Bill Gates recently bought the video rights to Richard Feynman’s 1964 lectures at Cornell University. And now he’s released them through Microsoft Research’s Project Tuva.
I’ve been a fan of Richard Feynman for close to 20 years. I read the two books of stories of his life that he co-wrote: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) and What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. And I also read James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.
One of my life goals is to one day fully understand Feynman Diagrams. But that can wait, because I plan on enjoying the lecture series. Thank you, Bill Gates.
Note: to use Project Tuva (and watch the videos) you will have to download and install Microsoft Silverlight, a browser application framework, which competes with Adobe Flash, and which is not available for all browser/OS platforms.
Martin Fowler, chief scientist at ThoughtWorks, author, and advocate for agile practices has written a report and given a talk on ThoughtWorks’ experience with using Ruby in their consultancy.
You can read the report or watch the video.
Here is the major conclusion of the report:
All of these questions sum up into the key question for us: is Ruby (and Rails) a viable platform for us and our clients. The answer thus far is a resounding “yes”. It offers palpable gains in productivity, allowing us to be more responsive and produce better software, more quickly for our clients. This isn’t to say it’s the right choice for all situations. Choosing a development platform is never a simple choice, particularly since it usually is more of a social choice than a technological choice. But the headline conclusion is that Ruby is a choice that’s worth considering, worthy enough for us to want to keep this tool in our toolkit. [emphasis added]
The Register reports that a survey conducted by Evans Data shows that in North America, usage of Ruby by developers is up by 40% from one year ago. Furthermore, based on what developers expect to be using in the next year, we should see a 43% increase in Ruby over the next twelve months.
We scheduled our Ruby Fundamentals Workshop just before the Great Lakes Ruby Bash conference here in Ann Arbor, so workshop participants can stay an extra day and enjoy the conference.
Learn more on our training page.
The Great Lakes Ruby Bash is a one-day regional Ruby conference that will be held in Ann Arbor, MI on Saturday, October 11th. The conference is only $50 and includes lunch.
Registration is now open.
According to this article Eurogames tend to have the following features:
- “emphasise strategy over showiness”
- “downplay luck and conflict”
- “lean towards economic rather than martial themes”
- “strive to keep all the players at the table until the game’s end”
The linked article emphasizes that, “[Germany] specialises in ‘Eurogames’,” and that “Germans are the keenest European players.”
Even though I’m no spring chicken, I still have regular “AHA!” moments where something that puzzled me or got little notice from me suddenly falls into place. And I’m glad I do still have these moments, because they’re so much fun. I wonder how I missed things that in hindsight seem so obvious. And I’m never sure whether I’m in the minority or majority with each of these gaps in knowledge as they come up.
Anyway, I just had one of those moments. I was reading a post in a blog on statistical modeling, and I followed the link to the paper cited. And in reading the abstract, I suddenly realized why it’s called the periodic table.
Of course I know what periodic means, and I learned a bit about the periodic table in my two chemistry classes. But I guess I never asked myself why it’s called the periodic table. Now I realize it’s because, for at least a certain portion of the table, elements 18 “units” apart from another share certain properties. So there’s a periodicity of 18 for part of the table. Whoa!
I suppose part of the reason is that when I learned about properties of the elements in the periodic table, I was probably about twelve, and the word periodic didn’t mean much to me. But I took one other course in chemistry as an undergrad, and I must have understood what periodic meant by then….
Does everyone know this and I just somehow missed it?
I got an email from David Black of Ruby Central yesterday that my talk proposal had been accepted for RubyConf 2008 in Orlando, Florida. My talk will be on Friday, November 7th from 2:10 – 2:55 in Room #1.
You will see from the abstract that this is not a typical Ruby talk. Since I spoke at RubyConf 2007, I felt I had to at least submit a proposal for this year’s conference. I struggled to come up with something that would be cool and interesting, and I was failing miserably. On the final day that talk proposals were being accepted I decided to take a step back and ask myself what I could offer the Ruby community. And when I framed the problem that way, I realized that my background in neural modeling and cognitive psychology was likely unique in the Ruby community, and that that was where I should look for a topic. Two hours later I’d written the abstract for my talk.
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