Author: Kyle
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Music To My Ears, and Eyes
I’m telling you, Julie Rehmeyer is fast becoming one of my favorite science writers. Her Science News Math Trek piece this week follows up on a paper by music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko that represents musical chords in hyperdimensional geometries. Even cooler than Rehmeyer’s very accessible written description of the work, though, are the accompanying videos…
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Acronym Ambiguity? Nope. Acronym Confusion? Nope…
I’ve been thinking a lot about acronyms today, specifically conflicting ones. For starters, I was interested to read this morning about the test flight of a plane powered by a pulse detonation engine. My enthusiasm was dampened, though, by (minor) confusion each time I read a subsequent reference to the aircraft, which sounds–when the acronym…
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Acronym Overload
I’ve been thinking a lot about acronyms today. For starters, I was dismayed to see that the new
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Big Ten Champs!
Thanks to my roommate’s awesome soon-to-be in-laws, I got to see the Badgers clinch a share of the Big Ten Championship tonight. It was a pretty serious blowout (not a word to all my Penn State alum coworkers, I promise), which was great fun on Senior Night. I’ve got no real insight here, I’m just…
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The Hacker Within VI
Today’s subject: another cool Emacs mode Just stumbled across an Emacs mode for editing input files for Los Alamos’s MCNP Monte Carlo radiation transport code. Since I’m now addicted to syntax highlighting, I definitely snatched this one up. Turns out it was written by Tim Bohm, who works right down the hall from me. Anyway,…
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[Insert Puppet Joke Here]
It’s been more than a year since something I actually wrote got published anywhere but on this blog, so I couldn’t help but post a link to my short write-up of an engineering-education-related talk Professor Greg Moses gave at a recent department colloquium. If you’ve got a second, you should also check out some of…
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“Hey Jesus, You Want Pizza or What?”
Part of our Lenten discipline at St. Francis House this year has been a weekly Movies with Meaning series. Admittedly, eating free food and watching movies on Monday nights hasn’t felt like much of a sacrifice compared to the usual “oh shoot, I didn’t do enough homework this weekend” tone of a typical Monday night.…
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Shake a Tail Feather
So I’m up doing some work and watching a little PBS, and I just saw something I simply had to share. The special I’m watching is on evolution in rain forests and how a few pieces of new technology have affected some studies of same. Thus, thanks the wonders of high-speed (and regular-speed) camera equipment,…
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Sunday Judgment VI
A couple of years ago, my one-a-day usage errors calendar (yes, I had one) went off mission for a page to tackle a pronunciation issue. I’ll take that as license to do likewise. To be honest, though, I think the author and an awful lot of other people make too big a deal about this…
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The Hacker Within: Baseball Edition
With a little help from geek and proud, I’m now able to listen to MLB.TV radio broadcast streams on Kermit, the Linux machine I work at. Using the MediaPlayerConnectivity plug-in Alan suggests and choosing Totem as the default player in the configuration wizard seems to do the trick on my system (“i686-redhat-linux-gnu” according to configure).…