I find that IEEE locks up research results that I pay for as a tax payer. It is a minor inconvience for me to use the library at work, but it would be prohibitive if I were a middle income indpendent scientist or engineer.

The IEEE also has policy statements that oppose policies that advance the public interest. Take a look at: http://www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/ipc/index.html and http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20090922030639824

After 30 years, I dropped my membership. The IEEE no longer advocates or implements policy for the public interest.

I took a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathWorld to remind myself about how CRC press treated Eric W. Weisstein (creator of MathWorld). CRC press is a division of Taylor and Francis. Whenever I get a request to referee for a Taylor and Francis publication, I decline and point the editor at the MathWorld story.

Don't do business with Taylor and Francis.

I believed the adminstration's story 10 years ago. But six weeks after the invasion began, I knew I had been lied to. The great shame is that we (the US voters) voted in 2004 to let Bush stay in office after it was clear even to fools (like me) that what you accuse him of was true.

You would lose your bet.
I would bet more than 60% percent of voting age Texans believe that heaven and earth were created by Jesus Christ's father less than 10,000 years ago.

TeX, yes!

I wrote my first scientific article in Macwrite, my second in ditroff, and my third in LaTeX. Then I combined them into a dissertation. I chose to translate the fist two into LaTeX. My second choice would have been ditroff, and my third choice would have been to pay someone to type it all up. A better name for Macwrite would have been MacMemo. For anything longer than a page, it was awful. I don't know what value it has/had other than a cautionary tale for others to avoid.

I believe that after 30 years, it may be time for me to move beyond LaTeX. I'd like something I could program more easily. And I'd like support for describing function more than appearance.

It just makes me sad. Many decades ago I grew up in a Bible Belt town of 90K immersed in Broun's point of view (and accent). Watching the video was sickening. It was so familiar. I had hoped that rather than it simply being that I moved physically, the world had moved on. I was sadly wrong.

I suspect that Manning will be convicted and spend several years in prison. He seems to be a sympathetic pathetic character to me. If, as what I read suggests, he broke the promises he made to get a clearance, broke the law, and his action damaged US interests and endangered lives, then serious punishment is appropriate.

US claims against Assange seem less clear. I don't know what US law he violated and I don't know how the US can claim jurisdiction. I found reference to a rumor of an indictment at wikipedia, but I'm not sure that the US has charged him. The Swedish charges seem plausible and unrelated.

I have more sympathy for Manning than Assange, perhaps because the case against him looks clearer and more serious.

I picked up a paper copy of it yesterday by chance and quit reading after the first page or so. The article was effusive about the great creative years of Microsoft. I think they became rich by exploiting a monopoly that they inherited from IBM and imitating existing products in ways that precluded interoperation. I quit reading the article because I thought the author understood neither the history nor the technology.

Cell is published by Elsevier which has been in the news recently because of a boycott. A search provides http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/feb/02/academics-boycott-publisher-elsevier I support the boycott.

I've been watching Intel since the 1970's, and I've been impressed with their technical skill and business judgment. I didn't like what the Wintel duopoly did for computing/science/culture, but it made Intel rich. When Andy Grove canned employees at Intel Supercomputing for using Apples, I took it to mean that he believed that his company's future was tied to Microsoft.

Do you think the decision to join LibreOffice was made at the highest level at Intel? If so, I think it is an important shift.

When I read Stallman's "Right to Read" more than 10 years ago, I thought it was more evidence that he is a crank. Look at it now: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html. Why is he always so right?

What is that?

The integer 1 usually works.

When I start coding, I often find that I don't completely understand things that I thought I did. While calling eig() from a matlab prompt does not require understanding much linear algebra. I think writing code often is a better way to clarify and demonstrate understanding than working examples.

That's what annoyed me too. If one were proactive enough to shift the paradigm, how many exponential racetracks could one fit in the width of human hair?

Human hair thickness varies by a factor of 10.