Kyle Matthew Oliver

Author: Kyle

  • Strange Indeed

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    Kyle
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    One of the very, very few reasons I regret not having a car is that getting to Madison’s east or west sides for movies hardly seems worth the investment in bus-riding time (we miss you University Square, you of the $4.75 student admission and reasonably priced beer). This week I’m doubly bummed due to this…

  • News Wire: (Mostly) Underwater Edition

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    Three of the four science stories that caught my eye this morning take place under water: “Case study: Making waves with new power generation technology” (Financial Times)“What’s Making That Awful Racket? Surprisingly, It May Be Fish” (New York Times)“Growing Pains for a Deep-See Home Built of Subway Cars” (New York Times) Not content with those…

  • Final One

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    Well, the unscientific verdict (“unscientific” because saying anything based on one tournament or especially one game is foolishness) is in: if you’re looking to win some money or whatever, you can do a lot worse than to start from the pure LRMC rankings and go from there to make your bracket picks, at least given…

  • I Didn’t Know We Could Do That

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    Two fascinating stories off the morning science wire today: Paper planes tested for launch into space –What have aerospace engineers got to lose? Everything but a single sheet of spray-coated sugar cane paper, apparently. I mentioned this project a while back, and I just can’t get enough of it. I hope it works. 10 impossibilities…

  • …What To Leave Out

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    I got a hat tip from the Freakonomics blog today in reference to a recent post about the Wikipedia article for “real life.” The post accepts the premise that fantasy and reality are complements rather than substitutes (a position Contraria Sunt Complementa naturally supports), and it zeros in on Robin Hanson’s pro-complement point that “fiction…

  • Long Time No Hear, Here

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    Just a quick announcement: Natalia Zukerman is finally coming back to Madison! She’ll be playing at Cafe Montmartre (it’s still gonna be there, right?) on April 23, according to her mailing list. Time, cost, and opening act are all TBA. Zukerman is one of my favorite artists, despite my general lack of interest in acoustic…

  • The Hacker Within VIII

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    Today’s subject: Mozilla Thunderbird Templates Greg V. Wilson of the University of Toronto has a great talk on nanoHUB called “Software Carpentry: Essential Software Skills for Research Scientists.” In it, he makes the claim that any task that you need to perform more than once is worth automating. My computing life has improved in direct…

  • Back To Macro-Blogging

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    Greetings! Sorry for my absence this week; I had a big midterm on Friday, and since I’ve apparently lost my exam-taking mojo, I didn’t want to risk under-studying. I haven’t been entirely absent from the blogosphere, though. You may have noticed that I’ve begun micro-blogging with Twitter (kmoliver). As with most of my forays into…

  • Amusing Wikipedia Articles: “Real life”

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    I love it when Wikipedia editors thoroughly cross-reference their entries. Although such dutifulness can be a problem, it also helps you find pages you’d never have guessed existed. As a case in point, when reading today about magic cookies (I was passed there by reference), I came across the following sentence, complete with what I…

  • Five-Minute Posts: Sour Apples

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    This article from today’s New York Times is kinda interesting. I’m fairly Apple-neutral, but I enjoyed seeing the fanatics get called out a bit. We talked about something similar to “hostile media phenomenon” in the DOE weapons non-proliferation seminar I went to a couple of years ago at Mizzou. No matter how neutral an article…