The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is one of the most ambitious and influential surveys in the history of astronomy. Over eight years of operations (SDSS-I, 2000-2005; SDSS-II, 2005-2008), it obtained deep, multi-color images covering more than a quarter of the sky and created 3-dimensional maps containing more than 930,000 galaxies and more than 120,000 quasars.

It is hard not to dream about exploring space when you see what Sloan has to offer.

For one of the problems we were given the equation:

P = @(x) (x-2)^9;

Which produces this over [1.92, 2.08]

One of the awesome things about MATLAB (or GNU Octave) is that it has a great graphing libraries and a REPL that lets you literally “play” with the problems you are working on. You can visualize it different ways, you can dig deep into different corners, there is really no limit. The net result is a very fun and educational learn-by-doing system very much in the spirit of HtDP. That said I wanted to play around with the function we were given.

Out of curiosity I multiplied out P into PEX:

PEX = @(x) ...
      (x^9)       - (18 * x^8)   + (144 * x^7)  - (672 * x^6) ...
    + (2016 *x^5) - (4032 * x^4) + (5376 * x^3) - (4608 * x^2) ...
    + (2304 * x)  - (512);

Now you and I know that P and PEX are equivalent. What do you think will happen we we plot P and PEX together? I figured that we would get one line on top of the other since they are literally the same equation. Why did I want to do this? I can only attribute it to providence.

After thinking about it, go to the next page.

I submitted:

EiffelStudio: A Contract for Success

– Grant Rettke

And won!

They gave me a one-year license for EiffelStudio in return for signing away the slogan.

It was worth it… it is a great language!

(via lifehacker)

Cool can come from what a [thing] is or what it does. But at the core, Cool is about purity of expression, of material objects being infused with human energy, creativity and insight to make them more than just the sum of their parts.

– Mark Hoyer, WHAT IS COOL?, Cycle World 2/2010

I love Mark’s take on cool; from motorcycles to programming languages, it still makes sense. It makes me think about how great it is to be alive, living, in the present. It is a gift.

Swing is the GUI standard for Java. Clojure is the awesomeness standard for Java.

(via Stuart)

Have you felt it lately? How?

What is a beautiful font for printed quotes?

His recipe is a classic; his sense of humor is hard to resist:

(image found via Neven)