Corran

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• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  Disclaimers: Python's been my primary programming language for well over 25 years at this point (well before it was my day job); and my boss is one of the original SciPy authors, so to say I'm fairly deep in the...
• Commented on Bad news day
  A law requiring Americans to vote - and fining them if they don't - would likely improve the percentage of people who vote. On the other hand, would these forced voters cast responsible ballots? Australia is a worked example...
• Commented on Omicron
  Macports is a bit ... eccentric: I'd strongly recommend Homebrew instead. Yes, but unfortunately the step-by-step install instructions are based on Macports with no Homebrew equivalent. It'll do for the goal at hand (getting PyNomo up and running with...
• Commented on Omicron
  IIRC Python also works this way, with the added twist of saving the bytecode as a .pyc which acts as a cache for the compilation step. This is basically correct for the standard Python runtime - it compiles through...
• Commented on Omicron
  To put this in more concrete terms, lets suppose I want to start with nomographs. Here is a project that generates them using Python. http://pynomo.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page Can you point me to a good place to learn what I need to...
• Commented on Omicron
  The problem is that the standard for documentation and examples is set by the full time professionals maintaining larger packages. Like log4j, to pick a topical example. I can't speak for log4j or the Javascript world, but NumPy (which...
• Commented on Omicron
  The documentation is rubbish. Some of it is vague and a lot of it isn't presented with examples which can make life awkward. yeah, you can find lots of help on line, but the manual should be the first...
• Commented on Omicron
  Actually, one of my retirement projects is learning Python. Any advice for someone just getting started, who has a creaky old iMac (and an even creakier MacPro)? As long as they are Intel machines, you can probably get a...
• Commented on Omicron
  If you're comfortable with Python there is an open-source, pip-installable Python package provided by PHE that consumes the web API, and which includes basic documentation and examples. It's about 5 lines of code to get things into a Pandas dataframe,...
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  Apologies for the mis-attributed response in #649, was responding to #634....
• Commented on A death in the Firm
  (These people are working engineers and scientists, not PR people; worth watching more of the video.) Learned today that some of the open source science libraries I've worked on to were used by this team - almost certainly not on...
• Commented on What happens now?
  Mine were Stratton and Tynan. I also mostly hung out in the library... I think we discovered this connection a while back. ISTR there's a 3rd ex-Woollahra here too, but more a lurker rather than a frequent commenter (Hi!). (Waves!)...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  I'm struggling to understand the high level of how it could work that way. For hybrids like the Prius, they are generally more efficient in city vs. highway driving (where standard internal combustion is usually the other way around), but...
• Commented on The Laundry Files: an updated chronology
  There's some very handwavy arguments in that piece. This one - about how much information is needed to specify a game of life containing intelligent life - is particularly special: I’m not an expert, but I think an initial configuration...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  So, a giant revival for Traveler! (Except classic Traveler was absolutely not a game where you could go full murder hobo and expect to survive your first combat, so I'm guessing there'd be a bunch of updates to make it...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  And to get back to the matter at hand - I have no clue how this election will turn out, and my own personal voting choices won't make a huge difference regarding brexit. Where I live the choice is between...
• Commented on The obligatory general election discussion post
  Former professional mathemtician here (and in analysis, too, so putting my biases up front). The problem with restricting yourself to the rationals isn't continuity (you can play epsilon-delta games just fine with rational numbers) or infinitesimals (the 2x2 matrix [[0...
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  So I wrote up a small python script to do Monte Carlo simulations of various strategies. There's a little fuzziness in the description about how things reset after a GFC, and the exact behaviour of "head on a pike" (ie....
• Commented on Story time!
  While a Poseidon drone in the Waikato would probably mess up the North Island pretty badly, Taupo is at the top of a multi-dam hydro-electric system, with the Huka Falls just before you'd get to Taupo proper. So no nuclear...
• Commented on Brexit! Means! Brexit!
  I am a little surprised that no one has put forward the one obvious way that Brexit can be a success: the return of King Arthur. As prophesied, at Britain's Darkest Hour, with the risk of the UK becoming a...
• Commented on Do my Homework
  Noted, and apologies for taking the discussion in unproductive directions....
• Commented on Do my Homework
  The ethnic cleansing in the Second American Civil War won't be black vs white, it will be Democrat vs Republican. There may well be racist overtones, but that will mostly be due to the fact that most african-americans are Democrats....
• Commented on Do my Homework
  we'd be having fewer problems if there were enough people around who remembered that Nazis are bad and should be shut out of political life. Or possibly we would have a bunch of very experienced Nazis running a country who...
• Commented on Do my Homework
  I'm mid 60s. The people I know who are older than me (a fairly diverse group), especially in their 70s and 80s seem to want things to stop changing. I'm a decade younger, but for at least 20 years I've...
• Commented on Do my Homework
  A Second American Civil War won't be some states breaking away and using their National Guards against Federal forces; it'll be white people in rural areas conducting ethnic cleansing, or forming militias to raid urban centers, and then using insurgent...
• Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
  Perhaps I didn't explain where I was coming from well enough. That could take a very long time: here's something I wrote in 2007 on that topic. My suspicion is that it would still fill up surprisingly fast: the only...
• Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
  I'm not up to speed with the latest SF or research on generation ships - the closest thing I've read recently would have been Seveneves which I found a bit unsatisfying - but one thing I haven't seen discussed is...
• Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
  Indeed, it would be worth a blog post exploring this. So much has happened in the past few years that it's hard to remember that Trump's campaign used paid actors for it's original launch[1] so that it is certainly part...
• Commented on Not dead but dreaming
  Meanwhile, machine learning is being applied to the Vatican Secret Archives... Not quite as dramatic as it sounds at first blush, of course: just a fancy OCR system for handwritten Latin text. But shades of Laundry and "Nine Billion Names...
• Commented on Test Case
  Aff, trust a writer to spot the non-native speakers! Sadly I have no such excuse, and this sort of thing does annoy me when I notice it ("tow the line" instead of "toe the line" gets me in particular). Plus...