itsjareds

Maybe we're discussing different definitions of the word "depression" here, but depression isn't simply "walked off" or fixed with a change of perspective. To suggest so both ignores the reality of depression as a mental illness and repeats the same myth that people who are depressed are just confusing themselves.

Desktop, I'm not sure. Being primarily a laptop user, I find myself missing the superior power management that comes with using the default OS and original drivers. I started with a Windows laptop with a short battery life, where ekeing out every little bit of extra juice was important, to a MacBook Pro that does very well at conserving battery. (Much better than stock Ubuntu/Linux Mint, at least.) The gestures in Mac OS and the HiDPI support are important to me too. I'm a pretty average laptop user, though, so I don't know that I'm the intended audience.

I do miss having a proper package manager. Homebrew is just okay.

Yes, I'm about to finish up my undergrad CS degree, and Amdahl's Law came up in at least three separate classes, most notably my computer architecture course and my operating systems course. Side note, we were assigned to read Soul of a New Machine and the Pentium Chronicles in the computer architecture course, and most everyone enjoyed the books.

That is an awesome idea. I can imagine it would be cool in your standard one-on-one fighting games where the music could get more intense when then battle becomes more intense.

Could you then modify the definition to "for all n >= 0, n! is the product of natural numbers <= n"? That sounds kind of like the definition "f(0) = 1; f(n) = (n-1)! * n, n > 0".

How is the HiDPI support in this version? I'm afraid to go to the trouble of making a live usb if everything is small.

I guess we find the same problems in the wild enjoyable. I spent a few nights procrastinating on homework to brainstorm how I could try to find the most efficient walking path between points on campus. I figured that I would need to be able to represent the campus on some sort of plane where each point has a value referring to its elevation, and then finding the geodesic. I figured I could refer to some physiology literature and find if anyone has tabulated average energy expenditures for walking at different grades (downhill, flat, or uphill). Now, my math skills are really sub-par (haven't gotten past single variable calculus), so this question had me asking various physicist friends how to solve the problem. I just found myself learning along the way.

I'm curious how you determined efficiency for each of the candidate walking patterns. Did you compare only the traveled distance, or did you also take into account the energy spent per unit distance? I think that could make a difference if, for example, you had these walking strategies:

Walking strategy S => A "normal" human gait, except you travel in an squiggle path (i.e. not a straight line) to your destination.

Walking strategy T => Do continuous jumping jacks while walking, but continue in a straight path.

S may travel a longer distance, but will exert less energy overall and therefore be more efficient than T. Now, that's a pathological scenario, but I wonder if your walking pattern could have the same issue where you are actually exerting more energy despite walking a shorter distance. It'd be interesting to do more research on the biophysics of how your body moves.

I love this! I found it funny that the heart sends out those little shockwaves on the ventricular diastole (when the heartbeat relaxes) as opposed to when it contracts.

For what it's worth, everything looks fine for me on Mac OS using Chromium 42.0.2308.0, Firefox 36.0.4, and Safari 8.0.5 (10600.5.15).

My university is one of the universities listed in the article for having issues with Yik Yak. The university president was rumored to be considering banning the app, which is a functionality supported by the creators to fence off a certain geographical region. The yaks made in my area can get particularly nasty, but I'm not sure what the appropriate response should be. Most of them aren't specific enough to be illegal - inciting violence, harassment, etc.

Comments made on Yik Yak also was a big motivator for a series of protests on my campus around the time of the Ferguson protests, which is unusual for a socially conservative campus with little social activism.

As with a pure democracy, in order for market forces to work, you have to assume that the individuals really want what is best for them or best for society at large. Pure capitalism isn't going to solve many serious problems that can be attributed to tragedy of the commons -- pollution, fuel efficiency, etc. -- because not everyone is an expert in those areas, and I don't fault them for that. Likewise with issues like racial and gender discrimination, if those decisions were left up to individuals to decide whether they "want" to promote fairness to marginalized people, then I can assure you that the status quo would not change. Market forces can fix many things, but they won't fix societal issues way larger than the individual -- or at least not in a timely manner.