rnadna

I think the answer re tables is the meta-answer for linux generally: copy somebody else who has solved the problem. The Apple IOS-OSX dichotomy comes to mind as something to ape.

I fall into a similar misdirected-focus trap, but mine is simpler: I waste an embarrassing amount of time in editing the wrong damned file. After a sequence of small tweaks that yield no change in the results, I make a huge change and see nothing, and then realize that I've done it yet again. I need to write a vim macro that blanks the screen every few minutes, displaying the message "are you SURE this is the right file?"

The journal owns the copyright, not the author.

Re "deprivation ... from everybody"...

I was told once that the typical paper in my field gets only two serious readers, beyond the reviewers. (The joke is that it gets only two, including three reviewers.)

Of course, it is impossible to know who has read a paper, and that may explain why I've never seen the number written down. Still, it's easy to count citations. In my field, strong papers get perhaps a dozen citations. My guess is that no more than a quarter of citations indicates a thorough reading, so we indeed get a readership that could be counted on one hand.

For an author, a big factor is page charges. A popular [society, noncommercial] journal that I use has a special deal for providing content to readers for free. It "only" costs 3K. At that rate, the one or two potential readers who lack a university subscription could just phone me and I could buy them a ticket to visit, where I could explain the work in person.

I downloaded the new version, and tried it on a docx file that a colleague had sent me. In MSword, the file has 24 pages. In LibreOffice, it seems to have a bit over 5 pages. No error message, no dialog box ... it just gets to a certain string ($O_2$, expressed in latex format) and stops. If not for the fact that I have MSword, I'd email back to my colleague and ask her what the heck kind of a draft manuscript she was sending.

Although I use the Excel copy quite a lot (for grading), I have yet to see the Word copy function properly in a professional document of any realistic complexity.

I know, I should report the bug, but the material I'm looking at is under submission to a scientific journal, and will therefore be private until it may be published.

Security of data is a moral concern in some circles (e.g. academics outside the USA are quite wary of the Patriot Act) and a legal one in others (e.g. privacy of medical and financial information). Some jurisdictions have specific laws about certain types of data not being hosted across a border. These things may be disagreeable to some, but they certainly are not delusions.

Mathematica provides symbolic computation, R does not.

In case it's of any interest, below is code in the R language that produces time-series graphs for two provinces in Canada.

    fluPlot <- function(country="ca", regions="Nova.Scotia")
    {
        url <- sprintf("http://www.google.org/flutrends/intl/en_us/%s/data.txt", country)
        d <- read.csv(url, skip=11, header=TRUE)
        n <- length(regions)
        t <- as.POSIXct(d[["Date"]])
        for (i in 1:n) {
            if (i == 1) {
                plot(t, d[[regions[i]]], xlab="", ylab=regions[i], type='l', col=i)
                grid()
            } else {
                lines(t, d[[regions[i]]], col=i)
            }
        }
        legend("top", col=1:n, lwd=par('lwd'), legend=regions, bg='white')
    }
    par(mar=c(2, 2, 2, 2), mgp=c(2, 0.7, 0))
    fluPlot("ca", c("Ontario", "Nova.Scotia"))

Me too. And I didn't realize that made me old, until scanning this thread. I guess time flies.

Not only is this a great thing (well, everything about github is pretty great) but now I know that the funny icon can be called "breadcrumb".

Fifteen years ago, people would have found this interesting.

It might be my eyes, but the video is too blurry to be of much use. A couple of paragraphs would have been preferable.

I've not used mathematica in a long time, and I forgot how crazy-ugly the graphs are. The cartoonish legend in the Out[18] graph is a case in point, almost a lesson in what not to do, in terms of distracting from the content.

The syntax ain't pretty either, but one does get used to that, of course.

PS. opminion is right: the unit weaving is pretty strange. But the content of the posting is interesting enough to make me think "oh well, it's just another yank" and keep reading.

They worked in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Countries rely on ethical breaches by the military, so these 'moral' robots are a non-starter.