kowen
Joined 17 years ago
Karma
130
Submissions
56
Member since
Jan 5
Programmer; background in molecular biology.
Kind of obsessive. Clever t-shirts make me inordinately happy.
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Comment · 16 years ago
I've had some success playing with wordoid.com to come up with "name-ey" or "word-ey" names.
Comment · 16 years ago
7--who the hell uses anything other than pinyin? I see Wade-Giles occasionally but that's typically for family names.
My sister uses bo-po-mo-fo a great deal - but then she's in Taiwan, not mainland China.
Comment · 16 years ago
I paid my way through college doing medical transcription. Throughout my time there, the hospital was experimenting with speech recognition, but the success rate was very low, and the doctors spent a lot of time going over and correcting the output. I believe they finally ditched the voice recognition software (though I do not know for sure).
I'm guessing that the reason the experiment failed at this hospital is that the language was non-English. In addition, most of the doctors were foreign, speaking with wildly differing accents. Also, many of the doctors would mix two languages when dictating, in addition to the usual Latin terms.
Basically, it was easier to just pay some humans to parse it.
Comment · 16 years ago
I second (third?) this. You can also use a ViaJet (some people prefer it).
You can use salt and/or baking soda as antibacterials in the water you use for irrigation.
If you add irrigation to your routine, you may want to switch out dental floss with dental tape and "buff" your teeth (floss:tape as thread:ribbon - buffing with a thread doesn't work too well). Makes a huge difference in the buildup of plaque.
Lastly, disclosing tablets or solution (picking one at random from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000W6LW6I) is not just for kids. Using it for a few weeks or months could help you see where your tooth brushing technique is a bit weak.
Comment · 16 years ago
One discovery that kind of blew my mind a few months back was approvals. I've seen the entire bowling game kata done with a single test.
It's a bit different to code against a failing approval when doing TDD; you still code in very small increments, but you don't necessarily get to green immediately. Slightly disturbing if you feel somewhat obsessive about seeing the green bar.
Locking down legacy code is beautiful. There is a screencast where the guys who developed approvals lock down a battleship game, generating about 8000 lines of output, not even glancing at them, and then refactoring the hell out of it.
Comment · 16 years ago
This gets even more embarrassing if you're used to typing in dvorak. I can never remember the actual keys I use to perform certain actions - my fingers obviously know how, but my brain has no longer retained the actual mapping. And I can't just look down at the keyboard to figure out which key it is, since I don't have a dvorak keyboard, just remapped the qwerty one to use the dvorak layout.
Comment · 16 years ago
> Just ask any man who has spent twenty minutes waiting for a woman to put on her face, only to find that she looks hardly different when she comes out from the bathroom than she did when she went in.
> It makes evolutionary sense for women to invest heavily in being good-looking
It seems like it would only make evolutionary sense if the males noticed the difference.
Comment · 16 years ago
The speaker in the TED video didn't actually say that people weren't motivated by carrots in the tasks that required creative thought, just that carrots didn't improve performance in those situations.
Comment · 16 years ago
The female engineers I know seem to approach "everything as a problem to be solved" too.
Comment · 16 years ago
Interesting! I wonder if people know this instinctively, or we just sort of pattern match in the background and pick up on it.
Comment · 16 years ago
Yes, "why" would be extremely interesting!
It would appear that the research on the subject is somewhat spotty and often gets misinterpreted, sometimes at the source.
I found a book on amazon the other day called Pink Brain, Blue Brain by neuroscientist Lise Elliot, which is next up on my reading list.
http://www.amazon.com/Pink-Brain-Blue-Differences-Troublesom...
One study I read about described a situation where the researchers bundled the same baby up and told some people that it was a boy and others that it was a girl. The people who thought it was a girl tended to comfort the baby when it got fussy, and the people who thought it was a boy tended to try to distract it.[1] Subtle, but I can imagine that there are other ways that we train girls to be more 'face to face'.
[1] from http://www.amazon.com/Failing-At-Fairness-Schools-Cheat/dp/0... --marred by some selection bias in the data they used, but very interesting nonetheless.
Comment · 16 years ago
Somewhat arbitrarily this brings LOLCODE to mind.
Comment · 16 years ago
Have you tried the readability bookmarklet?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=501970