Monday Links
1. You know when in TV, they zoom in on an image to a ridiculous level of resolution? What a joke!
Actually, even though the TV shows exaggerate how much you can extract from an image, see the video on:
Identifiable Images of Bystanders Extracted from Corneal Reflections by Rob Jenkins and Christie Kerr in PLoS One, 2013 [DOI]
And the joke is on us.
2. The homogenization of scientific computing, or why Python is steadily eating other languages’ lunch
This is pretty much what I said before about Python: for scientific computing, Python is rarely the best language for any single task, but it's almost always the second best choice and the only one who can span all the necessary areas.
4. I had the healthiest childhood imaginable. And yet I was sick all the time.
This article seems to fight the good fight (it's pro-vaccines), but gives half the game away to the idiots on the other side:
I was brought up on an incredibly healthy diet: no sugar till I was 1, breastfed for over a year, organic homegrown vegetables, raw milk, no MSG, no additives, no aspartame. My mother used homeopathy, aromatherapy, osteopathy; we took daily supplements of vitamin C, echinacea, cod liver oil.
What a perversion of the word healthy! Only the breastfeeding (and arguably the cod liver oil, if there were other dietary deficiencies) is in any way related to health. Raw milk is even dangerous for your health (you might say it's worth the small risk of disease because you get better tasting cheese, but that's not what the word healthy means).