Cool, refreshing, tangy limeade is the perfect drink to go with a light summer meal eaten outdoors. Limes are also considerably cheaper than lemons, which saves you money and makes an equally delicious drink. This wonderful beverage is actually quite simple to make. This recipe makes three quarts of limeade.
via wikiHow.
Richard Dawkins, the famed British scientist and atheist, believes in Progress (with a capital “P”). He concedes the Shoah was a “temporary setback” for humanity, but nothing to fret about in the long run. In his view of history, religious faith is in full rout (though still, to his mind, terribly dangerous), material welfare is on the rise, and goodness and peace are coming in every way. Supremely confident in the power of Science (with a capital “S”), Dawkins assures his readers that, “our brains…are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences.”
Progress has been a dogma of modernity since at least the time of Francis Bacon, and it has real staying power. It’s just a lot harder to believe in it now that Science and Technology (with a capital “T”) have shown themselves to be two-edged swords. To the extent human activity is warming the globe, the efficient cause is carbon-derived power, not prayer. Similarly, to imagine the manipulative scientific consciousness which produced the South Pole’s ozone hole and the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone will soon bring universal peace and prosperity is an illusion every bit as dangerous—and more immediately so—than the fanaticism Dawkins accuses theists of.
A simple but telling little study from the University of Brussels challenges the idea that college kids are gobs of clay passively waiting to be molded by their professors. In general, students of social science are more likely to graduate college as self-defined leftists, while law and economics graduates tilt the other way. To find out why, sociologists gave various cohorts of university students surveys when they entered their schools and when they graduated. They found that while … (Read more in DoubleX.)
via The XX Factor
I had a ton of trouble finding matrx/matrix corss product code, but only found stuff for matricies. Even common matrix packages like JAMA didn’t have it, so I’m reproducing it here in case I, or anyone else, ever needs it.
/**
* the cross product of a & b storing in result
*/
public static void product(Matrix a, Matrix b, MutableMatrix result) throws Matrix.WrongDimensionException {
int rca = a.getRowCount();
int cca = a.getColumnCount();
int rcb = b.getRowCount();
int ccb = b.getColumnCount();
if (cca != rcb)
throw new Matrix.WrongDimensionException("column count of matrix a = " + cca + ", row count of matrix b = " + rcb);
result.setDimension(rca, ccb);
for (int r = 0; r < rca; r++) {
for (int c = 0; c < ccb; c++) {
double sum = 0;
for (int i = 0; i < cca; i++) {
sum += a.getElement(r, i) * b.getElement(i, c);
}
result.setElement(r, c, sum);
}
}
}
}
Relaxation of the federal standards, and an explosion of consumer demand, have helped push the organics market into a $23 billion-a-year business, the fastest growing segment of the food industry. Half of the country’s adults say they buy organic food often or sometimes, according to a survey last year by the Harvard School of Public Health.
But the USDA program’s shortcomings mean that consumers, who at times must pay twice as much for organic products, are not always getting what they expect: foods without pesticides and other chemicals, produced in a way that is gentle to the environment.
via washingtonpost.com.
