Leverage

1,168,107 (51.9%) vs 1,058,682 (47.1%) for a difference of 109,425 = 4.9% of a total of 2,249,026.

Collections
Amino acids, squared.

Full tilt

The winter solstice was just a few days ago. And, it rhymes with lattice.

A fundamental truth

It is what it is - see also: It was what it was

As a consequence, it will be what it will be.

Book

ISBN-10: 0979777747

1 = sin(x) + cos(x)

1 = C/C (C ≠ 0) =>
1 = (1/C)*(C*sin(x) + C*cos(x)) =>
1 = (1/C)*(cos(a)*sin(x) + sin(a)*cos(x)) if C = sin(a) = cos(a)
=> 1 = tan(a)
=> a = π/4 as a possible solution
=> C = 1/sqrt(2)
=> 1 = sqrt(2)*(sin(x + π/4)) or 1/sqrt(2) = sin(x + π/4)

Again, it is time for some equinox.

The answer to "what makes something/someone be ..." is looking for symptoms, not causes; the answer to "what makes something/someone do ..." is looking for causes, not symptoms. For example, the answer to "what makes someone retarded" could be "low frustration tolerance" as opposed to "hitting your head against a wall too many times". The latter could indicate an initially high frustration tolerance, which then gradually lowered. For other symptoms, such as a tendency to acquiesce to the expectations and desires of others, see Switzky/Greenspan, "What is Mental Retardation?" [Google Book].

Probability
The conditional probability P(x|y) is the probability of some event x given the occurrence of some other event y.
The marginal probability P(x) is the unconditional probability of some event x.
Bayes' theorem states that P(x|y)*P(y) = P(y|x)*P(x) = P(x ∩ y).
See the wikipedia article for details.

See also: Sklar's Theorem about copulas, as well as the wikipedia article. A copula combines the marginal, univariate distributions of a multivariate distribution into that multivariate distribution.

Crumbling Is Not An Instant's Act

Sharing

Sharing (memory) is evil the enemy of scalability.

• Reader/writer locks and their (lack of) applicability to fine-grained synchronization - Joe Duffy
• Sharing Is the Root of All Contention - Herb Sutter

CWE-609

Double-Checked Locking - a common weakness, enumerated. The complete list can be accessed here.

Sonnet 29

Gas Tax

According to wikipedia,
fuel taxes in Germany are €0.4704 per litre for ultra-low sulphur Diesel and €0.6545 per litre for conventional unleaded petrol, plus Value Added Tax (19%) on the fuel itself and the Fuel Tax.
1 US gallon happens to equal 3.78541178 litres. With an exchange rate of 1 Euro = 1.3949 U.S. dollars, this results in a fuel tax (not including the V.A.T.) of $2.4838(3943) / $3.4559(373) per gallon for diesel/unleaded fuel.

Basis point

One basis point is one hundredth of a percent. 1 % = 100 bp. Or, equivalently, 1 bp = 0.01 %.

FICA tax

The FICA tax is the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax. It is a payroll tax, funding Social Security and Medicare. More details can be found in this wikipedia article.

Strong typing

Another nail in the coffin of the weak typist. According to Coding Horror, typing is a core programming discipline. With weak typing skills, a possible recourse might be to use weakly typed languages, or to devote more time to planning before embarking on the next hunting and pecking expedition.

The formula for the amortization schedule payment mentioned in the annual percentage rate wikipedia article is derived in the amortization calculator wikipedia article.

Premature optimization and its relation to evil is discussed in a wikipedia article on optimization. Premature optimization may result in traversing many local extrema that turn out to be unacceptable, before reaching the global extremum (or an acceptable local extremum, or running out of time). What is being optimized is the time to execute a program, while neglecting the time it takes to develop it.

According to Paul Graham, The distinguishing feature of nasty little problems is that you don't learn anything from them. ... Working on nasty little problems makes you stupid. And this, in turn, makes you more qualified to work on more nasty little problems, resulting in an infinite regression.

Air quotes are typically double quotes, or possibly angle quotes (guillemets) according to wikipedia. It is not clear who invented air quotes, and how they relate to sign languages.

According to Alan Greenspan, there could be

a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.

Would this be self-interest, which guarantees the best possible outcome?

The sentence What you are will show in what you do appears in "The Education of the Wage-earners" by Thomas Davidson (1840-1900). This is a quote commonly attributed to Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931).
The Development of Thomas Davidson's Religious and Social Thought

The acronym RTC can stand for Resolution Trust Corporation. Touch-typists do not have to resort to the use of acronyms, of course.

Do non-touch-typists use shorter variable names?

This article by Randall Hyde discusses the benefits of optimization, if performed at the right time.

Problem Solving

According to Albert Einstein, A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. But what would a stupid person do?

Update: Instead of avoiding the problem, it is also possible to give up.

Productivity

A good way to magnify productivity differences between software developers is to have them work on the same set of files. Slower developers will have to continually merge changes made by faster developers until being able to commit their changes (without breaking any tests, assuming there are tests that go beyond successfully compiling and linking and a policy that requires to have tests pass before committing changes). Ultimately, their tasks will have to be reassigned to faster developers, or they will never be completed.

The performance of Qt's QItemSelectionModel with large numbers of selected items is a known issue.

In SMILES, the '/' and '\' symbols are to be interpreted relative to the atom, not the double bond. X/Y(/Z)=R means that X is below the line Y=R and Z is above it. See the OpenSMILES specification for details.

The Lennard-Jones potential in its various forms is described in a Wikipedia article. The truncation of the potential at large distances by a simple chop and lift operation is described, but there is no mention of splines to avoid discontinuous first derivatives, or of any special treatment at small distances. The canonical form of the potential is 4ε*[(σ/r)¹² - (σ/r)⁶]; an alternate form is D*[(R/r)¹² - 2*(R/r)⁶)]. The first one uses the distance at which the potential is zero (σ), the second uses the distance at which the potential is minimal (R). ε and D are the well depth in both cases.

Hagatna Bay - this is item # 570340. It comes in a pane of 20. Each of the 20 costs $0.90, and each and every of the 20 is also self-adhesive.

If it is not possible to step into the same river twice, then it is not possible to make the same mistake twice. Instead, what appears to be the same mistake, will be a different mistake.

Is avoiding procrastination a different form of procrastination? Procrastination assigns higher priority to tasks that you want to do (but don't need to do) than to tasks that you need to do (but don't want to do), and acts accordingly. Is it possible to want to do things that you need to do? The want pulls more than the need pushes, and the want wins. I prefer walking downhill to running uphill.

Creating complex solutions to simple problems can provide the foundation for the production of more complex problems which may not have simple solutions. Productivity is proportional to the number of problems solved, inversely proportional to the effort to solve a problem, and inversely proportional to the number of problems created by the solution. This could be related to the measure twice, cut once concept.

What does it mean for an application user interface to be "responsive" while some task is being executed? It means that the application is still able to process input events, i.e. to react to user input. Depending on the task being executed, some input events may be ignored (for example, by disabling the part of the UI responsible for launching the task, until the task is complete and another one can be submitted). Some input events must not be ignored (for example, being able to close the application, or to interrupt the task).

If the unexamined life is not worth living, the examined life not necessarily is either, but the evaluation is needed to establish worthiness. Can zombies be passionate about their zombie existence? Should every day be rated on a scale from 1 to 7, where 1 is Monday and 7 is Friday?

The perfect balance lies exactly between the extremes of too little and too much. Instead of doing everything now, or doing nothing never, you do something now and then.

Parameterization of torsions involving ring atoms ...

Statistical Data Mining Tutorials

Creative-Reactive Balance

reflects the degree of balance between the creative dimensions and the reactive dimensions. The percentile score here gives you a sense of how you compare to other managers with respect to the amount of energy you put into reactive versus creative behavior. It also suggests the degree to which your leadership, relationships and goal oriented behavior is coming out of a creative or reactive orientation. It suggests the degree to which your self concept and inner motivation comes from within or are determined by external expectations, rules, or conditions.

Reference

Extreme Instability

Combinatorial design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

UCSF Chimera Home Page

Businesspundit: How To Network: For Introverts

24 ways: Writing Responsible JavaScript

Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and AJAX

Bioactive Substituents and Linkers

The New Modality API

Molecular graphics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith -- New York Magazine

InChI Canonicalization Algorithm

pastebin - collaborative debugging

NVPerfKit

The MathWorks - Support - Graphics Rendering and Troubleshooting Guide

spyGLass: an OpenGL call tracer and debugging tool

The RNA Modification Database, University of Utah

In general, the symbol "N" is preferred for modified nucleosides of unknown structure ...

Life 2.0: The little book of Flow - revised

China Fashion Week on Yahoo! News Photos

HIC-Up

Getting Real

Do you make these 10 mistakes in a conversation? at Personal Development with The Positivity Blog

Ligand Depot - AGC

API Usability: Guidelines to improve your code ease of use - The Code Project - Design and Strategy

Research Beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources | OEDb

Google has acquired JotSpot

Doctors Ponder Fixing Heart Defect - Forbes.com: "In the late 1990s, cardiologists started aggressively sealing PFOs in stroke survivors, in hopes of lowering their risk for further strokes. They threaded tiny implants into the heart through a hole in the groin, pulling them against the PFO's flap to seal it shut.

Then some implant recipients started reporting an odd side effect: Their migraine headaches went away. Subsequent research suggested at least 40 percent of people who suffer a severe type of migraine - the kind that comes with an 'aura' or visual disturbance - have fairly large PFOs."

Testing Concurrent Programs (by Brian Goetz)

Aviation Formulary V1.43. See also: Great Circle Mapper.
Origin

Aviation Formulary V1.43: "Aviation Formulary V1.43".
See also: Great Circle Mapper.

Friday, October 13, 2006

Particle decay may point to New Physics ... with penguin diagram.

Fuzz testing

How to test a program by feeding it files which contain random bad data.

"computer based" "de novo design" "drug like" - Google Scholar

Ethan Nicholas's Blog: "Java Browser Edition": New name, first steps

Time Boxing is an Effective Getting Things Done Strategy

The Wooden Periodic Table Table

The cranky user: Your language usage matters - an article about dialog boxes and the confusion they can cause.

WhyNot? Idea Exchange

Indeed. Why not!?

java.net: Five Habits of Highly Profitable Software Developers

Vector fun for bowling — kirit.com

Main Page - Ajax Patterns

Creating Passionate Users: Mediocrity by "areas of improvement": "By focusing on 'areas of improvement', we're putting a square peg in a round hole. What do we end up with? A crappy, rounded off peg who meets the minimum thresholds at the expense of their most kick-ass attributes."

Linux Command Line Tips

Don't let these disasters happen to you: The top five engineering hints you'll rarely hear

Agile Modeling (AM) Home Page: Effective Practices for Modeling and Documentation ... The TAGRI (They Aren't Gonna Read It) Principle of Software Development

Distance measures:
Hamming distance. Number of substitutions necessary to transform one string into another, both having the same length.
Procr[a/u]stes distance. Possibly after alignment, sum of Euclidean distances of two sets of points, both having the same number of points.

JenaLib: Nucleic Acids Nomenclature And Structure

Clustering - Introduction

junit : Message: Re: [junit] Digest Number 1846

Robert Martin makes an absolute statement.

Java theory and practice: Introduction to nonblocking algorithms

(published 4/18/2006)

Symptoms of Morgellons disease.

"Nucleic Acid Structure Files"

What Are Healthy Levels of Cholesterol?

The article actually answers that question.

Testing legacy code


As the old Chinese saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

James Bach's Blog: No Best Practices

Rands In Repose: The Soak

Diff - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Qt 4.1: SVG Viewer Example