Basketball Throws

A little probability simulation, using Clojure and Incanter, hosted on google docs:

book: ReSampling - The New Statistics

This book describes a revolutionary —but now fully accepted— approach to probability and statistics. Monte Carlo resampling simulation takes the mumbo-jumbo out of statistics and enables even beginning students to understand completely everything that is done.
— from books intro

Its statistics made easy, because there's no need to tinker around with theory much, its all about harnessing computer power to do the simulations of the probabilities you'r after. Which i think is just great. You can find the book here.

On the process, the authors(Julian Simon and Peter Bruce) developed also a computer language for performing these simulations described and used in the book.
This has been implemented in a Java application, by John Grosberg, and made available as Statistics101, so you can easily play around and test the code examples from the book.

book: FREE

Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, has published a new book that looks at something of interest to Consumerist: the trend of content and services to slide toward free, especially in the digital world. It's pretty light reading and an interesting look at economics in the digital marketplace in particular, and for now, at least, it's available in multiple formats for free.
— from consumerist

It discusses Free, its meaning, its implications, its misconceptions, its business models, etc, Free is no doubt the trend of the future that has breen brought full-on with the digital age and is having a huge impact in most industries including radically changing money making models.

In its launch is being offered for free, I listened to the Free's free audio version from wired.

Emacs (v2)

Why use Emacs for Clojure

Here's a few of references i found recently that help to get up and running with Emacs and Clojure development:

 Iteration I
 Started using the Carbon version of emacs. Then take a look at: Emacs Starter Kit(ESK), it provides a saner set of defaults than you get normally with Emacs. For step by step installation instructions, here's a good tutorial: Setting up Emacs & Clojure with Emacs Starter Kit. And finally, a few of more details about developing Clojure setup with the ESK, from ESK author himself.

Iteration II

After spending some time with Carbon Emacs(and learning a bit better how emacs work) I've decided to try out the Aquamacs version.

Aquamacs is, out of the box, more mac friendly because supports default key bindings like copy, paste, selectAll, etc.. that all mac text handling apps normally have.

And thats actually very useful, even after learning a lot of emacs shortcuts. Note that emacs key bindings are also worth learning, is amazing to discover how many applications support them. But i've found that stuff like Ctr-C, Ctr-V, and Selecting text working as you expect just make you move around faster.

One issue i ran into, is that the ESK i mentioned before is not compatible with Aquamacs because of different key bindings schemes.

But that turned out not to be a problem, and ended up learning on how to customize Emacs in the process, Here's a a few references i've used for my current emacs setup:

References:

• AquamacsFAQ, for several tips and tricks on the Aquamacs
• Emacs Wiki, central point for a lot of emacs packages and tips, essential reference.
• ESK, I use this as a reference, for learning on how to customize and go check what packages are used there. I use, for example, the zenburn.el theme from there.

Packages:

• ELPA, for installing packages, great to install all you need for Clojure development instantly.
• ido, lot of helpful stuff, especially the automatic completion when using Dired.
• espresso, for javascript editing.
• Balancing your parentheses, to customize the highlight of your parenthesis, even possible to highlight a mismatched parenthesis with red, to give visual hint you closing the wrong ones!

The Power of the Pentatonic Scale

Fun video of Bobby McFerrin engaging an audience in singing a little tune using the pentatonic scale, this music scale is a 5 notes sequence of musical intervals that is found again and again in completelly different music cultures around the world. See in Wikipedia.