Viewing profile — bluenose69

The Nature paper is open-access at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10871-3 in case folks want to read the details.

I get this sometimes when I ask the agent on GitHub to suggestion improvements to my Julia code. It's kind of fun to watch it struggle to please. I'm reminded of the old "Doctor" m…

Yes, that's a great book.

Ah, thanks for the information.

The curve on your diagram makes me think that you've fitted a normal (Gaussian) curve to the data. By eye, the distribution looks a bit more like log-normal, and so if you're still…

They are doing this also for the science version, the 15C. I bought a 15C in the 1980s, and have enjoyed it ever since. It is like a rock. Despite being treated roughly over the ye…

I agree with this entirely. I suppose it was partly an issue of limited floor space, but maybe the largest factor was that if a store sold junk mixed with good items, they could ge…

The article starts out by saying that Notepad++ "is a text editor popular among developers". Really?

The cursor changes when you get to resizing corners and edges, so I don't suffer from the problem pointed out in the original article. However, I do find something annoying: someti…

I work in a university environment. The teaching model is much like that proposed by the originator of this thread. Classes are 50 minutes instead of an hour (and similar for 1.5 h…

I've been in academia for more decades than I'd like to state, and I have never heard of an institute that covered article processing charges. I work in a natural science. Maybe th…

I use a phone app called 'transit' to find out where the buses are at any moment. It's a great app for a lot of reasons, but the reason I was drawn to it at first was their witty r…

I agree 100% with what I think is the key phrase, viz. "the results can change without any modification to your code". I maintain an R package that is quite stable and is widely us…

The oral discussion does not scale well in large classes. The solution is to stop using essays for evaluation, relying on (supervised) examinations instead. Of course, there will b…

I just tried the same prompt in chatGPT and it gave 10 errors. Mostly they were because it was using `#` as a comment character, which suggests that it has not been given very much…

Yup, that's pretty bad. But, as an old fart with old eyes, I now use Safari and click the 'reader' version on many sites. Frankly, the web in it's early years was preferable to muc…

I've never seen a publisher's template that was hard to work with. The process of writing in latex for journals (and textbooks -- I've written for both things) is really very easy.…

I've started using typst for small local documents that I would previously have written in markdown (or R-markdown). Typst offers programming features that are very helpful for sma…

The cleanest one caught my eye, and then I read that it was a restaurant, Cy's, that was in Moncton, NB, about half an hour's drive from where I grew up. Although I never ate there…

Yes, the noise (which I'd call "the sound") is a big factor. I teach in a classroom that had blackboard that had stood the test of time for decades. When it was replaced with a whi…

I agree. Here are some things that I (a science researcher and professor) like about R and CRAN: 1. There are a lot of build checks for problems involving mismatches between docume…

The author is a good writer, able to expand upon (and illustrate) ideas articulately and convincingly. However, quite a lot of this doesn't quite apply to actual practice in educat…

Regarding the phrase "imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable" in the text, I'm old enough to know what has changed. Today, man…