A couple of years ago I installed Damn Small Linux on a Gateway 2000 I pulled out of a dumpster. It was a 486 machine, and DSL worked reasonably well. DSL came with vim and I installed elinks from a .deb and compiled Pine and pretty soon had the same setup I did in the computer lab back in 1992. In September 2012 DSL put out their first release in 4 years, with very minimal changes from their 2008 release. I assume that it will still work on a 486. I don't know if a distro with a 2.4.31 kernel can be called "modern", but at least it's "recent".

As a baseball fan, I have read literally dozens of articles and hundreds of message boards rants on this subject. If you're interested, a little wading through Baseball Think Factory will allow you to relive the endless re-hashings at your leisure. More generally, this sort of statistical talk is very common among a certain segment of baseball fandom, and is (as has been mentioned before) the milieu from which Nate Silver emerged.

What's interesting about this specific issue is that Cabrera vs. Trout has been painted as a traditionalists vs. stat-heads vote, but an argument for Trout can be made with no reference to advance statistics. It goes like this:

Trout's traditional "slash line" (batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage) is very similar to Cabrera's. Cabrera hit for more power, but otherwise they are nearly equal. Trout's home ballpark is harder to hit in than Cabrera's. Trout led the league in stolen bases with 49, Cabrera had 4. Cabrera grounded into 28 double plays, most in the league. Trout grounded into 7. Cabrera is a poor defensive player, Trout is an outstanding defensive player. Trout's team even had a better record than Cabrera's, even though Cabrera's Tigers made the playoffs and Trout's Angels didn't.

Nothing in that argument requires anything more complicated than the division required to work out batting average and the like. The fact that Trout's candidacy has been painted as just the result of statistical mumbo jumbo is ridiculous.

(It should be pointed out that there is a lot of mumbo jumbo in baseball's defensive statistics. They are not at all mature yet, and are heavily influenced by very subjective inputs. This is part of why I prefer the non-statistical argument for Trout. When someone says that Trout's glove was worth 2.1 wins above a replacement player (the number given at Baseball Reference he is speaking with a false precision. Silver, it should be noted, doesn't fall into this trap, and I should say that Sean Foreman at Baseball Reference doesn't believe that his 2.1 win number is anything more than an educated guess.)

Apple are totally going to sue Fu Xi for starting the iChing in 2850 BC. All I can say is that it's a good thing for Fu that he's dead. And fictional.

It's been available for years in other places; my partner wrote her dissertation on 17th century science, and used scans of Hooke from a couple of online sources. The National Library of Medicine has a beautiful flash version of it. There is a decent version at the University of Wisconsin. It's at archive.org in a nice scan. The PG edition is very good, an original spelling transcription with scans of the original plates. IIRC there's also a scanned edition in the (pay access) database Early English Books Online. So this is not news at all.

But it's always a good time to look at Hooke. His illustrations really are astonishingly beautiful, and weren't bested for a century or more, and the text conveys something of the wonder to be the first person to *ever* see these things. It's pretty astonishing to imagine what that might have felt like. Hooke not only first saw cells, he coined the word in its biological sense, because he thought the cells in cork bark looked like the cells that monks live in. Hooke was a polymath, a successful mathematician, an architect and inventor, and by all accounts a very good musician. He was also apparently a bit unpleasant and a little crazed, but genius is allowed these things (at least when it's no longer around to annoy you)

Regardless of your findings...which if done soundly with regard to the science of numbers...you'd get roasted over a public open fire and branded a racist.

Uh, if I did your study in the US and released my numbers, the newspaper headline would be "Study Finds Blacks Poorer than Whites". I don't think I'd get raked over any coals for that.

You start getting into hot water when you talk about causes. Your study would just demonstrate an easily visible fact, and doesn't prove or really even suggest anything about anything relating to causation. If you want to say that the cause of this is somehow genetic, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot of work to convince people, and yes, you're probably going to be branded a racist. Part of this is political correctness, sure, but a lot more of it is the fact that most previous efforts towards establishing an evolutionary explanation for poverty were little more than pseudo-scientific hackwork. The history of the field is very, very unpleasant, and that naturally makes most of us think unpleasant thoughts about current practitioners.

The other major issue is that you want me to look at the "genetic profiles" of people in various government programs and also "adjust for % of each race in the the nation". But the problem is that a race isn't a genetic profile. To use the obvious US example, we call African-Americans a "race", while studies have shown that Africa has more genetic diversity than any other continent. So you'd expect that the genetic makeup of a group of people descended from Africans would be more heterogeneous than that of a group of people without any (or many) African ancestors. (This of course ignores that most Africans dragged to the Americas came from a relatively small section of the continent, but it also ignores the fact that most African-Americans have a little bit of everything in their ancestry. It should roughly even it out.) The point is that it'd be really hard to explain the socioeconomic fate of an extremely genetically diverse "race" on the base of genetics, unless you could find a few very specific sets of genes causing economic backwardness or something. I mean, maybe they exist, maybe they're out there. Good luck. But it's really, really doubtful.

I have relatives in the Midwest of the US that apparently don't pay per litre, but in every other country I've ever been, water usage is metered just like electricity or any other utility.

Yea, we call that "having a well."

FYI, having a well is far from free.

The largest city in the Midwest only has metered water for a small percentage of houses. For everyone else you are charged a flat fee. Chicago is trying to convince people to install meters, saying that metered water can result in lower bills if you use less than what you'd be billed for. So what's happening is that people who use very little water are installing meters and people who use a lot don't. This shouldn't be a big deal because we have a truly massive lake right beside the city, but the water level is a problem because they reversed the Chicago River to flow out of Lake Michigan rather than into it. Anyway, as of late September, only 41% of Chicago water accounts were metered.

So, what you're saying is that we return to the era prior to copyright (say, before the 1700's just to have a nice, rounded number), all of the authors will no longer have any motivation to publish just like before that time? No one will bother publishing works like Romeo & Juliet (or any of Shakespeare's books, for that matter), Beowolf (before copy right as a concept even existed) or any other works because of lack of copyright protection?

Well, there was great literature before copyright protection, but there was vastly more after it. Some of this is due to technology, demographics, economics, and so forth. But some of it isn't. The first copyright provision passed in 1710. The explosion of the novel, which is entirely a printed form, came after that date. Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and Defoe was not only a crusader for copyright protections but also possibly the first person in England to be able to make a living by writing prose. Copyright made the professional writer possible.

Romeo & Juliet is a good example, actually. 16th and 17th century plays were written for the stage and printed as an afterthought, often in pirated (if we can use that term) editions. As a result we've lost a pretty large percentage of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, because why print them if someone can pirate them and kill your profits? Or, even worse, what if the rival theater company across the street puts on your play without having to pay you a shilling for it? We know of at least two Shakespearean plays (Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won) that are lost because they were never printed. If Shakespeare had had copyright protection, would it have been worth his time to publish them?

I think that the way copyright protection has been so abused by US corporate interests can sometimes blind us to the value of it. Our current system of unending copyright is very clearly bad, but a reasonable form of copyright is very clearly good. It frees writers from the requirements of patronage, it increases cultural output, and it provides a monetary incentive for making that production public.

The microSD card is a huge plus to me. Assuming the build quality is similar to the previous generation of Nooks, the big Nook will be the first 9"+ tablet with a microSD card, bluetooth, a solid build quality, an a debut price under $300. You can get an Asus EEE Pad Slider for $299, but it sold at ~$400 before this, and the build of the Archos and Le Pan devices didn't impress me when I played with them at my local MicroCenter.

I think that this is a really big deal -- bluetooth, the expansion slot, and a solid build quality will finally mean that there's a proper netbook replacement in the budget range. The Nook Color sort of worked like this, but the bluetooth required Cyanogenmod and is pretty wonky even then, and it's only a 7" device. The Nexus is nice, but you're stuck with the 7" model and there's no microSD slot. Samsung has a $250 device with most of what I want, but it's only a 7" device and there you're effectively paying a $50 premium over the Nexus just for the microSD. So the large Nook really does feel like a big deal to me. If it takes after the Nook Color more than the Nook Tablet in terms of being easy to root and to mod then I'll buy one the day it gets released. Even if it isn't I might buy one anyway.

If it doesn't freeze in the corn belt again this year, like it didn't last year, it would be a good crop to attempt, as it could easily offset feed costs, and avoid "graining" their cattle on refuse gummybears.

Just for the record, last winter was among the warmest ever, but it definitely did freeze here in the corn belt. Davenport, Iowa (for example) had subfreezing temperatures 4 times in October 2011, its first low in the teens on November 17th, and its first day with a subfreezing high on December 5. Buckwheat is a good cool-weather crop, but it isn't very frost-tolerant. It's too in the year late for it.

This is just a mild corrective to the parent. Buckwheat is an excellent alternative to corn, but for earlier in the season.

A quick search of eBay shows that potions are still for sale. For example, here is a love potion (the listing includes some vaguely NSFW images). They say, "I am happy to bring to you a special cast potion that me and the covens that joined us brought forth on Samhain/ Halloween night! [...] This is a guaranteed powerful mix to get you the results you need." That's pretty clearly a magical potion. With a guarantee!

Browsing the metaphysical section also brings up vast quantities of magic items -- 41,706 items under "Crystal Healing", for example. There's also orgone protection for your cell phone and a dust that attracts money. I'm curious -- has eBay banned the sale of magical services -- curses, etc. -- but not magical items? Or are these listings just slipping through the cracks? If it's just services that have been banned, then the complaint in TFA about holy water being sold is completely specious. And even if some physical items have been banned, the continued presence of lots of orgone accumulators and healing crystals suggests that eBay isn't working from purely pro-Christian motives. (Yes, I know about the category of natural magic that can in theory be squared with Christian belief. I don't think eBay is capable of being that subtle.)

And take heart, magic users -- a search for the word "grimoire" turns up 24 pages of items. Even if they've banned the sale of curses, no reason you can't still roll your own!

I can tell you where the idea comes from. It comes from the idiotic idea that doing a research paper on a topic that has already been researched a million times before is useful in any way shape or form. It comes from the notion that you can teach PROPER research procedures on dummy(fake/psuedo) research projects.

IF you want to fix the problem, fix the process. Make it REAL research, on things that matter to the kids. Yeah that means more work for teachers, but teachers are supposed to be teaching, and not teaching by rote.

You can't do original research until you learn what is already known, which by definition will be something that someone has already done. There is no way around this problem. No teacher can generate large numbers of projects that are both 1.) simple enough for an introductory student, and 2.) examples of original research. The easy stuff has been done in most fields.

On the Cliff's Notes issue -- I just looked in WorldCat and got over 10,000 hits for Hamlet as a subject. This will include multiple entries for lots of titles (different editions, the German translation, etc.), but you're still looking at 4,000+ books published on the topic, in addition to no one knows how many scholarly journal articles. Do you really think that a high school English teacher is going to be able to come up with an idea for original research on Hamlet that hasn't been covered in one of the previous 20,000 publications on the topic? And then come up with another one for her second and third period classes as well? And then do it all over again next year? Not possible. If she could do that she'd have won a MacArthur Grant and would be running the Renaissance studies program at Harvard. The same problem applies (to a less extreme extent) to every book in and around the Western canon. Now, a good teacher will know what's in Cliff's Notes and whatever it's Web equivalents are, and will assign work on something they don't include. But that's as close to original research as you can get with the average student.

Amazon is thought to have approximately 20% share in total book sales in 2011, so it may still be fairly indicative of the market as a whole.

Except brick-and-mortar stores don't really offer e-books, and Amazon is a skewed sample as they're pretty much the champion of digital book purveyance. So no, not fairly indicative at all I'd say.

On this recent episode of Open Book on BBC Radio 4 a guest said that ebook sales in the UK account for something like 12-15% of total book sales. He said it was about 40% in the US, and that the UK numbers are pretty fuzzy because Amazon is the only significant player in the UK ebook market and they don't release their figures.

We can try to check this out for ourselves: If we guesstimate that Amazon accounts for 80% of UK ebook sales and (as per the grandparent post) 20% of total sales, and that their ebook sales are 55% of their book sales, we arrive at ebook sales being 13.75% of the total UK market. So this guesstimate lines up with the analyst's more informed effort.

Observation also suggests the same thing. I was in London in the spring and was astonished by the vast number of really good brick and mortar bookstores, far more than any American city I've been to. There's a handful of flagship stores in the US (the Strand in New York, the Seminary Co-op in Chicago, Powell's in Portland) that surpass what you can find in London, but no US city has anything like the bulk and variety of great bookstores that London does. This could just mean that they just haven't gotten around to dying yet, but it seems more likely that there are still very strong sales of hard copy the UK.

Dude, please. Agribusiness, defense and oil, the biggest welfare leeches in America, are all squarely Republican.

Agribusiness is squarely Midwestern. Its bloc of supporters in Congress are representatives from farm states from both parties. For instance, when (oil state) Senator Tom Coburn proposed legislation to end the ethanol subsidy, a bipartisan group of Midwestern senators came up with legislation that attempted to save a subsidy of some sort. This sort of thing happens all of the time. If you're an elected representative from Indiana or Minnesota or Iowa then you're probably going to support Big Agriculture no matter what part you belong to.

A senator may be very clear on what limits there should be on government spending, and he will also probably believe very strongly that such limits should not apply to his constituents. This is of course both a a feature and a bug of a republican form of government.

That's the proof of a supernova in 774?

Yeah, that's credible.

One wonders what the "wonderful serpents" were.

You're simply not going to get a definitive record of a celestial event in 8th century Europe. Records are very scanty, often non-existent. This is so marked that it's led to an entertaining conspiracy theory or two claiming that the early Middle Ages didn't actually exist and were faked at some later date. Back in the real world, there's so little evidence for most things about Anglo-Saxon England that the claim that the people of York chose Ethelred, son of Mull to be their king is almost as suspect as the claim about the wonderful serpents.

So the best you can usually hope for in the English 8th century is a monk somewhere recording events in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (or a Anglo-Saxon Chronicle -- there were a few of them made at different times and in different places). The Chronicle doesn't really go for detail. They sum up a year in a few declarative sentences, with no description, so you're never going to get a description of a celestial event, you're going to get a simplfied interpretation of it. This interpretation will be in terms that the monk or the eyewitnesses he got his information from understood. They didn't know anything about supernovas, but he knew about miraculous crosses in the sky, like that which appeared to the future Roman Emperor Constantine during his fighting against his rival Maxentius. So whatever it was that someone saw, it got interpreted as a crucifix.

The point isn't that something definitely appeared in the sky in 774. There's a chance that someone made up the red crucifx, or hallucinated it, or the chronicler lied or garbled a story he heard fifth-hand. But if it did happen, there's no reason to think that there will be better written evidence than a vague line in one copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

To me, the big thing that the Nexus has over the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet is bluetooth. A tablet on which you can use a BT keyboard to do some serious typing is a device that can replace most of what I do on my netbook -- web surfing, Netflix, email, and light word processing. There are already $200 tablets with BT, but they are things like the Ideapad A1 that don't approach the Nexus in terms of internals and screen quality. This is a big moment as far as I'm concerned. If the thing had a microSD card slot (an unfortunate omission) then I'd preorder one right now and put the netbook up on eBay.

And I know the Nook Color is a very well-built device that's been around for a while and that has bluetooth that you can use under CyanogenMod's build of Anrdoid. But the BT chip doesn't have an antenna, the internals aren't great (and were less good when it was released in October 2010 than the Nexus 7's are right now), and you're stuck on Gingerbread. The Nook Color is close; the Nexus 7 looks to be even closer.