NASA’s Starliner decision was the right one, but it’s a crushing blow for Boeing
Enlarge / A Starliner spacecraft mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket before an unpiloted test flight in 2022. Boeing Ten years ago next month NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency’s most experienced contractors, won the lion’s share of government money available to end the agency’s sole reliance on Russia to ferry […]
Sticker on caption phone says that using the captions can be illegal. Why?
2 Answers
Guide to Error Handling in Rust
Are you overwhelmed by the amount of choice Rust gives us for handling errors? Confused about when to return a structured error type or a Box? Intimidated by Box
Parochialism in Time and Space (2021)
When people who haven’t been to America talk about it, they get their ideas from the distorted cliches of the media. A land of gun nuts and COVID deniers, rife with racism and obesity! This annoys me. I’ve lived in the US and have family there. I know these views are absurdly one-sided. People who’ve […]
Ruby in Jupyter Notebook
IRuby.display IRuby.table([1,2,[],3]) IRuby.display IRuby.table({a:1,b:2,c:3}) IRuby.display IRuby.table([[11,12,13,14],[21,22,23],’not an Array’,[31,32,33,34]]) IRuby.display IRuby.table({a:[11,12,13,14],b:[21,22,23],c:[31,32,33,34]}) IRuby.display IRuby.table([{a:1,b:2,c:3},’not an Array’,{a:2,b:3,c:4,e:5}]) IRuby.display IRuby.table([{a:1,b:2,c:3},{a:2,b:3,c:4,d:5},{0=>:x,1=>:y},[:a,:b,:c]])
How to run Valgrind on a CGI program in C
How to run valgrind on a CGI program in C There was still one bug left with mod_blog—it would crash with a memory corruption error (thanks to checking in glibc when doing a POST. I only found the bug because I was using the old web interface to make sure I had the right credentials […]
How a flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers
Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now. Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn’t read very well. “There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me,” she said. “When a teacher would dictate a […]
Neurotechnology Numbers Worth Knowing
In the tradition of Cell Biology by the Numbers, Physiology by Numbers, and Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know, here’s a collection of numbers worth knowing if you’re working in neurotechnology. You can also download this list as Anki flashcards. Having them memorized and at your fingertips is great for sanity checking ideas. I plan […]
Ruby’s official documentation just got a new look
Ruby is an interpreted object-oriented programming language often used for web development. It also offers many scripting features to process plain text and serialized files, or manage system tasks. It is simple, straightforward, and extensible. Features of Ruby¶ ↑ Simple Syntax Normal Object-oriented Features (e.g. class, method calls) Advanced Object-oriented Features (e.g. mix-in, singleton-method) Operator […]
Transfer energy from nitrogen to argon enables 2-wayl cascaded lasing in air
Schematic of bidirectional cascaded air lasing through photon exchange from nitrogen to argon. Credit: Zan Nie and Chan Joshi. To produce light, lasers typically rely on optical cavities, pairs of mirrors facing each other that amplify light by bouncing it back and forth. Recently, some physicists have been investigating the generation of “laser light” in […]