Good environmental news: First Hawaiian "golden gooney" chick to fly soon

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="422" caption="Photo: US Fish & Wildlife Service"][/caption]

Raising Islands--Hawai'i science and environment: First Hawaiian "golden gooney" chick to fly soon.

How often do you get good environmental news?

I'm a bird geek. Or actually more of a romantic -- I  shed a tear when I …

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Things I Learned From New Scientist This Week

Clever

Robot with corkscrew legs travels over rough terrain

Australia is considering a plan to make all cigarette packaging generic -- no branding or design on the cigarettes or packages, just the name in a generic font. The cigarette companies are freaking out, obviously.

Interesting

A study seems to show "we …

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WW2 Sub Ballasted With Gold

HMS Friday – The Most Valuable Ballast : The Scuttlefish.

I wonder if Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon was partially influenced by this true story...

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MSR Paper on 10x Pose Recognition Alg (Kinect)

Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from a Single Depth Image - Microsoft Research.

Whether this is in the Kinect software API being released imminently, it's not clear, but it will certainly become available over time, presumably giving 2012-era Kinect games higher-quality recognition

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Configuring Google +1 Button With Word Press and Bad Behavior Plugin

The very valuable Bad Behavior plugin for WordPress causes conflicts with Google's recently introduced +1 button. The fix is very simple.

Symptoms: When you attempt to "+1" on a Word Press site that is using the Bad Behavior plugin, the +1 icon appears for a few seconds and then is …

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Literate Programming: Python-Style

I don't think literate programming is something that will ever enjoy widespread popularity, but for those who write about programming, it's something devoutly to be wished. It might be a good match for Python, which is a nice language for data exploration and demonstrating algorithms and techniques. This tool: pyreport …

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Free Book: The Architecture of Open Source Applications

The Architecture of Open Source Applications.

I've just skimmed a few chapters, which you can do as well at the above link, or you can buy it in paperback or PDF.

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Choosing Scala (Somewhat Reluctantly)

Scala is the implementation language of choice on the next big project I'll be working on. For me, that's a tiny bit of a disappointment, as I've been slowly building up my knowledge, not of Scala, but of Haskell. But the high-level software at the observatory is predominantly Java, so …

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jQuery Events: Stop (Mis)Using Return False | Fuel Your Coding

Guilty as charged: jQuery Events: Stop (Mis)Using Return False | Fuel Your Coding.

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