I read a paper on ArXiv today about SETI, and talked to Jeremy Darling about water masers. This got me thinking: the best way to signal your presence to the universe as an intelligent civilization is to take advantage of natural amplification. So, say, you go find a big cloud of water molecules in the right state to start masing, and blast them with some of the right frequency radio emission: you get a strongly enhanced isotropic emitter. Maybe SETI should look for those, then search for nearby coherent sources.... EDIT: Isotropic? No.
Articles by Adam (keflavich@gmail.com)
skill set
is it a marketable skill that I can bring down almost any computer system I'm given access too entirely unintentionally?
Skim: a PDF reader that allows annotations
from Sam: http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/ neat
some comics
http://ableandbaker.net/index.php?comic=198 http://ableandbaker.net/index.php?comic=222 http://ableandbaker.net/index.php?comic=357 http://ableandbaker.net/index.php?comic=396 http://ableandbaker.net/index.php?comic=471 545 "Put on your snuggle trunks and jump in the cuddle pool." http://ableandbaker.net/index.php?comic=905 http://ableandbaker.net/index.php?comic=922
specanpy
AG There are now 2 clones of PySpecKit: sPecAnPy Spectroscopic Toolkit (Astronomy)
SSH
Learned something knew about ssh... keys are stored in ~/.ssh/known_hosts. If a remote key changes, you may be denied access if your saved key is wrong.
Stone 12th Anniversary Bitter Chocolate Stout
Tried this 9.2% bomber last night, and even drinking it over the course of an hour and a half I could feel my nose not feeling afterwards. The pour was probably the most exciting part of this beer. It came out an extremely dark, rich, thick motor-oil looking thing with nearly no head. The flavor, though, is of a very bitter and very dry imperial stout. I didn't get much of the chocolate tone, because I only taste chocolate when it is sweetened - bakers chocolate doesn't taste like chocolate to me. I think this beer would have been better if kept a little bit sweeter, much unlike the other Imperial stouts I've tried lately.
SUCCESS! 64 bit python with 64 bit tcl/tk!!!
After a long, tedious process (see previous posts), I got 64 bit python, 64 bit tcl/tk, and 64 bit tkinter all to work! I can now use the TkAgg backend in matplotlib! Python 64 bit on Mac OS X: Sam Skillman's post Tcl/Tk 64 bit: a post on the tcl/tk forums tkinter 64 bit: python bug report 4017 (last two posts give the solution) and my posted solution
Sync a fork with the original repository on Git
A seemingly simple operation that I just can't seem to get right. This page gives me useless information: $ git checkout -b upstream/master $ git remote add upstream git://github.com/upstream_maintainer/master.git $ git pull upstream remote $ git checkout master $ git merge upstream/master `` If you do that, it frankly doesn't work. Why? "upstream/master" etc. all have special meanings. Here's the real process & explanation (thanks to Erik Tollerud for some help): ``git checkout master # (assuming you have a local branch named master - otherwise, pick whatever branch you want synced)git remote add original git@github.com:thing/thing.git # "upstream" = "original" = "remote" - the place you're trying to sync fromgit fetch original # 'original' being the name YOU gave for the "remote/original" repositorygit merge master original/master # now merge the "original/master" branch (they should have a branch named "master" too, otherwise you have to figure out which branch to get) into your mastergit push # push your now-merged stuff back to github# I was instructed to use these commands. They didn't work.# git reset original # the word "original" here matches the word "original" on the previous line# git reset --hard original # this will overwrite local changes
Testing trackbacks?
I just want to see if "trackbacks" work at all. I recently posted about histograms on google spreadsheets. While I'm at it, might as well throw up a link to my google code site.