Kyle Matthew Oliver

Author: Kyle

  • Ambivalence

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    First, some Sunday Judgment bonus content: ambivalent does not mean apathetic. It means you have mixed emotions, not none. That drives me crazy. Here are two stories I’m ambivalent about: (1) “Nielsen Looks Beyond TV, and Hits Roadblocks” — This article kinda scares the hell out of me. On the other hand, I think a…

  • Sunday Judgment V

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    I don’t have much ire left after two straight grumpy posts, so I thought in this installment we could just all meditate on an increasingly divisive issue: “‘They’ as a third-person singular gender-free pronoun.” It sounds as if Randall Munroe is “all for it,” as is my friend Scott, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology who…

  • Mostly Talk

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    I went to see Girl Talk on Thursday with some friends. I was excited about the show–I don’t go to enough of them anymore–but something just felt wrong. It’s not that I’m against mashup artists–far from it. In fact, I’m embarrassed to admit that one of my old bosses gave me a copy of West…

  • “The Proof” That I’m a Nerd

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    Well, once again, one of my Saturday posts is just going to be me telling you about whatever Julie Rehmeyer’s written in the Science News “Math Trek” feature this week. This time around, it’s Sophie Germain. She’s a really interesting figure in the history of math (and especially the history of gender bias in STEM…

  • The Hacker Within IV

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    Today’s subject: Emacs matlab-mode, THW III update Just a quick one right now. I needed to take a look at a MATLAB function today but didn’t want to have to look at it in MATLAB to get the syntax-highlighting right. Check out this link if you’ve had the same problem and want a matlab-mode customization…

  • Sounding Board

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    Editors have Chicago. Pop music fans have Marsh. Medical Physicists have Attix. Nuclear scientists have Knoll. Chefs have…well, some book by Julia Child, according to the only chef I read: In the end–as it so often does–it came down to Julia. Julia Child’s recipes have little snob appeal, but they also tend to work. We…

  • The Hacker Within III

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    Today’s subject: SQLite I’m a novice programmer. As such, I often find that a lot of the sample code and documentation I find online goes over my head. I can’t be the only one for whom this is true. Thus, I thought I’d post a little sample application I wrote that demonstrates some of the…

  • New Wisconsin Engineer Online

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    While I’m no longer an editor at Wisconsin Engineer, I still try to keep abreast of its goings-on, so I wanted to mention that the February issue is now online. I was interviewed for one of the articles, which experience was a bit strange. It’s funny going from having darn-near final say on an article’s…

  • Sunday Judgment IV

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    Today’s subject: the naked this. My copy editing habits for any particular usage issue tend to go in cycles: Depend on logic, intuition, and sound before taking time to do research on the issue or to realize it’s even an issue at all. Research the issue or be told about it by someone else. Develop…

  • Here Comes the Sun (Again)

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    There’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times that talks about how Silicon Valley has caught solar fever. If it sounded familiar to you, you’re not alone; they ran a similar article about a year ago. Not sure how I remembered it; it just rang some sort of vague bell and I ran a…