Author Archives: jcs

The//Intercept Calls Out Obama and the DOJ

Posted on 2014-02-21 by jcs

In a coda to the TSA’s war against Rahinah Ibrahim that I’ve written about here, here, and here, The//Intercept is calling out President Obama and the Department of Justice for their abuse of the state-secrets privilege. Murtaza Hussain details how, … Continue reading →

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Changing the Tires

Posted on 2014-02-20 by jcs

I’m not a racing fan but like many people I’m aware of how proficient the pit crews are. In a normal Formula 1 pit stop, the car is gassed up and the four tires are changed. How long do you … Continue reading →

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The NSF Questions

Posted on 2014-02-19 by jcs

Last Saturday I wrote about the National Science Foundation poll that asked respondents 10 questions about the biological and physical sciences. The most astounding finding was that one in four Americans don’t know that the earth revolves around the sun. … Continue reading →

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Prompting for Repository in Magit Status

Posted on 2014-02-18 by jcs

I found another great tip from Leonardo Etcheverry. Sometimes I want to call magit-status but the current buffer isn’t associated with the proper repository. That happens, for example, when I’m in the agenda buffer and want to commit one of … Continue reading →

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Resolving Git Merge Conflicts with Ediff

Posted on 2014-02-17 by jcs

Leonardo Etcheverry has an excellent short post on how to resolve merge conflicts with Magit and ediff. For various reasons, I don’t often encounter merge conflicts so I always struggle with getting them resolved. Etcheverry’s post shows how easy this … Continue reading →

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Running Emacs in the OS X Terminal

Posted on 2014-02-16 by jcs

Most of us, these days, prefer to run everything from a GUI. Of course, there are plenty of times when we need to use a terminal. That can be a problem for Emacs users on OS X because there is … Continue reading →

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Scientific Illiteracy

Posted on 2014-02-15 by jcs

A little while ago I wrote about mathematical literacy and disturbing indications of a lack of it in American life. Now there’s evidence of American’s scientific illiteracy as well. The National Science Foundation recently polled 2,200 people on some basic … Continue reading →

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Git Bisect Tutorial

Posted on 2014-02-14 by jcs

Back in December, I wrote about Randy Fay’s screencast on Git bisect. Now Matt Honeycutt has posted his own tutorial. It’s in the form of a blog post so if Fay’s video moved too quickly for you to follow, you … Continue reading →

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Nanopass Compilers

Posted on 2014-02-13 by jcs

For the 2013 Clojure Conj, Andy Keep gave a great talk on nanopass compilers. The idea is that rather than having the normal 2, 3, or 4 passes in a compiler, you have several passes each of which does one … Continue reading →

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Lisp Debugging with Slime

Posted on 2014-02-12 by jcs

Rainer Joswig has a nice video up demonstrating how to debug Lisp with Slime. In a sense there’s nothing new here: most Slime users are pretty much aware of the facilities that he uses. Nevertheless, it’s very useful to see … Continue reading →

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