Adam V’s Tumble Blog

The most famous and farreaching labor conflict in a period of severe economic depression and social unrest, the Pullman Strike began May 11, 1894, with a walkout by Pullman Palace Car Company factory workers after negotiations over declining wages failed. These workers appealed for support to the American Railway Union (ARU), which argued unsuccessfully for arbitration. On June 20, the ARU gave notice that beginning June 26 its membership would no longer work trains that included Pullman cars.

via Pullman Strike.

Hobson Street in Brookline is getting a face lift, undergoing base repair this week and next week the tarry smell of asphalt will float through the neighborhood.

via kdka.com.

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”

via The Nation

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.

via The Ekklesia Project

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

Update!!!: It turns out that this is an algorithm for the outer product…Sorry

I had a ton of trouble finding matrix/matrix cross product code, but only found stuff for vectors.  Even common matrix packages like JAMA didn’t have it.

So, even though I don’t remember where I found this. 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.

Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps: position static relative absolute float.

In February, First Solar tooted its horn about breaking the $1-per-watt barrier for making solar modules in the last months of 2008. This week, the company said costs had fallen again to 93 cents per watt, down 5% in three months and down 28% in a year. (The full presentation is here.)

First Solar executives also say to expect more falling costs. By 2014, it expects to drive down cost per watt to make solar modules to fall to between 52 and 63 cents by 2014. The biggest driver of the lower costs is better efficiency, it said. Production per fabrication line is expected to nearly double over the next five years.

Driving down costs is critical for First Solar, which faces competition from low-cost Chinese solar makers and a public that won’t want significant subsidies to last forever. In other words, if it can’t drive down cost of modules and installation over the next few years, the game might be over.

via WSJ.