Science Links

1. Donald Knuth: Yoda of Silicon Valley (NYT)

2. Schrodinger Equation or Lunn Equation? (wikipedia, quora, Physics Today)

The Physical Review referee, G. S. Fulcher, found Lunn's paper to be unphysical and impossibly abstract, and he rejected it. Fulcher replaced Lunn as a member of Physical Review's editorial board early in 1922, and Lunn went on to withdraw bitterly from contact with most physicists...

3. CRISPR and human babies (The Atlantic)

QOTD: "Education is learning what man has discovered over the past 5000 years, in 20 years or less." (via @TheWeirdWorld)

QuickTip: Default Color Cycle in Matplotlib

For reasonably recent versions of matplotlib [v > 1.5], you can extract the default color scheme into a string array by:

clr = [p['color'] for p in plt.rcParams['axes.prop_cycle']]

Simplex and George Dantzig

We talked about the Simplex algorithm in class last week. It was invented by George Dantzig as a tool to solve large linear programming problems.

The story of how Dantzig, as a graduate student, mistook two unsolved problems in statistical theory for homework assignments is truly inspiring. It sounds like something you would see in a movie (like Goodwill Hunting), except it is true (Snopes).

QuickTip: Extract Bibliography File from Cited References

Suppose you have a couple of big BiBTeX databases that you import into a document myDoc.tex, either as,

\addbibresource{database1.bib}
\addbibresource{database2.bib}

or,

\bibliography{database1,database2}.

Suppose the databases contain 1000s of records, while your document contains only a few tens. If you want to extract a new ".bib" file only from the references cited in the paper, then you can use the bibexport tool that comes with the TeXLive distribution.

bibexport -o extracted.bib myDoc.aux

This produces a new bibliography file extracted.bib, which contains only those records used in myDoc.tex.

Pair-Programming and Google

The New Yorker has a riveting story about the unlikely friendship of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, and its role in shaping Google.

Sanjay looked at Jeff. For months, Google had been experiencing an increasing number of hardware failures. The problem was that, as Google grew, its computing infrastructure also expanded. Computer hardware rarely failed, until you had enough of it—then it failed all the time. Wires wore down, hard drives fell apart, motherboards overheated. Many machines never worked in the first place; some would unaccountably grow slower. Strange environmental factors came into play. When a supernova explodes, the blast wave creates high-energy particles that scatter in every direction; scientists believe there is a minute chance that one of the errant particles, known as a cosmic ray, can hit a computer chip on Earth, flipping a 0 to a 1.