Roberto De Almeida

I’ve learned that “data scientists,” no matter what their background, specialize in providing insight by using keen analytical and quantitative skills. If needed, they will clean, explore, and model data sets to create new information products and key metrics. These scientists are not in a cubical doing mundane research towards an elusive goal.

Magenta is the complementary color to green, or the color of the afterimage you would see after you stare at a green light. All of the colors of light have complementary colors that exist in the visible spectrum, except for green's complement, magenta. Most of the time your brain averages the wavelengths of light you see in order to come up with a color. For example, if you mix red light and green light, you'll see yellow light. However, if you mix violet light and red light, you see magenta rather than the average wavelength, which would be green. Your brain has come up with a way to bring the ends of the visible spectrum together in a way that makes sense. Pretty cool, don't you think?

That's why magenta is my favorite color. And of course, due to the reaction of a friend when I told her about magenta: "magenta? that's something that only exists in Matlab!"

We have not succeeded in answering all our problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher level and about more important things.

The new micro-lattice material is so light that it can sit atop dandelion fluff without damaging it (Image: Dan Little, HRL Laboratories, LLC)

Earlier this year we looked at a "multiwalled carbon nanotube (MCNT) aerogel" -also dubbed "frozen smoke" - that, with a density of 4 mg/cm3, became the world's lightest solid material. Now frozen smoke has been knocked off its perch by a new metallic material with a density of just 0.9 mg/cm3, making it around 100 times lighter than Styrofoam. Despite being 99.99 percent open volume, the new material boasts impressive strength and energy absorption, making it potentially useful for a range of applications.

I love the picture, I saw it on the newspaper this morning and went looking for the article online just to post it here. :)

I pick two real numbers through some process unknown to you. It might be random and it might not. Maybe I always pick "3" and "100". Maybe I roll two dice. Maybe I write C code by mashing a keyboard until it compiles and prints two numbers (or produces Windows ME). Maybe I always use 0 for the first number, and for the second I call my aunt and ask her for a negative real number, which I multiply by the estimated number of protons in the universe. (At this point, my aunt is used to that kind of call from me.)

I put these two numbers on slips of paper and put them in two envelopes. I thoroughly shuffle the envelopes, and then you choose one via a fair coin toss. You open it and look at the number. You are now given the option (as in the infamous but very different Monty Hall problem) of switching to the other envelope.

Your goal is to pick the envelope with the higher number. Can you come up with a strategy that guarantees you a better-than-even chance of winning?

The solution is in the comments, it's a quite simple and elegant one.

Kaufmann’s Posographe is nothing less than an analog mechanical computer for calculating six-variable functions. Specifically, it computes the exposure time (Temps de Pose) for taking photographs indoors or out (depending on which side you use). The input variables are set up on the six small pointers; the large pointer then gives you the correct time. The variables are very detailed, yet endearingly colloquial. For outdoors, they include the setting -- with values like “Snowy scene”, “Greenery with expanse of water”, or “Very narrow old street”; the state of the sky -- including “Cloudy and somber”, “Blue with white clouds”, or “Purest blue”; The month of the year and hour of the day; the illumination of the subject; and of course the aperture (f-number).

I'm waiting for the day that we'll have affordable 3D printers able to print something like this.

Amazing! Reminds me of Badi Assad playing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBMe9foIuR0).

We wanted to give Rudy the ability to rotate the laptop to whomever he was chatting with. This problem lent itself to a fairly simple solution that we thought we could put together rather quickly with an Arduino, a servo motor, a rotating platform, and a simple server that bridged communication between a serial port and TCP/IP port.

Cool solution, but it looks a little freaky. Sometimes we have Skype meetings with my boss and for a few seconds I always have the impression that my boss is actually a computer.

In general JSON via HTTP or zeromq is so much cooler and more flexible than WSGI could ever be. I think if we accept that as a possible way to build applications out of components and start experimenting with it we could build some really cool stuff.

This is something I was thinking yesterday. I tend to use WSGI stacking a lot on my development — on Pydap, for example, most of the additional functionality is implemented as WSGI middleware. Search is one example: I wrote a middleware that indexes all the datasets on a server, and injects an API (at /_search, IIRC) for queries using JSON. This would be much better running as a separate application, and there's no reason to run it in the WSGI stack.