Lots of turkeys around where I live. I frequently run into flocks of them. They've always been peaceful, even despite my harassment.

The local NBC affiliate covered the fiasco, interviewing several frustrated fans, and reported that RICC at one point disabled comments on their Facebook page. WPRI Eyewitness News and ABC6 also covered the story.

Mike Ferreira describes some of the chaos on the Anime Herald:

Families were separated. Vendors were barred from returning to their booths. People stood outside in a rainy 40-degrees for hours only to be turned away. Traffic was backed up for hours due to inadequate parking. People were packed into an event hall like cattle, with little room to move or maneuver, and countless photo ops that people paid for were left unfulfilled.

Some people on Facebook describe the conditions inside the convention center as unsafe. RICC has responded to some of the comments, saying, "There was no mess up. This happens a lot at large events. It is very difficult to predict the turnover flow of patrons. Sometimes, for the safety of all, we need to halt entry to let the crowd thin out." RICC Organizer Steven Perry of Altered Reality Entertainment has been unreachable by media and disgruntled fans.

People are being very supportive of the Fire Marshals who handled the mess. One Facebook user writes, "Fire marshal #9 guarding the Omni North Garage was awesome. Delt with an angry mob through the whole 4 hours." I personally witnessed that marshal do a really great job with a really bad situation. Rhode Island is the site of the worst nightclub fire in US history, and Rhode Islanders understand that the Fire Marshal was acting with restraint and responsibly.

I have not heard about the conditions at the convention center today. They have apparently already sold to capacity but are still selling tickets online.

Physicist Brian Greene discusses it on RadioLab here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/....

Information theory and quantum physics are in a different category. Quantum physics is a model of reality that happens to predict certain kinds of observations to a high degree of accuracy. Information theory is mathematical truth and not a model. Information theory is inviolable. Quantum physics is violable to the extent that it does not describe reality perfectly.

Most of the programs I write produce stuff I can't explain.

The arguments in favor of R boil down to this: R is more widely used by statisticians and has a much larger library of statistical packages. But R is not a very good programming language, is difficult to learn, and is not well suited to integrate with or be used for more general purpose programming tasks.

Python, on the other hand, has a vast library of packages but does not yet have nearly as many packages specialized for the statistical computing domain. The arguments in favor of Python are, in essence, that it's very easy to learn and easy to use and easy to integrate with other general purpose programming tasks. Python is also gaining a lot of momentum in the scientific computing community. For many statistical analysis applications (most?), the packages that do exist for Python are more than adequate. Some folks even suggest that R's lead over Python is evaporating fast.

The scientists represented to the IRB that the dataset was preexisting, and so the IRB passed on the review. It's not clear that the dataset was preexisting, though, since the study seems to indicate that the scientists were involved in the design of the experiment from the beginning. What's more, the paper itself claims to have obtained informed consent when clear there was none.

And why do we still have antiquated data lines and switches and whatnot when we are paying through the nose for internet access?

It's like you forgot that Google exists. http://qt.digia.com/Qt-in-Use/

"Wolfram Language" is not new. Wolfram is just trying to decouple Mathematica's programming language from the Mathematica products, which only makes sense considering the direction of the company. Mathematica users have been using this language (minus the Wolfram Alpha feature) for years.

As a domain-specific language, it's really great. The functional programming features have a great syntax (IMHO) for doing math stuff. As a general purpose language, it's awful. The library is large and easy to use, and the documentation is a pleasure to read. It's also as proprietary as it gets. Wolfram Research tries to ease the pain of that constricting noose with the CDF player and the ability to embed certain kinds of Mathematica--er, I mean, Wolfram Language code into web pages. In practice, however, everyone you want to share your code with is going to need to buy a Wolfram Research product or work at an institution that has a site license.

Is anyone else surprised that it doesn't already do this? Do the other browsers not do this either?

Do you even know what Qt is? It's way more than just a widget toolkit.

This is very incorrect. Sage's website accurately describes it: "It combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface. Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab."

There is an additional benefit that is crucial to research mathematicians: the source code can be peer reviewed and checked for correctness.