THANK you for that link. I'll try to read the thing this afternoon. I want to find out which metrics they ended up using!

Yeah, it's that "metric of complexity" which is the sticking point. There are a few which turn out to be useful (such as various definitions of fractal dimension, and multi-scale entropy). The thing is, the metrics never care where the numbers came from, so "accounting for erosion" isn't a factor at all. There are no "erosion numbers" and "footprint numbers" and "something-pooped-here" numbers. I'm sure that "2 girls 1 cup" would be off the charts for all of those metrics.

The sentence is fine, and makes perfect sense if you know what cluster analysis is. An English major, furthermore, would perhaps have used "detecting life" and some proper ellipses instead of "detecting live". :P

Aaaand I didn't read one of the given masses correctly. Damn it.

0.6% is NOT a small number. Unfortunately, it's also not NEARLY the right percentage, calculated from those given masses (technically: g-reduced weights, since mass is assumed invariant).

Awww, that's cute! The best thing out of PEAR was the name "Strip Mind Media". The only stuff coming out of there that isn't understood is the fact that someone thought that it should have been funded in the first place.

If you're not teaching or publishing, what the hell are you doing?

Actually doing the research which the publications should be based upon, and which will be taught in 30 years. Editing or writing textbooks. Pulling in grants which will pay for research equipment, laboratory space, materials and expendables, travel, publication costs, and incidentally feed, house, and clothe you, your students, and the higher-ups. Serving on administrative councils which are necessary evils, but massive time-sinks. Writing and running necessary simulations so that future research projects can be green- or red-lighted before these time-sinks are encountered again.

If you think that time researching in a University is spent either in the classroom, or at one's desk pumping out papers left and right, you're sorely mistaken.

The infamous "caring for your introvert" article from 2003's The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/03/caring-for-your-introvert/2696/

You basically said it all!

in 3... 2... 1...

Check into how this software works. It chooses a sparse set of data points, creates its "model", and then brings in more points to test against. I've used it (though not super seriously) and heard a talk by one of its creators. It's based upon a heuristic of finding the _most_surprising_, _worst_ matches to its guesses and then refining the model. In the sense that it is explicitly used to predict how well it fits to further actual, experimentally-obtained data points, your criterion of it being "tested against a physical environment to determine whether the predictions are correct" is exactly what it does.

... or... what was before that? I forget.
 

Ponies!!!11111!1 and hot grits.

You need to revisit KDE, if you left it when it was in the state you describe. I agree with the SQL database crap, but the stability issues have been worked out, at least for me, and I use all of the things you specifically mention.

I'm using Clementine on linux and Windows. It now has those two things (automated album art and lyrics fetching), at least on linux, and I think on Windows too.

Facetious or not, you seem to be spot-on with each of those points. That junk has given me fits each time I've installed KDE on a computer. It's not getting in my way quite as much now, but it sure isn't doing me any favors.

No.

Yes. And it's been done, repeatedly.