NPCT

If anyone finds themselves needing an n-dimensional implementation of gammaln in Tom Minka’s Lightspeed, I posted the modified code here.

After wasting an absurd amount of time trying to figure out where the bug in my code was for fitting Dirichlet parameters, it turns out that the bug actually wasn’t in my code, but was in my test data. It appears that Stixbox has a bug in its gamma random variate generator, rgamma that [...]

In McCreary County vs. ACLU of Kentucky, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the county must remove the Ten Commandments from county courthouses as a violation of the Establishment Clause. Slate has a discussion. I thought Justice O’Connor’s concurrence was quite insightful:

At a time when we see around the world the violent consequences [...]

When I run the rgamma function in Stixbox, I regularly get this error:

??? Error using ==> reshape
To RESHAPE the number of elements must not change.
Error in ==> rgamma at 42

So, I changed the last line of the function from this:

x = reshape(x, n/nn(2), nn(2));

to this:

x = reshape(x(1:n), n/nn(2), nn(2));

I listened to Al Franken’s book and he rants a lot about Ann Coulter being crazy, but you just can’t quite appreciate it until you actually read her words.

The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go [...]

This week’s Offtopic Lunch at the Cavendish Laboratory will be by Rita Monson: “They are talking, are you listening: Bacterial Communication and Community Behaviour.” Here’s the abstract:

Bacteria use a wide variety of simple signaling molecules to communicate both within their own species and with other species around them. Infection progression, community behaviour, virulence, [...]

Scientific American has a nice article with fifteen answers to flawed Creationist arguments. Here’s number 9 as an example:

9. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that systems must become more disordered over time. Living cells therefore could not have evolved from inanimate chemicals, and multicellular life could not have evolved from protozoa.
This argument derives [...]

Ok, this is awesome. Willie Nelson and his wife have sponsored stem cell research at UT-Dallas. Just to clarify to all the country-listening right-wingers out there, that’s one of the Highwaymen with an enlightened point of view (he also supported the Democrats who fought the recent Texas gerrymandering), but don’t forget that Kris Kristofferson [...]

Sounds like JoePa is optimistic about 2005 and isn’t planning on retiring anytime soon. What football coach isn’t optimistic about the upcoming season? I like Paterno’s straight-forwardness regarding the additional game on the NCAA football schedule:

“We are playing a 12th game for strictly one reason — to create revenue so we can support [...]

Here are some pictures from the 2005 St. John’s May Ball.

I put up some pictures of May Bumps here.

First, I tried SBCL on Gentoo, then I tried CMUCL from Portage, then installing it straight from the binaries. I’m now going back to scratch and I’m going to record what I’m doing here. Truthfully, my objective is to make my efforts here searchable for other people having the same problems. I [...]

It appears that the Gentoo ebuild of cmucl and cmucl-source does not include simple-streams. I have no idea why this is, but I decided to unmerge them both and just install CMUCL straight off of the tarballs. That seems to be the only way to make sure I have a sane install. [...]

Just in case anyone else has problems installing CLOCC on
Gentoo, here is what I ultimately had to do to get it working. My problem was with finding gray streams, as was this guy’s. Anyway, after installing cmucl and cmucl-source, and following most of the instructions for CLOCC, it turns out that you need [...]

While it is clear that the macro syntax that Lisp offers is quite powerful, I find it hard to identify an easy-to-understand, concrete example of an improvement over other languages. I was writing a little code today and I realized that something I do all the time is open a text file and read [...]

Overall, I haven’t been able to decide whether GWB is legitimately unintelligent or a sellout. Now, I’m pretty sure I know the answer to that. In 1978, he ran for Congress, and made his views on abortion clear:

The Avalanche-Journal reported: “Bush said he opposes the pro-life amendment favored by Reese and favors leaving [...]

I do most of my work in Emacs: Latex, Matlab, various programming, etc. I have a big wide screen on my laptop (1920×1200) and I like to have one big Emacs window, with several buffers in split screens. I find it annoying that it has a click-to-focus policy for the split screens, in [...]