1. July 2008 by emeris.

mex api

Posted in computer | No Comments »

25. May 2008 by emeris.

More space links. Sadly, unlike the plucky little rovers around the equator, it seems this one will not survive it’s first winter.

asymptotia

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

7. May 2008 by emeris.

Check out the order of the most popular list. A story about a TV show is doing better than stories about last night’s election results. It’s not even clear to me why CNN is reporting on American Idol (or dancing with the stars) at all, it’s not something I would consider news compared to 1) the disaster in Burma 2) the primaries 3) the Russians swore in a new president (will have to send Bush over to look in to his soul…oh wait Putin is still in charge never mind) 4) new FBI raids on the executive branch

Posted in Pop Culture, politics, cause I feel like it | 1 Comment »

5. May 2008 by emeris.

47 Years

Dog Physics

Posted in space, physics | No Comments »

4. May 2008 by emeris.

Somehow I missed this post when it went up. All I really have to add is to say “Go read the older wiser physicist”.

Posted in physics, Pop Culture, science | No Comments »

3. May 2008 by emeris.

It makes me sad when people abuse science in the name of ripping people off. It makes me sadder when people claim to explain the science being used and muddle it even more.

For example: http://bellasugar.com/1073289 (which I am not linking to because I don’t want to help their google ranking at all (I know google regularly crawls this page)).  First they define an ion, while linking to wikipedia, and still get it wrong. Typically “atomic particles” is referring to the constituents of atoms. Second they claim that ionic hair driers are faster by “…breaking down water molecules into smaller bits…” which strikes me as nonsense. If this were a major factor in drying the hair, it should also cause a fair amount of damage to your skin as well.

I briefly contemplated signing up for the site to make these comments, but then I thought of this xkcd and decided to write a blog post instead.

To see other people pointing out people who are wrong on the internet see here. Teh stoopid, it burns!

Posted in bad science, bug, physics | 1 Comment »

30. April 2008 by emeris.

I work primarily in matlab(2007b 64bit) on a group computational server, hence my main mode of access to the server is through ssh with X forwarding. The problem is that on my laptop I am running the ubuntu 8.04 (32bit) with the compiz eye candy turned on and the java jre does not get along with compiz (from what I gather it has to do with something about repainting frames and swing waiting for the window manager to do that, but compiz never does this so java based programs sit there with grey screens forever, this is a bug in the JRE not a bug in linux and has been fixed in newer releases). The simple solution would be to turn off the eye candy, but some of it does in fact add to productivity (particularly when going from matlab window <-> emacs for code <-> firefox for matlab documentation given the limited desktop space on a laptop screen some of the window manager features are very nice) so after poking around for a bit I found this:
http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1003847#post1003847

The summary is that matlab (version 2007b) uses java1.6.0, but installing java1.6.0u6 (java 6 update 6 (the forum claims that update 5 also works which is a claim I saw else where)) and the running
$export MATLAB_JAVA=(location of java1.6.0_6)

everything works wonderfully.  This needs to be done on the computational server as that is the jre that is running matlab, not my local version.

Posted in bug, computer, linux | No Comments »

11. April 2008 by emeris.

This blogging thing is harder than it appears. There are a lot of things in real life that do a good job of providing ample distraction from this activity. On the bright side my life has been going well

Posted in random | No Comments »

19. March 2008 by emeris.

This is pretty cool.

Nice when markets work the way they are supposed to due to some technology . The penny summery, fisherman in India got mobile phones, their waste dropped to zero, their average profit went up, and the consumer price went down. This is postulated, as I understood it, to be because they now had the ability to call multiple beach front markets and determine where their fish would sell best before having to land, thus the distribution of fish became more efficient.

Posted in Econ, politics | No Comments »

15. March 2008 by emeris.

A follow up to the last post on the space shuttle launch, a link to NASA’s Page for the space shuttle.

People may say what they want about the scientific use of the shuttle and the ISS and how you can get more results per dollar with robots than you can with people, which is undoubtedly true, but it is no where as near as cool. Additionally we have invested a lot of money, time, and brain power in manned flight over the past 50 years. If we do not keep at least a token manned space program all of the knowledge and expertise that we have gained will be lost. And did I mention it’s really cool!

Posted in space | No Comments »