@rcollyer I've been on the BioBeta again today; it just makes me feel like we're on the right track. The user base needs maturity, but there's already good potential.
@rcollyer Speaking of getting out of commitment, over 25% of committers to the Mathematica site have fulfilled the commitment (by posting 10 times or whatever the formula is). You have to get all the way to Christianity (in beta 224 days) before seeing a beta with anything like that (in their case, above, at 30%). Most other betas have single-digit numbers.
@Verbeia I think we're headed for an early graduation, relatively speaking, probably on the order of 6 mos.
Towards that end, we should discuss the idea of a community promotion ad, again. I think we need some info from WRI on what we can reasonably use without exposing SE to a lawsuit, though. Anybody know anyone who works at WRI? :P
There's a proposal to use a custom spikey in our ad/design. My concern is we could get into legal hot water over its use. Since your a programmer, I wouldn't expect you to know where we can tread there, but any insight?
My personal feeling is that, even if there is no objection, it makes sense to have a user contest to design something unique and beautiful and signifying the community.
@rcollyer would it be considered in poor form if one of the moderators put comments on some of the promising graphics-related posts saying, "you should take a look at this question"
@rcollyer Yeah... I used to stomp out those when I was visiting actively, but then I took a break after qualifying and then a short "vacation" and I see it's all MATLAB everywhere.
At least, one saving grace is that the users answering are not (generally) giving them code solutions, but rather approaches and ideas, which is good
I've earned less than 1k rep since Sept last yr... I kind of lost interest in the site and now mostly do janitorial work.
Exactly. It was one of those that languished for more than a year in Area51 and when we went into beta, folks found out that they couldn't invite others... no questions being asked, bored of seeing the existing ones... a good number of them left during private beta
Well that makes me glad we got through as fast as we did. Our "loss" of cohesiveness did not begin until we were well into beta, and different people started to burn out.
I see a big difference in the kind of questions asked on gardening and dsp... no one has an "urgent" issue with their plant and even if they did (I wonder what it could be) it can't be fixed overnight. So mostly questions are thought out and written decently. On the other hand, where there are colleges, there are assignments. And where there are students, there are last-minute-joes. So...
As we are approaching 90 days, it is time to get us back to answering the 7 Essential Questions.
In terms of site design, we ultimately need to consider a number minutiae such as logo, the top banner, the look of our badges, the color scheme used, etc. As this is a large topic, this question sho...
Wow, the queue on one of the clusters is nearly empty of queued jobs. All but 2 are running, and 64 of the nodes are about to free up in the next 10 hours. Hmm... should get some stuff queued up.
Had some more fun with the grab-plot-data question. The answer is now way over the top as far as length is concerned. Mods should do something against that. ;-)
@SjoerdCdeVries you'd think the mods would be on top of excessively long answers like that! After all, there's this trouble maker, he just keeps making these excessively long posts!
@SjoerdCdeVries Did you get auto-flagged for it? :)
@Heike I hadn't thought of that application. Could be interesting.
I really should have looked at the Experimental` package before now. There's two very interesting functions in there: CompileEvaluate and ValueFunction.
@Heike CompileEvaluate compares favorably against Leonid's JIT solution, so it was an interesting find. But, I agree ValueFunction looks like a very interesting function.
If we knew the answer it wouldn't be called research!
There was this one problem from that class that I want to try my initial method again: using $\mathbf{E}$, $\mathbf{B}$, and $\mathbf{E} \times \mathbf{B}$ for circularly polarized light as the coordinate system you're working in. Didn't have time to work out the effect on the derivatives or the integrals at the time, so I had to put it aside. But, it gave me interesting results before that point!
@Heike No, not really. It all started with my youngest son who had to chose an instrument, and who choose drums but was a bit shy to go to the music school alone. So, I decided to join him and we now have a weekly hour with a private tutor (a drumming student) here in the Utrecht conservatory.
@EliLansey ideally one shouldn't use ordinary superglue on wounds since it doesn't stick strongly enough (compared to medical superglue) and eventually breaks down into toxic by-products. However, I still do it, with no apparent ill effects so far...
@Heike I never found acetone particularly effective for dissolving it; in the lab I use a mixture of isopropanol and butanol (also good for dissolving perfluoropolyether vacuum grease) but at home I just use soap and hot water (both the soap, and the temperature of the water seem to be important).
@OleksandrR you'd probably be cleaving the ester by using soap and hot water.
Which could explain the effectiveness, but still the most probably helpful effect is that of temperature, I think. If you say acetone doesn't work well..
Also, nail polish remover here now only contains EtOAC, Acetone being deemed dangerous.
@CHM not sure that soap is alkaline enough or that hot water is hot enough, but yes, probably to some extent. However, superglue isn't a polyester; it polymerizes by a nucleophilic mechanism. I think the soap and water mainly serve to get underneath the glue and lubricate and soften the top layer of the epidermis, allowing it to be rubbed off more easily.