michaels0620's comments

One simple thing to make presentations visually appealing is to ensure a consistent style. If you are using outlined shapes, stick with outlined shapes. If you are using semi-transparent boxes stick with them. So often I see presentations with multiple type faces (where it isn't warranted) and different styles of diagrams. It can be distracting and give the sense that the presentation was just hastily assembled from various other presentations (whether true or not).

From what I understand (as a fellow fascinated layman) is that String Theory is still the dominant StandardModel++ theory in academia but there are a few who are being more vocal about its validity.

Peter Woit is a notable skeptic of the viability of String Theory and has a blog which contains links to a number of interesting physics blogs. http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

He answers this in his faq (http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/09/genetic-programming-mona-l...):

Q) Is this Genetic Programming?, I think it is a GA or even a hill climbing algorithm.

A) I will claim that this is a GP due to the fact that the application clones and mutates an executable Abstract Syntax Tree (AST).

Even if the population is small, there is still competition between the parent and the child, the best fit of the two will survive.

The link is now working.

The other issue with people like me who chronically over eat, is that asking me to eat 6 small meals a day is like asking an alcoholic to go to a bar 6 times a day but only order pepsi.

It's gotten even worse now with many fitness gurus strongly advocating 6 small meals a day.

A big part of a child's success in school has to do with parental involvement. Home schooled children, almost by definition, have highly involved parents. It would be interesting to compare home schooled children with regular children whose parents are actively involved in their education to see how that matched up.

How is the readability from a distance? Between the grain of the individual boards and their color it seems like there is less contrast and more "noise" when compared to a generic white board.

They do look nice though.

Does Scala fit your idea of something in between? It has nice type inference features and does not require pure immutability.

I haven't heard of one that does this. In fact an oft stated selling point of JVM based languages is the ability to call and interact with existing Java code and libraries.

For those who are interested there is also the classic arcade game Defender in a favicon: http://www.p01.org/releases/DEFENDER_of_the_favicon/

I enjoy Scala but I would say there is truth to 3 (phantom menace). Although tool support has improved markedly over the last couple of years I still get cases where the IDE is complaining about an error and I go nuts trying to fix it only to give up, run it anyway, and have the error just disappear.

If you spend too much time reading Scala blogs, you may get the impression that 6 (the type babel) is how many people write scala. A lot Scala bloggers like to write articles that exploit or examine clever aspects of the type system but it can be pretty impenetrable at times. At least to a blub like me.

One issue I have with this is that due to the commonality of spinners, I associate the wait cursor with waiting on the browser (memory issue, temporary CPU spike, large js script running) rather than an waiting on the results of an ajax request.

For me at least, using this technique would probably cause me to perceive the site as being slower or more resource intensive than it truly is.

I've paid for Sublime Text and think it's awesome. I primarily do Scala development and would like to use ST for it but the one thing I miss are highlighting errors in the source. Does anyone know a way to do this? I searched the ST forums to no avail.

Actually, what's endearing (or outright cool) is that he has been able to create an editor good enough that people are willing to pay $50 for it. With lots of free alternatives and big players it isn't the easiest niche to break into. The fact that he's been able to do this primarily on his own makes it more impressive.

It's a similar approach to the same problem. Code Bubbles make the jumping more palatable. I'm not sure you would need such a drastic change to the traditional IDE look to implement what I describe. You could (for instance) simply have the code (set off stylistically) expand in-line pushing the code below it down the screen. This would get rid of the jumping altogether.

Of course this approach raises its own issues. Can you expand a function within an expansion, how would that look, usability, and so on.

I wonder if this is something that could at least be partly offset by an IDE. Highlighting a function and instead of being able to jump to the definition, it sticks the code for that function where it is being called (initially, only as a view, offset stylistically).

That way you can expand the selections and see what is going on from an actual code standpoint without jumping from file to file, but you could jump to where the actual source is, if you want to go change it.

How many days in a row do you tend to fast for or is it something you just do now? I have started doing it and have found it not to be as difficult as I thought it would be.

For me, trying to eat 5-7 small meals a day is like asking an alcoholic to go to a bar 5-7 times a day but only order Pepsi. Also, people were always telling me that I should eat a good breakfast and lunch so that I wouldn't be as hungry at dinner time but that's not how it turned out for me. I ate the same amount at night regardless of what I ate before.

From a compliance stand point it has worked well; even though I don't eat during the day, I don't eat any more than usual at night. I do get some hunger pangs around 11 but they go away after a little while. It also feels good to be able to exert some control over a part of my life that I have struggled with.

There was an article (that I now cannot find) that claimed there was a positive effect of counterfeiting for high end fashion brands because it motivated buyers to more quickly move on to the latest version. Someone who is willing to spend $700 on a hand bag will get a newer version rather than hold onto the one they have when they see anyone and everyone sporting it.

That is a great book. It's well written and touches on details that most "physics for the masses" books skip. I also regret the use of the term God Particle though. I know he was being cheeky but it is all too easy for people to grab onto something like that and believe that this is some sort of religious quest.