Thirded! I also have "Getting Started in Electronics" and a couple of "Engineer's Mini-Notebooks" still on my shelf, with the intention of giving them to my kids one day.

Question for Mr. Mims: what was it like getting a completely handwritten book published? Did you approach RadioShack with the idea? Given all the modern publication options (self-pub, iBooks, etc.) and software to help, how would you go about it today? (I know, that's three questions...)

I'm guessing selection bias - entities with the security knowledge to use proper authentication techniques probably are also better at keeping their internal databases out of malicious hands. (Or, more negatively, the contraposition of that statement.) On a related note, this breach has caused me to update all of my own passwords, and my current pet peeve are entities that have an upper limit to password length within the current range of rainbow-table attacks (and what are the chances those guys are properly salting?)

I agree with these two points. #2 (the obnoxious images on the front page, and "read more..." links after only 4 lines of text so I can't even read the summaries without clicking!) are bad, but the redesign for the comments section will very likely be bad for slashdot.

As I was browsing it, I realized that a single comment like the parent in the current format, that takes up less than a third of my browser viewport (so I can see the flow of conversation around it), takes up over two thirds in the beta format. I feel like "the medium is the message" applies here, or at least, the medium influences the message -- multi-paragraph comments are more common on slashdot than other sites, but if they want to discourage that kind of dialogue, this is a great way to do it.

Agreed. I gave linkedin a try some years ago, until they suggested a professional contact of a specialist doctor I had recently seen. I can only assume the doc wasn't up to code on HIPAA or something, but I found it unnerving and useless. The only frustration I experience now, not being a member, is attempting to look up basic information for people whose only web presence is on linkedin.

I really suspect some of those columns contain something like a bag of words model, which I'm sure they would classify as "just metadata." Extra super creepy surveillance metadata.

I'm glad somebody said this. Though I'm sure it's always served both roles, another thought about modern tenure (in my opinion as a young academic) is that it's much less about guaranteeing academic freedom, and much more about managing hiring in the face of an ever growing crowd of PhDs. A department might hire a few adjuncts to teach and put 4 or 5 good researchers on the the tenure track, with what seems like a full expectation of granting tenure to one (or zero, if they feel like rolling the dice again) and firing the rest. Tenure is a beautiful ideal, but functionally it's a back-breaking 5-year interview, with a lot of benefit gained for the university in the meantime. And in the end, those that make it through have been selected based on funding ability weighted over any other metric.

I don't blame them for this really, there are many more PhDs than tenure slots and a maddening culture of anything-but-tenure as failure. I'll admit that I've only been in this game for a few years so I might be completely naive (I'm also lucky, being non-tenure track and on hard money), and I don't know how it works in the humanities. Nevertheless, I have a feeling that the concept of tenure is serving university endowments more and more and research and education less and less.

On the positive side, there are many good "teaching" universities and community colleges out there picking up the slack on the education side at least.

/bitterrant

The coolest were the older games where the gameplay was affected, but not ruined by lag. In Mechwarrior 2, IIRC, you would need to shoot ahead of your opponent as they moved, effectively leading them more or less according to the ping to the server you (and they?) were getting. Your screen wouldn't show you hitting them, but the server would register the hits and they would blow up. Ah, nostalgia attack incoming...

Dang, this is cool. In a post above I mentioned I work as a bioinformatician at a sequencing center--if you need guidance or advice, contact me and I'll see if I can point you in the right direction!

This is very much the case. I work as a bioinformatician at a sequencing center, and I would say we see around 50-100G of sequence data for the average run/experiment, which isn't really so bad, certainly not compared to the high energy physics crowd and given a decent network. The trick is what we want to do with the data: some of the processes are embarrassingly parallel, but many algorithms don't lend themselves to that sort of thing. We have a few 1TB ram machines, and even those are limiting in some cases. Many of the problems are NP-hard, and even the for the heuristics we'd ideally use superlinear algorithms, but we can't have that either, it's near linear time (and memory) or bust which sucks.

I'm actually really looking forward to a vast reduction in dataset size and cost in the life sciences, so we can make use of and design better algorithmic methods and get back to answering questions. That's up to the engineers designing the sequencing machines though..

Having also just completed my PhD, this is hands-down the best advice in the thread for what to do in grad school. (I'm not so sure it's super important to do it all before you arrive on site though.)

One thing I can suggest as you prepare is to get your personal life together. I went through a divorce during my phd, and it definitely didn't help the process: be aware that doing a PhD can stress your personal relationships and take some time to work that out with your significant other or others you're close with, if you can. It's a time when you will be stressing hard without a whole lot to show for it, monetarily or otherwise. Build a support network with friends and family, and via counseling services at your university if necessary (my "grad student support group" helped tremendously with my own difficulties, both personally and professionally).

Oh, and since you're going into biological sciences, a great way to prepare for an awesome career is to learn programming, motherfucker. (I suggest python.) The job market is tough for life sciences in general these days, but curiously not if they can program and work the command line... ;) (And while 5 years is a long time in science, starting now will still keep you at the forefront of that skillset.)

Stating something is undoubtedly true would be anti-science, especially according to the falsifiability definition. But it should be noted that this wasn't (and in my opinion shouldn't) be meant to divorce science from truth: in fact, Popper (who popularized falsifiability) stated that "there are criteria of progress toward the truth".

I've had pretty good luck using Siri with the music cranked up in the car. I haven't done much testing, but I suspect that my habit of speaking at the microphone on the bottom of the phone or holding it up to my face helps, that way it can do its usual noise cancellation thing with the secondary mic. Unfortunately, my results with siri aren't as good as other's overall, due to my poor enunciation (I have a slight lisp) :/

Seems you are correct that there is no logic behind it, but that it's just a very commonly used and well-tolerated error: grammar girl's analysis.

I've been starting a textbook project myself recently (it's a lot more work than I first anticipated to flesh out the material and formatting, even with latex, and I haven't even started with the graphic design) so this is quite interesting to me. I saw that ibooks author will export to pdf, my biggest question is: will this be compatible with print-on-demand services? Surely some folks are still going to want dead tree versions, and some topics don't need lots of media interaction. Apple would do very well to consider hosting their own print-on-demand services for this (hmm, sort of like they did with the cards iphone app...)

Another thing I would love to see is some sort of "preview this book" like Amazon's. If Apple is to be believed, this is going to open up book publishing quite a bit, which also means lots of competing books with the standard web-2.0 and appstore quality distribution.

I'm very sorry to hear your situation. I certainly hope the best for your family. I don't really have any advice, but your story reminded me of something I heard on NPR a while back that might at least be of interest:
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/12/140336146/for-the-dying-a-chance-to-rewrite-life