QuickTip: Import Beamer Slides into Article

From here:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}

\usepackage[noxcolor]{beamerarticle}

Trimming and Speeding MP3s

sox is a great command-line tool ("swiss army knife") for working with sound.

You can download it using apt-get or the software manager for your system.

Trimming a file is easy:

sox trim

sox fullsong.mp3 trimsong.mp3 trim 1:00 2:30

This trims a two and half minute portion of the file starting from the 1:00 minute mark.

Speeding up an audio file is also easy. To speed it up by 10%, use:

sox normalsong.mp3 fastersong.mp3 tempo 1.1

The Beauty of Calculus

Here is a wonderful talk by Steve Strogatz at Yale.

It is based, in part, on his most recent book "Infinite Powers".

Antifragile and Hormesis

So yeah, Nassim Taleb and Nate Silver are having a spat on Twitter on what probabilities mean. Unfortunately, Twitter a great medium for expressing outrage, not so much for persuasion.

Here is a more thoughtful take on Taleb's concept of Antifragility. Eric Falkenstein argues that it is an old idea repackaged in a shiny box.

While I concur with Taleb on most issues philosophically, I think the blog articulates what I have thought about most of NNT's big ideas (excellent marketing that oversell old ideas). As someone said, most of his work can be summarized as "shit happens; fuck you; because probability!"