Comments

  2. says

    Ah, another link I can’t view on XP

    Along with Observations of a nerd/Science Sushi which I’ve been unable to read since the move due to this issue -.-

    Seems anything on Scientific American blogs crashes the browser in XP, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it (get a frowny Oh Snap! page in Chrome but it doesn’t work in other browsers eiher)

    If anyone has a solution for that I’m all ears (eyes?) (other than switch to linux/win7/macos/etc.)

    I’ve tried several machines running various operating systems and it works fine on windows 7 and windows 8 but not XP, heh.

  4. Ibis3, féministe avec un titre française de fantaisie says

    @Hideki

    Can’t help, but I’m running XP (FF 5.0) and I’m not running into any difficulty.

  5. says

    A lovely post.

    Incidentally, is there a reason why a trailer for “Courageous” appears beneath the first two posts on the homepage, and in the sidebar? It doesn’t appear to be related to the text above or below and advertises as being from the directors of “Fireproof.”

  6. says

    Incidentally, is there a reason why a trailer for “Courageous” appears beneath the first two posts on the homepage, and in the sidebar?

    Because you have to have somewhere to take the person you meet at Christian Mingle or at Liberty University. The advertising here dovetails nicely, IMO.

    Not dovetailing with the commenters, of course, but perhaps with lurkers watching with fascination and horror.

    Glen Davidson

  8. Vorticity says

    That’s a fine article, but she commits a cardinal sin by not crediting Randall Munroe of xkcd.com for the illustrations.

  9. Bill Door says

    Also, inverse Fourier transform… cause I’m kinky like that.
    And fast Fourier transform when I’m in a hurry.

  10. Therrin says

    Ah, another link I can’t view on XP

    FF 3.6.20, XP Pro SP3, no problems. Sounds like an add-on or setting issue.

  12. Echidna says

    I’m with Vorticity. Not providing attribution (for the xkcd comics) violates one of the basic ideas of science, as well as being bad journalism. I loved the article at first because Mr. Echidna and I have a similar vibe going but I came away feeling soured.

  14. dontpanic says

    I echo Vorticity + Echidna’s sourness about the xkcd non-attribution. Geek love for the yeah, though. Met via parallel blogs? How new school. Back when Ms. Don’tPanic and I started dating ~30 years ago one had to do things like visiting the NASA Ames Research Center “wind tunnels of luuve” in person on a Society of Physics Students outing — led to our first date that evening.

  15. Chris says

    When I was in high school I would walk along the sea wall and look at the waves. Since I had recently learned about sine and cosine I wondered if I could find the amplitudes and frequencies of the waves.

    And in college I did learn all about Fourier transforms, along with eigenvectors, eigenvalues and the rest. I even managed to become a vibration engineer. Euler’s equation is seriously cool.

    (I took statics thirty five years ago, and I still imagine little force arrows whenever I see a truss!)

  17. BCskeptic says

    Very cool. Very cool.

    See, this is the kind of foundational awe and wonder that religionists miss out on because of their narrow, dogmatic, bronze-age beliefs.

    And, this helps to dispel the notion that only “geeks” (whatever the F that really means) are into science and math.

    Now, if I could just get *my* wife to take a math/physics course…I wouldn’t get all of those blank stares!

  18. Samantha Vimes, Chalkboard Monitor says

    My DH sits in on my calculus classes. He does things like read for his classes or edit his novel, but he seems to have one ear open and catches the general idea of what we’re studying. Once the teacher teased him when he tagged along on test day, offering to let him sit the exam.
    And once when I groused that exercising in a swimming pool alone was boring, he told me to think about multivariable calculus. I pouted at his snark at first, then realized I was in the ideal setting, as I could think about how the force of my arms moving in curves was sending my body forward as a vector.

  19. theobromine says

    Ah yes, math and chess club will win the girl in the end.
    At least so go the desperate geek fantasies.

    Sure it will:

    My highschool sweetheart and I met in “Math Club”, which was really a computer club in which we all piled into the physics teacher’s station wagon and drove to the school that had an IBM360, where we spent the afternoon programming in Fortran on punchcards. And we sat next to eachother in calculus class, comparing the results on our tests (alas, he usually won by a mark or two, since I had a tendency to swap + and – signs or make other silly mistakes). 39 years later, we are still together.

    As for the next generation: Our son and his partner started out as science lab partners in grade 10, and they’ve been together for 11 years.

  21. says

    Another important aspect is that if you are an older person, travel insurance pertaining to pensioners is something you should really contemplate. The elderly you are, a lot more at risk you might be for allowing something poor happen to you while overseas. If you are never covered by quite a few comprehensive insurance policy, you could have several serious problems. Thanks for expressing your suggestions on this weblog.