Scientific Illiteracy (2)

Posted on 2016-05-27 by jcs

Remember a couple of years ago when I wrote despairingly of American scientific illiteracy and the fact that 1 in 4 Americans didn’t know that the earth revolves around the sun? I was pretty certain that that represented the infimum of such stories. I should have known better. Today, we have this:

I get that some people worry about GMOs and would rather avoid them but is it too much to ask that they know what they’re talking about? What on earth can non-genetically modified mean if your food doesn’t have DNA?

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Emacs as a (Python) IDE

Posted on 2016-05-26 by jcs

A couple of years ago, Drew Werner gave a nice talk to the New York Emacs Meetup group on An Intelligent Python IDE with Emacs, Projectile, and Jedi. I came across a reference to it today and watched the video of it. It’s well worth the 47 and half minutes even if you’re not a Python user.

Werner’s idea is that you can take his basic method of setting up a Python IDE and use it to set up an IDE for any language. Indeed, the first two components are pretty much language independent. He first sets up Projectile to handle your workflow at the project level. Then he installs auto-complete to provide context sensitive completion. The problem is that auto-complete doesn’t understand Python so its completion is rudimentary.

He solves that problem by adding EPC and Jedi, which provide Python language parsing and enable auto-complete to provide much better completions. Auto-complete has engines for other languages so with a little work you can build an IDE for many environments. See my post on Átila Neves’ talk on setting up Emacs as a C++ IDE as an example.

If you’re a Python user you should definitely watch the video. If you’re not, you may still find the ideas that Werner talks about useful for enhancing your own workflow.

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Quoting with Org Mode

Posted on 2016-05-25 by jcs

Grant Rettke, whom Irreal has mentioned from time to time, has a nice screencast on how he adds quotes to an Org document. Like many of us, Rettke takes notes on material he is watching or reading with Org mode. Sometimes he wants to add a verbatim snippet into his Org notes.

In the screencast, he shows three ways of adding these “quotes” to his notes and what the result looks when he exports the notes to, say, HTML. There’s a little less than seven minutes of content so it’s easy to find time to watch it.

I love videos like this because I always learn something from seeing how others use their tools—especially Emacs and Org mode—to lubricate their workflow. Even if you already know about the features that a particular video demonstrates, seeing how others use them can give you new ideas. I know that’s most often the case for me. In any event, Rettke’s video is interesting and well worth watching. It’s also nicely produced. Give it a look and see.

Update [2016-05-26 Thu]: Moke → Mode

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High Entropy

Posted on 2016-05-24 by jcs

And I’m pretty sure there would be no NSA backdoor.

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Not an Editor, Not an Operating System…

Posted on 2016-05-23 by jcs

This is where its power really comes from.

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Metadata and Privacy

Posted on 2016-05-22 by jcs

By now, I hope, no Irreal reader believes the “it’s just metadata” mantra from the nosey Parkers intent on snooping into every aspect of our lives. A recent study from Stanford quantifies the privacy-stripping power of metadata (you can read the study itself at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website).

The study shows that with a very small set of telephone metadata it is possible to identify the participants from publicly available records. The researchers also demonstrate that they could accurately infer when a subject was in a relationship and then (trivially) identify who the other person in the relationship was.

They were also able to correctly infer that one of the participants had a specific heart disease and that another owned a semiautomatic rifle. Read the report to see the wide range of sensitive data that can be teased from metadata.

Actually, all you need to know about metadata is what former CIA and NSA head Michael Hayden famously said about it: “We kill people based on metadata.” Remember that the next time you hear your Aunt Millie or one of the nannies say, “It’s just metadata.”

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Something Wrong

Posted on 2016-05-21 by jcs

At least they know who we’ve been calling.

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The Truth About Open Offices Revealed

Posted on 2016-05-20 by jcs

Succinctly.

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Count Days Between Dates

Posted on 2016-05-19 by jcs

Álvaro Ramírez points out that Emacs has the built-in capability to calculate the number of days between two dates. It’s easy to do; the tl;dr is: 

M-x calendar
<mark the region between the two dates (inclusive)>
M-= (or M-x calendar-count-days-region)

Ramírez has some animated screen shots that show how it works and also a shortcut for going to the endpoints of the date range.

It’s a nice trick and it’s all already there. Read the post and try it out.

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Schrödinger’s Backup

Posted on 2016-05-18 by jcs

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