good turn. They had established a precedent of over-flight, exactly what Eisenhower wanted to do initially, and now the Soviets had done it for us.

--

I'm not sure this is the complete story (I realize the above may come off as blindly pro-US), but it's an element that was unknown for 50 years while that information was still classified. I think the access to scientific papers is not a key part of that event (and besides, 50 years ago the traditional scientific publishing model still made sense).

Related: genetic algorithms to play video games. I can't find the exact one I read about before, which was for Super Mario Bros., but searching for "mario genetic algorithm" leads to a number of papers, videos, &c.

Yes: http://manuels.github.com/texlive.js/website/ -- "This is a port of TeX live 2012 to Javascript."

Also related: http://www.mathjax.org/

> The fact that he was reading his entire presentation verbatim should have tipped everybody off in the first minute or so

His presentation is utter nonsense, but whether he reads verbatim has nothing to do with it. Someone presenting valid results could just be a poor public speaker and/or nervous.

I think this is a poor substitute for engagement/wedding/etc announcements in the newspaper. While he could, I suppose, buy ad space for an engagement announcement in a newspaper, they are submitted/printed for free (and put on the paper's website). Furthermore, it is seen by a wider audience than just your facebook friends (in fact it enters the public record), and you get a nice newspaper clipping. For example, my co-workers (whom I am not facebook friends with) brought in a clipping of my child's birth announcement and picture from the newspaper. I think it will be nice to show that to my child in later years. Would you show your child a screenshot of your facebook page? Print it out for a baby book?

(I realize that in his example he promoted a political joke, something that the newspaper wouldn't publish for free, and that it someone might want to supplement a newspaper announcement with a facebook thing.)

Just a suggestion: I was annoyed when I first tried to drag the slider. I figured out you have to click it instead, but some users may just quit first.

The "earning them a master's" doesn't ruffle my feathers. A master's thesis in itself doesn't mean much; it doesn't have to present new results nor have any impact. Presumably this student had to complete the coursework required for the degree, and his adviser let him wank around with lolcats for the thesis. The thesis alone didn't earn him the degree, and given that the bar isn't that high for master's theses anyway, it's not that big of a deal.

From your link, "Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct" (concerning the "climategate" e-mails).

By hearing the cherry-picked quotes from those e-mails, you could get the impression that they're full of fraud, but now that the dust has settled and the investigations have been made, do you really think they're disgusting?

I think this example is counter to your point. The initial media reaction gave the complete wrong impression, and the later findings that the story is nonsense went completely unreported.

Not necessarily of Shipper but I'm sick of these "long conversation" ways of explaining things that don't need to be simplified. This is an almost boringly simple problem (I'm not trying to be condescending, but this is freshman CS stuff), we don't need to be eased into the complex situation at hand.