The dilemma of population ethics
What's population ethics?A while back I read through this excellent introduction to population ethics:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/Popluation Ethics is about how to make...
View ArticleMaking graphene
This article piqued my interest, since it suggests that making graphene can be made cheaply and easily:http://hackaday.com/2012/03/20/print-your-own-supercaps/That article includes links to the March...
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Light bulb aisle
Big box stores are different in Phoenix. Here is a typical bike helmet:But most fascinating was their light bulb aisle, which extended across the entire length of the western wall of the store. It...
View ArticleShop Essentials
A friend of mine is building a treehouse for his kids, and it got me thinking about how I'd outfit an empty garage for that kind of work.These are the basic ingredients I had in my shop around the time...
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Wavy shelf
wavy-shelf.skp Next the Son, the Stunning-Cantab:He suggested curves of beauty,Curves pervading all his figure,Which the eye might follow onward,Till they centered in the breast-pin,Centered in the...
View ArticleSketchup 2013 with wine in linux
Tried to install Sketchup 2013 on Ubuntu Lucid, and it kept complaining about needing to install the Windows Imaging Component. Downloaded it:...
View ArticleFlour smells like soap
Recently a batch of bread I made had an aftertaste like soap. Then the next day my wife made pizza dough from the same flour and yeast, and it had the same effect.Searching online, I read about lactic...
View ArticleWater heater burner only runs for a second
If you're lighting a water heater and the pilot lights fine, but when the burner engages, you only get a brief puff of gas, check the gas shutoff valve for the house. Sometimes they leak, so that gas...
View ArticleSagulator
This is a really handy tool to figure out how much deflection to plan for when building wood structures:http://www.woodbin.com/calcs/sagulator.htmPlywood seems to do about as well as solid wood, and...
View ArticleRead text format protobuf from file in Java
java.io.InputStream inputStream = [open file and get input stream] java.io.InputStreamReader reader = new java.io.InputStreamReader(inputStream); MyProto.Builder myProtoBuilder =...
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Raspberry Pi GPIO pins to stepper controller
I picked up a 3-axis beefy NEMA-23 stepper kit from ebay that sell for around $240. It comes with a Longs Motor DM542A stepper controller, which seems to be more or less identical to a lot of other...
View ArticleChrome only supports one concurrent download per URL
Well this took me several hours to figure out: chrome will only let you have one download in progress from the same URL at the same time. The second attempt will just hang until the first one is...
View ArticleRichard Hamming: "You and Your Research"
This talk is worth re-reading every few years. I've copied the text in case the original site goes down.http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.htmlRichard Hamming``You and Your...
View ArticleOptimal Psychology
Here's an idea out of left field. I get the sense that most psych research is looking for economy at scale (easy things that make a small difference in entire populations) or narrow results (eg.,...
View ArticleOn Hydrogen Bombs
From "Turing's Cathedral", regarding the H-bomb:According to Oppenheimer, at a briefing given by Edward Teller and the RAND Corporation, Secretary of the Air Force Thomas K. Finletter "got to his feet...
View ArticleDeath, the destroyer of worlds
Lots of people know Oppenheimer's quote about being present at the Trinity test, the first man-made nuclear explosion: "We knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed, few people cried,...
View ArticleUsing xrandr instead of nvidia-settings
On my Linux Ubuntu 12.04 machine, the nvidia-settings app has been crashing, preventing me from changing screen resolution or refresh rate (I like to switch to 24fps for watching movies so that slow...
View ArticleSaving a variable number of matches from a Perl regex
Intuitively it seems like the regex /(.)+/ should return an array of all the characters in a string. It's a match group with a quantifier allowing it to repeat, after all. But in fact it only returns...
View Articlefopen() read/write/create/append brokenness
It's amazing how long fopen() has managed to be around while still having confusing behavior.The big culprit in my mind is the "a+" mode, which really ought to do the thing I want, which is to open the...
View ArticleNexus 4 USB tethering to Raspberry Pi is broken
I tried to get my raspi online by plugging it into my Nexus 4 via USB, then enabling USB tethering under Android's wireless settings dialog. The 'usb0' interface appeared briefly with ifconfig, but...
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