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Tag Archives: technology

Filesystem Organization for Physicists Part 1: The Problem

27 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by bwkeller in research

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ast, astronomy, computers, programming, science, technology

I’ve been warned that I sometimes veer too far in the direction of toolmaker away from the standard path followed by most scientists.  Try as I might, I cannot seem to avoid finding the process of doing science nearly as interesting as the goal of getting that science done. And so, my mind has been orbiting around a problem I suspect is endemic amongst all physicists, if not all scientists.  That problem, captured so nicely by this PhD comic is that of filesystem cruft.  Science, being at it’s core an experimental art, produces for every successful idea a whole panoply of failed experiments, mistakes, and generally messed-up crap.  Being paranoid creatures consumed by our own fears, along with the awareness that serendipity has been a cornerstone of great work, we are loathe to sweep these ill-fated children of the mind into the trash where they (mostly) belong. And so those of us who rely on computers for most of our day-to-day work end up with home directories filled to the brim with old scripts, corrupted data files, a dozen different versions of the same list of values, and other digital detritus.  And this situation makes for errors, confusion, thousand yard stare, anal leakage, and other evils too foul to discuss in polite company.  Just looking at my /home directory on my workstation at the University, I have more than 100,000 files sitting around, waiting for me to stare at them for a quarter hour trying to remember what they were for.

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Battlestations!

25 Monday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in computer science

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

geek, reddit, technology

I’m a huge redditor, and one of my favourite little-known subreddits is r/battlestations.  It’s a nifty page where people show off their computer/desk areas and compare notes for cool monitor setups, epic workstations, and efficient office layouts.  Check it out if you want to kill some time and drool over other peoples offices. That was a short lame-o link post.  Sorry about that, I’ll be including vouchers for free nothing in the next post.

Finally, A Tablet I Can Get Behind

21 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in ereader, gadgets

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

android, ereaders, technology, thinkpad

Thinkpad TabletShort post today, I overdid it and started a much longer post I can’t finish tonight, and I’m getting mighty tired.  Instead of that, let me point out a bit of exciting tech news from today:  Lenovo has release an Android tablet that actually looks like I might buy it.   A Thinkpad Tablet!

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Podcasts I Listen To

13 Wednesday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

canada, podcast, review, technology

I used to have a relatively long commute in to work, with a 30 minute drive and a 15 minute walk (I am cheap, and hate paying for parking).  Because I have the attention span of a 6 year old meth addict, making this trip without something to listen to was unacceptable.  So, I developed a insatiable addiction to podcasts.  Here are the ones I listen to regularly.

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Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 3: Histograms

11 Monday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in computer science, howto, programming, python, research

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

matplotlib, programming, science, technology

Basic Gaussian HistogramContinuing my series on using python and matplotlib to generate common plots and figures, today I will be discussing how to make histograms, a plot type used to show the frequency across a continuous or discrete variable.  Histograms are useful in any case where you need to examine the statistical distribution over a variable in some sample, like the brightness of radio galaxies, or the distance of quasars.

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The Amazing SKA Pathfinder

09 Saturday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in astrophysics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

ASKAP, astronomy, science, SKA, technology

I feel like yesterday’s depressing (but popular!) post painted a bit gloomier picture of the future of astronomy and space science than the reality warrants.  Today, I thought I might cheer you up with an inside view of one of the neatest pieces of scientific instrumentation under construction today: a fantastic radio telescope called the Australian Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Pathfinder (ASKAP).

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Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 2: Lines, Points & Formatting

07 Thursday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in computer science, howto, programming, python, research

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

matplotlib, programming, science, technology

Bare bones plotContinuing my series on using matplotlib and python to generate figures, I’d like to get now to the meat of the topic: actually making a figure or two.  I’ll be starting with the simplest kind of figure: a line plot, with points plotted on an X-Y Cartesian plane.

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Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 1: Introduction

05 Tuesday Jul 2011

Posted by bwkeller in computer science, howto, programming, python, research

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

matplotlib, programming, science, technology

I’m sure many of my fellow scientists spend a relatively large chunk of their time making plots, graphs, and figures of one sort or another.  There are a plethora of cool tools out there for doing this, from proprietary tools like Mathematica or IDL to free software kits like GNUplot.  While GNUplot is useful and handy (and IDL is powerful and expensive), I’m a python guy primarily, so I like my tools to interface well with my existing code, and has a more pythonic interface.  For this, I turn to matplotlib, a powerful suite for generating all sorts of plots from python.

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400 Word Essay 1: Public Libraries in the Digital Age

19 Monday Jan 2009

Posted by nfitzgerald in school

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

books, ereaders, libraries, technology, writing

This term I am taking a really interesting course – “COGS 303 – Research Methods in Cognitive Systems” – which is intended as a guide to doing successful research in Cognitive Science. One of our regular assignments will be to write opinion pieces with a strong 400 word limit – a good exercise in clarity and brevity. We chose our topic from a list and must defend it within the word limit. I’ll post my essays to the interwebs so that they can be evaluated in the harshest of battlefields. Here’s the first:


Topic: The advent of the digital age makes public libraries obsolete. (Affirmative)

Current trends in technological and cultural development make it unlikely that public libraries will survive in their traditional format.

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Papa LCD’s Contrast Ratio was TOOOOOOO high…

18 Sunday Jan 2009

Posted by nfitzgerald in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

computers, technology

My new Acer Aspire One forms the perfect addition to my workspace family. Aww – isn’t it cute!

Papa LCD, Mama LCD and Baby LCD

Papa LCD, Mama LCD and Baby LCD

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Ben’s Tweets

  • RT @OJ_Astro: A blog post by physicist Syksy Räsänen (@SyksyRasanen), who has published with us twice, about why overlay journals are an an… 1 day ago
  • RT @JokesAstro: If the Islands of Hawaii were very massive stars, Kauai would be going supernova soon. https://t.co/NEboP6FRWd 2 days ago
  • RT @AnicaSeelie: @gauravmunjal Imagine if there was a duck but it had human ears 2 days ago
  • RT @jfmclaughlin92: Friendly reminder that if you're at a public university, your institutional email can be searched basically whenever. B… 2 days ago
  • @rcrain_astro Academia has a lot of problems. Precarious employment, massive overworking of junior researchers, poo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… 2 days ago

Nicholas’ Tweet’s

  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! Retrieval-augmented models are expensive. Make them faster by partially pre-computing passage representations. W… 5 days ago
  • RT @michielsdj: New paper! We propose FiDO, an improved version of Fusion-in-Decoder with faster inference and better performance. Work don… 1 month ago
  • @_julianmichael_ @LukeZettlemoyer @emilymbender @nlpnoah @ssshanest Congrats! 5 months ago
  • RT @michielsdj: Now accepted to @iclr_conf! 🎆 1 year ago
  • @mjskay Yeah, I feel a major point people were missing is that an endless spiral into the drain is actually the perfect visual metaphor. 1 year ago

Top Posts

  • Basic Data Plotting with Matplotlib Part 3: Histograms

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Blogs We Read

  • Bad Astronomy
  • Boing Boing
  • Rationally Speaking
  • Terry Project (UBC)

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