August 26th, 2012
After realizing how much I was hearing this year I had heard last year in St. Louis and forgotten, I decided to write a few things down.
Art
Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.
Get low.
Use a polarizing filter to get rich colors in landscape photography.
Biology
Some ants have stingers, not just fangs.
Toads have been recategorized. There are no more Bufos left in North America!
Butterflies aren’t even a clade. They’re just different families of moths that have evolved along similar lines.
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Posted in Bugs, Photography | No Comments »
August 25th, 2012
OK. This is the second to last day at Bugshot and a hurricane is coming. I’m staying at the Archbold Biological Station, home to one of the major, possibly the largest breeding colony of the endangered Florida Scrubjay. I’m told they come to the parking lot here but I still haven’t seen one. So this morning early I took off across the railroad tracks before breakfast and promised myself I wasn’t turning around until I found a scrub jay. And I was not disappointed:
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July 27th, 2012
Better-than-expected, in fact. I’m dictating this entire thing with dictation and Mac OS X mountain line.Compared to the various versions of Dragon dictate that I’ve used, it seems to work pretty well. I greatly accuracy about on par with Nuance naturally speaking 11.On the other hand, user interface leave something to be desired. In particular, I can’t just dictate continuously. I have to keep pressing the function key for each sentence I want to dictate and then click done.That’s probably because the recognition doesn’t happen directly on my own computer.Instead, it sent to Apple for recognition on Apple servers.
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July 24th, 2012
A quick proof of something that bothered me in basic topology. Assume the standard topology on â„n based on open balls. What about an open box? I.e. all points in â„n such that a1 < x1 < b1; a2 < x2 < b2;…;an < xn < bn. Is this an open set? I.e. can you build it up out of a union of open balls? Or, more colloquially, can you pack a square hole with round pegs without leaving any gaps?
Short answer: yes, if the balls can overlap and you have infinitely many of them. Long answer:
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Posted in Math | 1 Comment »
July 23rd, 2012
I’ve gotten completely addicted to eBooks this year. I now have a library of hundreds of ePubs and PDFs covering almost every category in the Dewey Decimal System. However I’m finding the available eReading software weak and inadequate for a lot of uses. The best I’ve found so far is Aldiko Premium ($4.99 at the Android App Store) combined with the open source Calibre on my desktop and laptop; but I want better. In particular here’s what I find missing in current options:
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Posted in Tech | 1 Comment »
June 16th, 2012
Posted in Photography | 1 Comment »
