Marginal Structure |

Washington, DC’s recently released open government directive has a lot of us in the open government community stoked about the mandate we are finally being given, collectively and formally, to make government more transparent and accessible.
The three tenets of participation, transparency, and collaboration are particularly relevant because, while they are couched in specific deliverables [...]

It is the end of science. Science as hypothesis is giving way to science as statistically derived by large data sets. We’re finding in many cases that data mining algorithms applied to loosely specified models leads to better results than finely tuned models derived from theoretical equations [see the unreasonable effectiveness of data (pdf)].
It’s [...]

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of sitting in on an Organicities design studio at EPFL, focused on “the digital generation of architecture using biological paradigms.” It was an exploration of the potential these paradigms might hold for generating effective public, corporate, and community spaces in urban environments.
Compared to [...]

For some reason this seems confusing– but it isn’t! That said, I always forget the specifics. Here’s how you use ssh-agent to do key forwarding to remove machines.
On your local machine, execute:

eval `ssh-agent`

Note the back ticks around ssh-agent. you need to eval this, not run it!
Now you need to add the identities you want [...]

The JSON module supports encoding (aka serializing) for all the basic built-in python types– strings, lists, dictionaries, tuples, etc. but if you have your own user-defined class that you want to store, I found the documentation to be pretty ambiguous. And since I also didnt see any complete examples out there of custom object [...]

Lately I find myself writing a lot of python scripts that involves a ton of text flying by, and me inventing increasingly creative combinations of obscure symbols to delineate different portions of the output. Luckily, if you’re not using windows using a sensible operating system, then you probably have an underappreciated tool at your disposal– [...]