lyso's comments | WingNews

lyso | 2 years ago | on: The possibly never-ending quest for the golden owl

As a footnote to this, can I recommend Stuart Ashen’s talk about Hareraiser, a lacklustre kind-of follow up and contender for “worst video game ever”:

https://youtu.be/ouvi-fwrfIY

lyso | 3 years ago | on: Dolt is Git for Data

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Do_It.txt

lyso | 8 years ago | on: You’re Descended from Royalty and So Is Everybody Else

But as you go back in time, it becomes increasingly unlikely. At some point it is so unlikely it can be disregarded. And the point of the article is that point is closer in history than you might expect.

lyso | 8 years ago | on: UK election: Conservatives lose majority

This is not going to be a five year parliament given the outcome. It might not be a five month parliament.

lyso | 11 years ago | on: Train doors require GPS signal to open despite stations being underground (2014)

Site seems to be down, here is a text-only cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Z4ZDqEM...

lyso | 11 years ago | on: Chrome for Mac 64-bit Support

It ought to work with Handoff and let you open iOS Safari's current web page in Chrome. Currently you get a popup with the Chrome icon but it doesn't work because Chrome isn't 32-bit(!)

lyso | 12 years ago | on: Tory Boss of Government Coding Education Initiative Can't Code

>she's navigating it through the corridors of power and dealing with all the vested interests for and against it.

Yes, but she doesn't seem to know what "it" is.

lyso | 12 years ago | on: Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID

Well he did approvingly quote some nonsense that the reader would only work on a 'live finger' (presumably it is supposed to be able to detect the presence of a soul?).

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/09/12/5s-fingerprint-s...

lyso | 12 years ago | on: Darpa to Genetically Engineer Humans by Adding a 47th Chromosome

The article is misleading - this is a technique for use on human cell lines, not on humans.

lyso | 12 years ago | on: Never Give Stores Your Zip Code

They do actually do this in the UK

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/9994089/DVLA-made-10m...

This is how car parking companies get your home address from your number plate to write you threatening letters.

lyso | 13 years ago | on: The hum that helps to fight crime

Of course, if you weren't actually near any mains electricity at the time you made the recording(s), this is not necessary.

lyso | 13 years ago | on: GNU grep is 10x faster than Mac grep

Are there any other utils worth installing from that tap? Awk? OpenSSH?

lyso | 13 years ago | on: Sugar, acid and teeth (2009)

This shows how bogus it is - you can put lots of sugar in a basic drink and it would score well.

The key point for me is why is concentration of sugar in mg/cl? Why not mg/l, or g/l, or oz/gallon? Each one would give a different answer, and all are equally justifiable. (There is also the weird idea that a decrease in pH of 1, which is 10 times the concentration of H+, would therefore be 10 times as bad.)

lyso | 13 years ago | on: Sugar, acid and teeth (2009)

p>0.05 does not mean that a correlation has been disproven, just that the authors are unable to reject the null hypothesis (potentially due to lack of statistical power).

lyso | 13 years ago | on: HP introduces new Apple iMac

Here is a referenced blog post, that also discusses the lawsuit:

lyso | 14 years ago | on: Google Scholar Metrics for Publications

So it looks like with this method, if a journal publishes more papers, this will give it more of a chance to boost its h5-index? This probably accounts for the high level of arXiv, and PLoS One beating out PLoS Biol.

One problem with impact factors is the way that a few articles can account for the majority of citations. For instance, a bioinformatics method that is widely used could attract thousands of citations, boosting the impact factor of the journal by a few points. This method doesn't solve this, as it expressly focuses on the top n articles and ignores the impact of the remainder. For instance, PLoS One's score of 100 is because the top 100 articles got 100 citations - it says nothing about the distribution of the rest.

lyso | 14 years ago | on: $900 DNA sequencing USB stick announced by OxNano

Yeah, the 10 (100?) kb length is the huge thing here. An awful lot of sequencing bioinformatics is dealing with the implications of short read length. This problem is possibly going to go away now.

lyso | 14 years ago | on: Vim ported to iOS

Looks like you need to send them across through iTunes.

lyso | 14 years ago | on: iPhone 5 and iPad 3, both with 4G LTE, reportedly due next year

What did the "4" mean in the iPhone 4, then?

lyso | 14 years ago | on: The relationship between Readability and Instapaper

Exactly. It is a problem - I respect that Marco doesn't want to stich articles together, but I sometimes reach the end of an article to find myself unsure as to whether that really was the end, or just the end of page one. Would be useful to get some indication in Instapaper when this is the case. I am flirting with Readability for this reason.