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Nick Boucart › Likes
Agile Sysadmin and the Art of Infrastructure Automation - http://www.slideshare.net/bitfiel...
Nick Boucart liked this
Agile Sysadmin and the Art of Infrastructure Automation
- Patrick Debois
FoldIt: Wasting Time for a Good Cause - Boing Boing - http://www.boingboing.net/2009...
Yaroslav Nikolaev, Mickey Schafer, Daniel Mietchen and 3 other people liked this
"I am Aotearoa, I have been folding protein via Fold.it for a long time now, perhaps 9 months. This is, without a doubt the most challenging, exciting, stimulating, intense, addictive game I have ever played, did I just say game? nah, this is life... Real life! stuff that effects real people and YOU could be the person who discovers the breakthrough of a lifetime, by playing it. I don't have a science background or diplomas in anything, but that doesn't matter playing this game because everyone is equal, you have to teach yourself or join a group to get support to learn. Beating the scientists at their own game always makes me laugh... technique wins the puzzles, learning the tools to Fold with and how the protein reacts to your touch will help ALOT."
- Michael Nielsen
Web 2.0 Finds Its Way to Enterprise Innovation http://blog.cognistreamer.com/web-20-...
Nick Boucart liked this
Oli Lemieux training trampoline wall Dralion Cirque du Soleil - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Nick Boucart liked this
Using twitter to maintain an operations log « Tales from the classpath – Jeppe Nejsum Madsen - http://jeppenejsum.wordpress.com/2009...
Nick Boucart liked this
Math Overflow - http://mathoverflow.net/
Daniel Mietchen, Claudia Koltzenburg, Konrad Förstner and 11 other people liked this
Question and answer site for mathematics, with quite a bit of serious activity at a high level.
- Michael Nielsen
It would be wonderful if this took off like Stack Overflow.
- mkz
I see they're grappling with the perennial LaTeX problem. http://mathematics.stackexchange.com/questio...
- Dan Hagon
One day we will have this for synthetic organic chemistry. One day soon. Mark my words.
- Matthew Todd
mkz - I looked through about a dozen comment threads. Some of the content is too far from my area for me to judge, but it looks to me like they have a very nice little community of professional mathematicians contributing. Provided they're each getting more out of it than they're putting in, it's easy to see this gradually becoming more and more popular.
- Michael Nielsen
It looks like some of the usual suspects of the math blogosphere are there. Hopefully they will hang on for a while, at least long enough to create enough high quality momentum to get the thing going. There are a few high quality email lists that serve similar purposes, but the level of discussion on the ones I'm subscribed to is maybe a bit too high; it seems a bit hard for non-senior...
more...
- mkz
The Ultimate Productivity Blog - http://productiveblog.tumblr.com/
Björn Brembs, Mickey Schafer, Vladimir Blagojevic and 4 other people liked this
Surprisingly good.
- Michael Nielsen
Works for me ;)
- Nick Boucart
My new home page!
- Vladimir Blagojevic
The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed's web server - Bret Taylor's blog - http://bret.appspot.com/entry...
Bryan Tsai, Sebastian, Thierry R. Andriamirado and 293 other people liked this
We have open sourced our web server. Download it at http://www.tornadoweb.org/. Check out the Facebook announcement at http://developers.facebook.com/news...
- Bret Taylor
from Bookmarklet
See a live chat demo: http://chan.friendfeed.com:8888/
- Casey Muller
*have no idea what I am looking at*
- Joe
Wow! Thanks so much, Bret and co!
- Doug
this was very interesting; good job
- RAPatton
neat
- anna sauce
I wonder what the engineering decision was to not use a WSGI interface.
- mikepk
mikepk: it supports WSGI, but it is not WSGI by default because WSGI does not support non-blocking I/O for things like hanging connections. See http://www.tornadoweb.org/documen....
- Bret Taylor
This actually is a very good piece of code! Thanks folks!
- directeur
cool, Bret, thanks :) I was just heading through the docs now.
- mikepk
Thanks for doing this, Bret! That's some pretty cool stuff.
- Keith Bourgoin
that's great. thanks..
- Onur Gündüz
oh man, this is so awesome, thanks guys!
- Charles Ying
Is "tonado" a typo?
- Bruce Lewis
from fftogo
I'm hacking my own python web framework at the moment, so now the choice on whether I want to switch gears to this or not. I'm liking what I see so far.
- mikepk
Bruce: Yes
- Casey Muller
Wow.. Thanks!! pretty much makes my day.. which is scary in it's own rite.
- Chris Myles
Great news! Cheers to the FF team!
- Egon Willighagen
Nice new title Brett.."Facebook Director of Products".. a good sign of things to come!
- Chris Myles
very very glad to hear this bit: "Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed's real-time functionality, which we plan to actively maintain."
- Chris Heath
Great work
- James Myatt
does this have any implications for friendfeed.com in terms of competition and shelf-life?
- Franz Sittampalam
Franz: enables widespread adoption which leads to greater influence of the technique
- Mike Chelen
So excited this is out. So many personal projects I have been wanting to build with it :)
- Bret Taylor
Bret, do you have a set of coding conventions you use? E.g. looks like you use mixed case for classes and underbar separators for methods.
- Cristo
Fantastic, Bret (and team)!
- Micah Wittman
A very good project!...you know if will be possibile to use Tornado with other technogies except Python (such as JEE, Ruby On Rails, etc.)?
- Nicola Junior Vitto
Cristo: we tried to use the official Python coding conventions, though we may have inadvertently strayed. Those conventions are: ClassNames, method_names, variable_names
- Bret Taylor
Brilliant! I hope you can provide very valuable input for the next round of #python WSGI, which desperately needs a next round ;)
- Uche Ogbuji
Re: WSGI needing help, see http://www.b-list.org/weblog...
- Uche Ogbuji
grt
- Xitong Liu
"Facebook's opensource technologies" link is broken on tornadoweb.org ..
- Onur Gündüz
Onur, worked for me - and still works now
- Chris Heath
Very cool, in case someone needs a high-end Web Server for a project, FriendFeed just open-sourced theirs, & apparently, it screams..
- Alex Schleber
Nicola: there is a Ruby example - http://gist.github.com/184760
- Mike Chelen
thx Mike, but this is a kind of eventmachine (that sounds good) for Ruby, not a Tornado client or wrapper...isn't it?
- Nicola Junior Vitto
Excellent! Thank you. Was eagerly waiting for the day to come after looking this just 1 month ago; "changeset: 5afb8a445cad / date: 2009-08-11 16:34:48 / description: Initial open source packages" http://changelog.friendfeed.com/2009...
- NaHi
from f2p
Chris, yes it is fixed.. I swear it was broken ..
- Onur Gündüz
Good catch, NaHi. :)
- Micah Wittman
Thanks guys. Really appriciated.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
That's great. thanks Bret :-)
- Nimaa
Nice job on the non-blocking stuff Bret!
- Mitchell Tsai
"We have open sourced our web server" @bret took over a year but is worth the wait. thx for the follow through ~ http://bret.appspot.com/entry...
- Peter Renshaw
Ohhh, ummm, btw, your underhanded behind the scenes sell out still rankles my human decency, & a lot of others too, as should yours...thumbs down/dislike x 47.5 million dollars, however not being bitter of course, keep ignorance & bliss
- sofarsoShawn
As I expected :) brilliant
- FFTornado
that's the sound of I believe 100000000? or so hands clapping...& giving you the BOOOO-URNS if I'm not mistaken...
- sofarsoShawn
oh you sonsabitchez this fscking rules! why so badass, ff? thank. you. :)
- mike
So, can we say; Python is the future?
- Ozkan Altuner
Nice code. Started to look at it today. Thanks for doing this. Now to start testing this on some projects I had been working on.
- Altan Khendup
What OS do you guys run FF on?
- Diego Barros
Diego: we run on Linux.
- Bret Taylor
from email
@bret just out of curiosity - what would necessitate usage of such an engine for a *personal* project? :)
- Michael Bravo
Michael: it is a nice framework to use for any project in my opinion (though I am clearly biased). If you are doing anything real-time like the chat demo, something like Tornado is certainly necessary/useful regardless of the size of the project.
- Bret Taylor
from email
@bret and for little-sized hardware? should have try it on Maemo based :)))
- A.T.
@silpol I kinda fail to see Maemo devices being used for servers (unless it's some kind of satellite-based or other covert server maybe :) )
- Michael Bravo
from IM
@mbravo you never know... there are some unusual (and cool) apps for web servers, granted you abstain (on purpose) from classical models, e.g.server farm somewhere there and herds of clients connecting to it...
- A.T.
Bret: Cool, thanks. Just out of curiosity, which flavour of Linux is preferred by FriendFeed?
- Diego Barros
I think this is the best answer for the ultimate question: "Does python needs yet another web framework?" While most of us would say why, when one come across this, a real world proven technology, serving zillions of pages a day, one would say, well, why not. actually, why not even take it an try to integrate out next web app with it? great job! seems like joining FB won't do you any harm ;-)
- Tzury Bar Yochay
We've seen tornado vs twisted, how about tornado vs rails? http://www.youtube.com/watch...
- Tzury Bar Yochay
http://chan.friendfeed.com:8888/ It doesn't work. I'd like to see chat.js :)
- Анатолий Шарифулин
FriendFeed's web server, open sourced? This is great! Welcoome, Tornado!
- Thierry R. Andriamirado
Bret: how do you proxy long-living connections through nginx? Vanilla nginx buffers everything.
- Alex Kapranoff
nginx has a configuration option to turn off buffering.
- Tristan Seligmann
They've accepted our session "Being Agile where it Matters: Business Values of Agility" at the XP Days Benelux
Wico and Nick Boucart liked this
Request to FF: Before any shut down please ensure there is a a public archive made of the complete public timeline. There is gold in there for future sociologists (they just haven't realised it yet). For the rest of the research community here there is immense value tied up in here which we would like to continue to get at in the future.
Anders Norgaard, Branwen Hide, Egon Willighagen and 28 other people liked this
Could I also suggest that if there are licence issues that people declare that leaving a comment here means that they are happy to have their (already public) content archived in this way?
- Cameron Neylon
OK to hang onto my public comments, yeah.
- D0r0th34
Absolutely, mine also.
- Garret McMahon
Dear FF team: archive my FF content any way you like, just please do archive it and keep it public.
- Bill Hooker
I think that sociologists have begun mining what's available here. I spent months lurking here and on blogs mostly from an ethnographic point of view. And yes, I am happy to be archived.
- Mickey Schafer
Yes, please!
- Elaine Nelson
Feel free to use my stuff - Archive away.
- Chris Miller
If it's publicly posted here, it should be assumed to be archivable. While that's my opinion and applies to all my stuff here, I think it's also probably the consensus.
- Mr. Gunn
Cameron, shouldn't you also post this to the Friendfeed Feedback room? You've posted it as a request to the organization, but not in a place they're as likely to be tracking.
- Jill O'Neill
Jill I have, but its on a separate item. Check here http://friendfeed.com/the-lif... and here http://friendfeed.com/friendf...
- Cameron Neylon
Agree with Mr. Gunn 3 posts up.
- Steve Koch
Aso agree with Mr Gunn but I wouldn't want something to be scuppered because of something odd in the terms of service...
- Cameron Neylon
Are people attempting to archive their individual contributions? If so, how? I've posted a lot of stuff directly here that isn't replicated elsewhere.
- Hilary
I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. - http://kendroid.tumblr.com/post...
Nick Boucart, Aaron D'Souza, Richard Akerman and 2 other people liked this
xkcd - Extrapolating - http://xkcd.com/605/
Sarah Kendrew, Christopher Granade and Nick Boucart liked this
And in eighteen years you will singlehandedly be paying for every single institution of higher education on the planet...
- D0r0th34
Eternal moonwalk - A tribute to Michael Jackson. - http://www.eternalmoonwalk.com/
Jan Aerts, Pierre Lindenbaum, Sarah Kendrew and Nick Boucart liked this
An eternal user-generated moonwalk from around the world. Lots of people do a surprisingly good one.
- Michael Nielsen
This site is made by Belgium national radio station "studio brussel", a radio station targetting an audience of people ranging 15-35 with slightly more alternative music. Their main site is http://www.stubru.be
- Nick Boucart
StuBru is such a great radio station - I've never found anything like it in other countries...
- Sarah Kendrew
@Sarah: that's been my feeling as well: not in the Netherlands, France, Scotland or England at least. Have had to stream it over the web since we moved abroad.
- Jan Aerts
Ellen no more counting ... officially graduated as a pathologist!
Nick Boucart, Vladimir Blagojevic and Jessie Dedecker liked this
Proficiat!
- Vladimir Blagojevic
StackExchange™—The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform - http://www.stackexchange.com/
Morton Fox, Konrad Förstner, Nick Boucart and 12 other people liked this
"The Stack Overflow Knowledge Exchange Platform Designed by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, Stack Overflow has rapidly become the best place for programmers to get answers to technical questions. Now there's a way to get the same kind of site for your audience. Bird calls? Stamp collecting? It's up to you The idea of a knowledge exchange, running the same software as Stack Overflow, can be applied to just about any subject matter. With StackExchange™, you can run a site with all the same features that made Stack Overflow successful. Customizable look and feel StackExchange allows you to override style sheets, choose color schemes, and provide your own logo. You can use a stackexchange.com URL (for example, philately.stackexchange.com) or your own top-level domain. You can also insert arbitrary HTML into the parts of the page where stackoverflow.com would display advertising."
- Michael Nielsen
I've only just come across the Stack Overflow podcast recently.. this has been mentioned a few times since then. I like the way they are opening up not just the platform but the data too...
- Daniel Swan
Some useful commentary, including links to similar open source products, at: http://news.ycombinator.com/item...
- Michael Nielsen
Wow. So shall we try SO for scientists?
- Michael Kuhn
But SO works because it's a site for IT geeks. I don't think it would work for science. What would you ask here ? A bibliographic reference ? Some help with a protocol ?...
- Pierre Lindenbaum
I would ask the same kind of questions we are asking and answering now in the life scientists room.
- Michael Kuhn
@michael But most of the time, we don't ask any question here :-)
- Pierre Lindenbaum
@Pierre -- we have had a few cases though, and people have got really good useful answers. My own example: http://friendfeed.com/billhoo.... Perhaps it's just a matter of FF'ers slowly developing the habit of bringing questions here?
- Bill Hooker
It would work for chemistry if there were a quick, intuitive way to share a) data b) pictures and c) video along with posts on SO. If there's any kind of barrier to that, people won't bother. Sharing code is so easy in comparison. I guess also that a chemical lab is quite a social place - lots of people around you you can ask first. Don't programmers often work in physical isolation, where their collaborators are online?
- Matthew Todd
I think it is hard to predict if scientist in general would accept it as a tool - if the critical mass of a certain scientific community accepts it it might become a useful resource for them. Another direction: It could be useful for teaching - students ask certain questions that are answered by others.
- Konrad Förstner
@Konrad: about 'teaching'. I think this is the goal of Nature Scitable: http://www.nature.com/scitable
- Pierre Lindenbaum
@Pierre - thanks for the hint - but I guess there are many different ways of approaching the online teaching aspect like there are many ways of dealing with programming related topics. Maybe I haven't found the SO like functionality in Scitable but what make SO so attractive to me is its simplicity and pure focus on "I have a question - who has the best answer?".
- Konrad Förstner
Web inventor to help Downing Street open up government data | Technology | guardian.co.uk - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technol...
Nick Boucart liked this
Tim Berners-Lee will help British government to make its data more easily available online
- Pirjo
Confluence Overview - Demonstration Space - Sirris Wiki - http://wiki.sirris.be/display...
Nick Boucart liked this
Community Principles (Google Wave Federation Protocol) - http://www.waveprotocol.org/wave-co...
Björn Brembs, Nick Boucart, Daniel Mietchen and 3 other people liked this
"The Google Wave Federation Protocol is evolving as an open source project, and as the community and technology grows, here are the guiding principles: * Wave is an open network: anyone should be able to become a wave provider and interoperate with the public network * Wave is a distributed network model: traffic is routed peer-to-peer, not through a central server * Make rapid progress, together: a shared commitment to contribute to the evolution and timely deployment of protocol improvements * Community contributions are fundamental: everyone is invited to participate in the public development process * Decisions are made in public: all protocol specification discussions are recorded in a public archive"
- Michael Nielsen
finally managed to get to end of Google Wave keynote. Blown away...many things that were looking real tough may now fall into place easily
Lambert Heller, Jodi Schneider, Ruchira S. Datta and 25 other people liked this
I really need to find an hour to watch that...
- Brian Krueger - LabSpaces
Yes you do. And I need to figure out how to get on the inside or find five developers who want to start building stuff...imagine that spell check/translator/linking backend hooked up to an ontology browser just for starters. But the real beauty is in aggregation and republishing mechanisms. This is taking Jon Udell's pub-sub paradigm to a whole new level.
- Cameron Neylon
For all the complaining we do on friend feed about science apps, you'd think we'd be able to put some ideas together, pitch them to an angel group, and actually produce something we'd all like to use.
- Brian Krueger - LabSpaces
My thoughts exactly - or conversely write the killer grant application (ideally with Google support) to develop something that works and test it in anger.
- Cameron Neylon
The conflict resolution aspect is what sold it for me. Having worked with wikis quite a bit, I know how much of an issue this can be. Oh, and the real-time translation... also really cool. Can't wait for this to become available.
- Ricardo Vidal
I do wonder how well the conflict resolution will work over dodgy connections or where you have bad latency
- Cameron Neylon
Getting google backing would be a good selling point.
- Brian Krueger - LabSpaces
Absolutely - believe me I'm on the case. Will be proposing "Making waves in laboratory notebooks" as a Scifoo session...
- Cameron Neylon
I sent a link to this thread to Bill Flanagan (OpenWetWare lead developer) ... not sure if he's on friendfeed, though.
- Steve Koch
It reminded me of what Rajarshi does with email - inline comments and almost instant response. Just waiting for all the wave puns - "Making waves in the gene pool" etc.
- Andrew Lang
My s.o. was at Google IO where they unveiled it and I believe they all get test accounts. Not even in alpha yet but the potential is indeed huge.
- Shirley Wu
Damn. I kept hoping that someone would come along and tell me that it wasn't worth watching, but everyone seems impressed. Guess I'll make some time soon.
- Chris Miller
Between now and when Google Wave becomes publicly available is a good time to build extensions for scientists. I would be interested in working on a gadget, robots are best written in Java or Python.
- Martin Fenner
Haven't seen it yet - would this be something to include in blog3?
- Björn Brembs
+1 "Making waves in the gene pool", that's funny Andrew
- Jim Hardy
am watching it now. Cool, very cool. Looks like I need to contact our grant agency where I just sent our grant application 2 hours ago...
- Björn Brembs
Bjorn, I don't think it needs a complete change of direction. Blog3 (or any other semantic webby kind of thing) could easily be seen as a way of reprocessing or coordinating objects that are natively waves or as a way of authoring the connections between objects that are then sent out as waves.
- Cameron Neylon
ps sorry I didn't get that letter to you. Basically been totally crap at delivering on anything in the past week. Apparently I don't scale well. Will try to be more useful in the future.
- Cameron Neylon
One really does need to watch the whole video to get an appreciation for what this is truly capable of doing
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Yup, especially the federation part towards the end.
- Björn Brembs
xkcd as a text on algorithms - http://code.activestate.com/recipes...
Brome and Nick Boucart liked this
A useful piece of code that uses xkcd as its sole algorithmic reference.
- Michael Nielsen
Knowledge Management 101? | Above and Beyond KM - http://aboveandbeyondkm.com/2009...
Kevin Gamble, John Spyers, Mark Gould and 17 other people liked this
"A far better approach is to think hard and then think harder again about human nature — how we learn, how we know and how we share what we know. And then, put your organization and colleagues under a microscope and study them until you have an accurate understanding of how the knowledge ecosystem within your organization works. When you’re ready to do this, here are some useful guides to help you along your way"
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
from Bookmarklet
Timely - currently being compelled to supplement the existing Sharepoint, wikis (because one is *never* enough), and network folders full of Word, Excel and Visio docs, by adding new information to a new wiki. But we don't want to move stuff out of the existing knowledge stores and into the new one. Oh, no - we want new knowledge! Guess who's going to be writing many pages of hyperlinks to other places? :-/
- Andy Bold
Andy, sounds about typical - expect people to not use any of it in the end, because with so many places to check it takes too much time to locate information. Install a good indexing tool and search engine. Your best option is to figure out how to write a migration script to gather it all in one place if at all possible
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Oh, we have several search engines as well, all doing their own poor job of looking in different places :-/ People are starting to come to me to help them find stuff... Need to put that down for my next performance review - "Search engine" ;-)
- Andy Bold
that's hardly the optimal use of your time! DM me and I might have some pointers, perhaps (mostly on how to pitch/sell a migration)
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Thanks - think we have it covered though! I've been speaking with my US boss, who also thinks this is a SNAFU, and we're figuring it out.
- Andy Bold
bummer, thought I'd get a lucrative migration advice contract ;) But glad you got the message through, unless you wanted your job title to change to "librarian"
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Joelle, you may not have won that lucrative migration contract, but you did start a conversation. So, thank you!
- V Mary Abraham
Thanks :D There is a tendency in KM to forget that knowledge is a living thing involving people using and extending it, knowing then doing. It's not enough to buy tools and systems - what you get is a butterfly and rock collection, not a living ecosystem. So many intranets and repositories are put in place but not used, not updated etc - because not covering the needs, or too inflexible...
more...
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Another problem is that our tendency to focus on the concrete (e.g., capturing explicit knowledge, organizing documents, etc.) sometimes lets us avoid the messier questions of human behavior with respect to learning and knowledge sharing. It's easier to count the number of documents in a repository than it is to count the number of satisfying interactions.
- V Mary Abraham
I couldnt agree more - theoretical efficiency <> satisfaction. Which gets me on a tangent story which I think will illustrate... I spent some time in my career in scientific publishing and bibliographical databases. Part of the job involved teaching people how to search using the different tools, in universities, hospitals and research facilities. Made it obvious to me what a huge gap...
more...
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Well, does that imply inefficient design? Based on your story, I would have to say yes.
- Mike Shields
Not as much inefficient design as design by the search experts for the search experts... something a lot of technology systems fall into - which makes it inefficient for the real users, who might be science experts but dont want to be search experts.
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Design by experts for experts. So why do amateurs like us buy the stuff?
- V Mary Abraham
Because we share the same needs, and have long learned to put up with things. It takes years to get away from the "oh no, what did i do wrong?" reflex when dealing with complex systems that are unintuitive or inconsistent
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
Too bad. It makes us sitting ducks for vendors.
- V Mary Abraham
“The thing is, it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself in the end that he is right.” - Atle Selberg, winner of the 1950 Fields Medal
Darren Heydon, Lisa zahara Hopkins, K.D. and 82 other people liked this
I wonder how sure he was of that.
- Simon
Wasn't he talking of religion in general, and belief in supernatural in particular? Myself, I am partial to the concept of religion as a self-replicating and very nearly ineradicable thought virus (with some exceptions).
- ianf ⌘
ianf -- secularists and atheists are fully capable of holding fixed ideas that are as absurd and destructive as those held by religionists. Marxists, Marxist-Lenininsts, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Maoists, etc. murdered in the neighborhood of 100 million people in the 20th century in the pursuit of utopian fantasies. (See The Black Book of Communism.)
- Sean McBride
I have no idea what he was talking about -- it's not important to me. I just liked the quote. I think it applies to everything, including religion, atheism, politics, technology, finance, etc.
- Paul Buchheit
I have a fixed idea that friendfeed rocks. :-)
- Robert Scoble
Sean - did you see me write that, so you needed to set me straight (again)? Besides, had I elected to engage in this discussion, I'd have pointed out from the start, that your "godless" examples of Communism (and Fascism, I presume) can just as easily be described as new religions. Complete with their own belief dogmas, foundation myths, theology, cathecisms (="A FAQ of religious...
more...
- ianf ⌘
ianf -- these Marxist movements were all explicitly anti-religious, and in many cases targeted religions for destruction (and religionists for death). To describe them as "religious" in any conventional or meaningful sense is to play word games. They were militantly dogmatic in their secularism and anti-religionism, in their fixed anti-religious ideas.
- Sean McBride
It seems clear to me that "religious" has two (related) meanings. It's common to describe a technical debate (such as one involving programming languages) as being "religious", but without literally meaning that it's the same as an Christianity or something.
- Paul Buchheit
Usually it means that the discussion is over non-falsifiable statements or matters of opinion that won't lead to anything useful.
- Bruce Lewis
really good context of the quote can be found here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26... Selberg was talking about fellow mathematician Louis de Branges, who had a reputation for being consistently wrong. In 1985 de Branges announced he had proved the Bieberbach Conjecture, and nobody paid any attention to it because it was from de Branges. Only, in this case, de Branges happened to be correct. :-)
- Karim
i'm not sure if Selberg was saying that de Branges was often wrong because he was seduced by the attractiveness of his own "fixed ideas" -- proofs that de Branges felt were correct when they weren't -- or whether it was a comment on the mathematical community rejecting de Branges' ideas outright because of *their* "fixed idea" that he was a nutcase. :-) either way, the lesson would seem to be, "Don't be so sure of yourself."
- Karim
oh and +1 Simon
- Karim
Hear, hear (Sean ;-))
- ianf ⌘
Isn't that the truth
- RAPatton
Life is a constant work in-progress!
- Kris
@Kris: are we sure of that? Like a fixed idea? </resist>
- Bill Anderson
from twhirl
unless your fixed idea is that we should legalize marijuana, in which case then it's cool.
- Thomas Hawk
BuddyPress.org - A WordPress MU Based Social Network Platform - http://buddypress.org/
Nick Boucart liked this
"BuddyPress will transform an installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform. BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact."
- Vladimir Blagojevic
from Bookmarklet
Peter Stuer and Nick Boucart liked this
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