org-mode here, too (and emacs, of course)

I think those pictures he came up with first inspired an entire generation of would-be computer scientists, maths geeks, physicists and Scientific American readers. How such a simple iteration could render those fascinating patterns even on a 2d grid, remains to this day one of the big mysteries. R.I.P. Benoit, I hope you'll finally be able to make sense of the fractal nature of things from up / down there!

I thought most of those byproducts weren't wasted, but used to feed cattle? No more happy days for the cows, it seems, and Scottish milk is bound to deteriorate from now on (no more whisky flavour).

It's hard to believe that the nation that invented haggis to be able to use *all* parts of a slaughtered animal should simply toss away the byproducts of whisky-making.

A thousand times *this*. The Emperor hath no clothes....

I think negative camber is used in racing to even out the aerodynamic and body roll effects at high speed, esp. during cornering. The more or less vertical downforce acts on the car, in effect evening out the negative camber at rest, *maximizing* the tyre contact patch to optimize mechanical traction during cornering, so it's quite the opposite goal that's being achieved here.

Of course, normal road cars don't have any aero downforce worth speaking of, to the tyres will remain at negative camber even at high speed.

If I remember correctly, GNU Emacs comes with a rather smart LaTeX mode that parses TeX error messages automagically and allows you to jump to an error's location. This is all from memory when I last used (La)TeX for my thesis a good 15 years ago or so.

Before you blame all of humanity for these things and begin to believe humans are inherently flawed, please read "Ishmael" by Dan Quinn to help cure your misanthropy ;-)

That laff was much needed, thanks ;-)

I recall many "puzzling" moments at the local pool reading the latest issue of "Scientific American" where he wrote a column regularly. And no, reading this title never attracted any chicks to join me on the blanket, but this is /. after all... ;-)

Godspeed Martin, your wit & humor will be missed.

Agreed, and looking at his programming achievements (emacs, gcc, gnu tools, ...) I can forgive him a little weirdness after all those all-nighters in front of a lethal amber CRT terminal. Linus ain't half bad either, but he had a lot more help from the community with Linux as the support infrastructure (the net) was already more or less in place (at least at the universities) when Linux became big.

Stallman however was pretty much a one-man show programming wise, and I recall a paragraph in the GPL about him sending out tapes for $100 a pop with the gnu source on them... good times.

On call until noon Monday, I expect it to be a quiet affair but you never know with these pesky machines... also checking on 2 running backup jobs in bacula every once a in while...

Where's the whatcouldpossiblygowrong tag when you need it?

anyone else read this as "Auror" at the first glance? ;-)

Wow, just wow. Hubble is going stronger than ever, it's hard to believe there was talk of retiring it because the refurbishing costs would be "too high". Yay Hubble!