theNerdIs.me

I love these chickens-
Their facial expressions are
Great, considering.

Productivity is Essential
By Doug

Meetings can be fun!

August 12, 2014 at 2:01AM
via Savage Chickens – Cartoons on Sticky Notes by Doug Savage http://ift.tt/XZiZ13

Sync a lot

Garmin announces automatic sync with Strava, MapMyFitness and Endomondo
By Rainmaker

Today, Strava along with MapMyFitness and Endomondo have announced automatic sync with Garmin Connect.  This means that your activities will now (or soon in some cases) automatically show up on those three platforms, should you choose to enable it.

Some of these partnerships, but in particular Strava, have been worked on behind the scenes since almost the beginning of the year – so it’s great to see this finally pop out of the woodwork.

These three companies join Training Peaks and RunCoach in the automatic sync boat, which started in June.  Additionally, you’ve got MyFitnessPal as well for calories synchronization, which starting last week included all Garmin devices (not just the Vivofit and FR15 anymore).  Note however that these much anticipated announcements did however come at the expense of smaller developers and hobbyists, as I discussed in this past post.

With that I’ll run through those that are available today (Strava), and then some notes on both MapMyFitness and Endomondo.  So with that, let’s dive into it!

Strava Sync: How it works

First up we’ll run through how the Garmin Connect to Strava sync works, including getting it setup and my experiences with it.

To start, you’ll go ahead and login to Strava and then click on the big orange ‘Upload’ button which will take you to a page that allows you to choose how and what to upload.  From there you’ll click on the left hand side and select ‘Device’, before then clicking ‘Get started’ below the Garmin logo:

Pressing that will get you to where the magic happens, which opens up an all new dialog box that allows you to connect your account with Garmin:

Next you’ll get a pop-up window that’ll show the below page.

(Tip: If you don’t get said window, ensure your browser’s pop-up windows are allowed for *.garmin.com & *.strava.com)

This page is coming from Garmin Connect and is asking for your permission to grant access to Strava.  This means that later on you can always ‘revoke’ access from the Garmin Connect control panel if required.

Once you click sign-in you’ll wait a few seconds and it’ll show you a confirmation page on Strava.  It explains that activities can take a few minutes to sync from Garmin Connect.  How you get your activity to Garmin Connect is totally up to you.  For newer devices it’d likely be via your phone (Bluetooth), or via WiFi.  But, many Garmin devices also work just fine with USB and Garmin Express on the computer directly.

While Garmin Express had a rocky beginning, I don’t have any issues with it these days – pretty much just works for the wide assortment of devices I use.  Either way, it doesn’t much matter how you get the activity to Garmin Connect – you just need to get it there.

So you’ll go ahead and sync your device however you normally do it, from wherever you normally do it.  For example, with the Garmin Fenix2 it can be sync’d via Bluetooth Smart to your phone.  So in my case I did it on a rock on the side of the mountain to my phone, with no PC anywhere near me.  But that same sort of Bluetooth wireless connectivity works with other units like the cycling focused Edge 510/810/1000 and the running-focused Garmin FR220/FR620.

Next it’ll automatically send the activity over to Strava, shortly after upload.  In my case, you can see all this directly from the phone.  On the left, Garmin Connect, and then on the right, Strava.

Note of course that if you have a unit that plugs in via USB, the automatic sync still works the same way – just with wires instead.

Once uploaded from your device, the activity will be named the usual activity names that Strava generates. It won’t change the name of the activity to match Garmin Connect’s activity name (i.e. ‘Sunday Long Ride’).

In my testing, the sync was happening as fast as about 20 seconds.  Though, one has to keep in mind that I’ve been using the system that otherwise has light load on it.  Once Strava’s kazillion users join, then it may change (but hopefully not).  As noted above in an earlier image, Strava estimates between 3-5 minutes for the sync process to complete.

As usual, once on Strava you can go ahead and edit the name of the activity, as well as the specific bike or shoes used (or activity type).  Note that it’ll automatically assign your default bike or shoes, so you may want to double-check those settings if you haven’t done so recently.

(Updated)  Note that it will sync the previous 30 days of activities from Garmin Connect after you’ve sync’d your first new activity.  So once you do that it’ll backfill the last 30 days of activities.  Activities older than that are not brought over.   only sync new activities, and will not sync past activities prior to whenever you set it up.  So if you set it up today, it’s for activities uploaded going forward from today.   You can sync older activities using this option, though do ensure that you don’t have both software tools enabled, as you’ll likely end up with duplicates.

Finally, on privacy – it’ll assume your default Strava settings, not your default Garmin Connect settings.  This means that if you have your activities set to ‘Private’ by default on Garmin Connect,  it’ll ignore that and publish anything and everything you upload to Strava.  Kinda a bummer, I wish I could easily set it otherwise. but ‘Public’ by default on Strava, then you may want to switch Strava to ‘Private’ by default and then manually enable them for the activities you want shared – otherwise everything will get shared on Strava automatically.

MapMyFitness: Coming soon!

Next there’s MapMyFitness, which is the massive MapMyEverything platform that includes the more well known sites MapMyRun and MapMyRide.  The platform is also used by many 3rd party companies behind the scenes, such as TomTom.

With the new sync, you’ll be able to also send your Garmin Connect activities direct to MapMyFitness as well, just like Strava above.  In talking with them, they believe the functionality should be available ‘soon’ (it sounds like a few weeks at most from my discussions with them).

I’ll make a note in a ‘Week in Review’ post once that happens, though the process should mirror the Strava process above in terms of initial setup, then authentication with Garmin Connect, and finally automatic sync functionality.

Endomondo: Coming Soon!

Last but not least, there’s Endomondo.  In short, there’s not much to say here other than Endomondo will get automatic sync running with Garmin Connect at some point in the future.  But they don’t have a date because according to them the development team has barely started looking at it.  So…there ya have it.

—

With that – thanks for reading!

August 4, 2014 at 6:00AM
via DC Rainmaker http://ift.tt/1o5wrub

Bots searching for linguistic gems on Twitter.

PangramTweets
By Ben Zimmer

The Twitter API, beyond its great utility for corpus linguistics (see “On the front lines of Twitter linguistics,” “The he’s and she’s of Twitter“), has made possible a lot of fun automated text-mining projects. One fertile area is algorithmic found poetry: there have been Twitter bots designed to find accidental haikus, and even more impressively, a bot named @Pentametron that finds rhyming tweets in iambic pentameter and fashions sonnets out of them.

And then there is found wordplay, which is its own kind of found poetry. I’m a big fan of @Anagramatron, which discovers paired tweets that form serendipitous anagrams of each other. (Example: “Last time I do anything” ⇔ “That’s it. I’m dying alone.”) Now, courtesy of Jesse Sheidlower, comes @PangramTweets, in which each tweet contains every letter of the alphabet at least once.

Jesse explains the project on his site:

PangramTweetsis a bot (a computer program that runs on its own) that searches Twitter for, and then retweets, pangrams—texts that contain every letter of the alphabet. A famous pangram, sometimes used as a typing test, is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” […]

You may find the results interesting, or dull. I make no judgment on this. The bot is entirely automated; I do not curate the results.

I strip out user names and URLs from the results, but hashtags are included. I also do some very basic filtering to try to ensure that the results are in English, and not in another language or complete gibberish (random letters), though earlier versions of the bot did retweet nonsense or foreign-language pangrams.

The bot originally did not filter out known pangrams of the “quick brown fox” variety, but by popular demand Jesse put a filter in place for that as well. The results are not as rich as Anagramatron, but that’s to be expected given the constraints: Jesse sayshe gets “one real pangram in every few million tweets scanned.” Here’s a sampling of what has turned up so far.

I’ve just (with the help of google) realized I wrote about the wrong experiment in my 12 mark psychology question

oops

— s (@bricktop___) May 13, 2014

It’s official: Arthur Sulzberger names Dean Baquet executive editor of The New York Times, replacing Jill Abramson.

— Vindu Goel (@vindugoel) May 14, 2014

Looking for a new job is exhausting. Every one I want requires a bazillion years of experience I don’t have. FML.

— Ryan Stephens (@Integrity1stziB) May 16, 2014

Thanks JMM for boosting my boxing prediction confidence again. The Mayweather card did a number on a lot of boxing fans. #MarquezAlvarado

— E.J.O. (@ElioOrtiz11) May 18, 2014

SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THE “FRIENDZONE”. MAYBE YOU SHOULD JUST VALUE A WOMAN’S FRIENDSHIP AND QUIT EXPECTING THEM TO FUCK YOU. JESUS FUCK.

— ・。。・゜☆゜・。。・ (@chrstnmchd) May 19, 2014

Juan Manuel Marquez boxes Alvarado on weekday to line up fifth fight alongside Pacquiao @SportsMomentz http://t.co/e5CyDwDXFd

— Rinaldo Jonathan (@testeronline12) May 19, 2014

Maybe Joe needs to take some advice from Iceland and arrest the rich people who are stealing from the rest of us tax paying citizens. #qanda

— Toby Owens (@TehMegaWiz) May 19, 2014

It will be interesting to see if the bot turns up a naturally occurring “pangrammatic window” that beats the current record-holder of 42 letters, from Piers Anthony’s Cube Route:

“We are all from Xanth,” Cube said quickly. “Just visiting Phaze…”

Sean Irvine announced the discovery of this pangrammatic window in Word Ways in 2012. It beat out Eric Chaikin’s 47-letter find, which he discovered by Googling for “Joaquin Phoenix”:

“JoBlo’s movie review of The Yards: Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Charlize Theron…”

Of course, determining if a pangram is “naturally occurring” may be difficult, since it’s always possible to game the system! But with half a billion tweeters tweeting, maybe someday one of them will authentically produce a winner like “Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.”

Update: Jesse is attempting to filter out non-English tweets, but Indonesian tweets keep seeping through. Since I’ve done research on colloquial varieties of Indonesian, I find these tweets fascinating. I was initially surprised that the Indonesian Twittersphere would be generating pangrams, considering that the letters Q, V, X, and Z appear only in loanwords. But Indonesian participants on Twitter are using quite a lot of Anglicisms, along with a plethora of txtspk-style abbreviations of Indonesian words. An example that just popped up:

@PutriAZSYA EXCITED BGT GRGR 1D MW K INDO. LBH EXCITED LG KLO JOIN LITTLEQUIZ @1D_CrazyLovers DAN BCA JG FFNY.PASTI LO MKIN EXCITED.CEK FAV6

— winda (@windaameliasar1) May 20, 2014

The loanwords here are EXCITED, JOIN, and LITTLEQUIZ, and 1D refers to the band One Direction. Here’s a key to the abbreviation-heavy Indonesian items:

BGT = banget ‘very’
GRGR = gara-gara ‘just because’
MW = mau ‘will’
K = ke ‘(come) to’
INDO = Indonesia
LBH = lebih ‘more’
LG = lagi ‘(even) more’
KLO = kalau ‘if’
DAN = dan ‘and’
BCA = baca ‘read’
JG = juga ‘also’
PASTI = pasti ‘definitely’
LO = (e)lo ‘you’
MKIN = makin ‘more and more’
CEK = cek ‘check’

So that would work out to: “@PutriAZSYA Very excited just because One Direction is coming to Indonesia. You’ll be even more excited if you join LittleQuiz @1D_CrazyLovers, and also read FFNY. You’ll definitely get more and more excited. Check Fav6.”

May 19, 2014 at 5:07PM
via [Untitled] http://ift.tt/1h1wAaW

Where do you fit in on the patheticness scale?

June 11, 2014
By

Rosemary, from Bird and Moon, is patreonizing her comics! You have probably seen a lot of her work floating around the Internet.

June 10, 2014 at 11:00PM
via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (updated daily) http://ift.tt/1uXAB8y

Bots searching for linguistic gems on Twitter.

PangramTweets
By Ben Zimmer

The Twitter API, beyond its great utility for corpus linguistics (see “On the front lines of Twitter linguistics,” “The he’s and she’s of Twitter“), has made possible a lot of fun automated text-mining projects. One fertile area is algorithmic found poetry: there have been Twitter bots designed to find accidental haikus, and even more impressively, a bot named @Pentametron that finds rhyming tweets in iambic pentameter and fashions sonnets out of them.

And then there is found wordplay, which is its own kind of found poetry. I’m a big fan of @Anagramatron, which discovers paired tweets that form serendipitous anagrams of each other. (Example: “Last time I do anything” ⇔ “That’s it. I’m dying alone.”) Now, courtesy of Jesse Sheidlower, comes @PangramTweets, in which each tweet contains every letter of the alphabet at least once.

Jesse explains the project on his site:

PangramTweetsis a bot (a computer program that runs on its own) that searches Twitter for, and then retweets, pangrams—texts that contain every letter of the alphabet. A famous pangram, sometimes used as a typing test, is “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” […]

You may find the results interesting, or dull. I make no judgment on this. The bot is entirely automated; I do not curate the results.

I strip out user names and URLs from the results, but hashtags are included. I also do some very basic filtering to try to ensure that the results are in English, and not in another language or complete gibberish (random letters), though earlier versions of the bot did retweet nonsense or foreign-language pangrams.

The bot originally did not filter out known pangrams of the “quick brown fox” variety, but by popular demand Jesse put a filter in place for that as well. The results are not as rich as Anagramatron, but that’s to be expected given the constraints: Jesse sayshe gets “one real pangram in every few million tweets scanned.” Here’s a sampling of what has turned up so far.

I’ve just (with the help of google) realized I wrote about the wrong experiment in my 12 mark psychology question

oops

— s (@bricktop___) May 13, 2014

It’s official: Arthur Sulzberger names Dean Baquet executive editor of The New York Times, replacing Jill Abramson.

— Vindu Goel (@vindugoel) May 14, 2014

Looking for a new job is exhausting. Every one I want requires a bazillion years of experience I don’t have. FML.

— Ryan Stephens (@Integrity1stziB) May 16, 2014

Thanks JMM for boosting my boxing prediction confidence again. The Mayweather card did a number on a lot of boxing fans. #MarquezAlvarado

— E.J.O. (@ElioOrtiz11) May 18, 2014

SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT THE “FRIENDZONE”. MAYBE YOU SHOULD JUST VALUE A WOMAN’S FRIENDSHIP AND QUIT EXPECTING THEM TO FUCK YOU. JESUS FUCK.

— ・。。・゜☆゜・。。・ (@chrstnmchd) May 19, 2014

Juan Manuel Marquez boxes Alvarado on weekday to line up fifth fight alongside Pacquiao @SportsMomentz http://t.co/e5CyDwDXFd

— Rinaldo Jonathan (@testeronline12) May 19, 2014

Maybe Joe needs to take some advice from Iceland and arrest the rich people who are stealing from the rest of us tax paying citizens. #qanda

— Toby Owens (@TehMegaWiz) May 19, 2014

It will be interesting to see if the bot turns up a naturally occurring “pangrammatic window” that beats the current record-holder of 42 letters, from Piers Anthony’s Cube Route:

“We are all from Xanth,” Cube said quickly. “Just visiting Phaze…”

Sean Irvine announced the discovery of this pangrammatic window in Word Ways in 2012. It beat out Eric Chaikin’s 47-letter find, which he discovered by Googling for “Joaquin Phoenix”:

“JoBlo’s movie review of The Yards: Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix, Charlize Theron…”

Of course, determining if a pangram is “naturally occurring” may be difficult, since it’s always possible to game the system! But with half a billion tweeters tweeting, maybe someday one of them will authentically produce a winner like “Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx.”

Update: Jesse is attempting to filter out non-English tweets, but Indonesian tweets keep seeping through. Since I’ve done research on colloquial varieties of Indonesian, I find these tweets fascinating. I was initially surprised that the Indonesian Twittersphere would be generating pangrams, considering that the letters Q, V, X, and Z appear only in loanwords. But Indonesian participants on Twitter are using quite a lot of Anglicisms, along with a plethora of txtspk-style abbreviations of Indonesian words. An example that just popped up:

@PutriAZSYA EXCITED BGT GRGR 1D MW K INDO. LBH EXCITED LG KLO JOIN LITTLEQUIZ @1D_CrazyLovers DAN BCA JG FFNY.PASTI LO MKIN EXCITED.CEK FAV6

— winda (@windaameliasar1) May 20, 2014

The loanwords here are EXCITED, JOIN, and LITTLEQUIZ, and 1D refers to the band One Direction. Here’s a key to the abbreviation-heavy Indonesian items:

BGT = banget ‘very’
GRGR = gara-gara ‘just because’
MW = mau ‘will’
K = ke ‘(come) to’
INDO = Indonesia
LBH = lebih ‘more’
LG = lagi ‘(even) more’
KLO = kalau ‘if’
DAN = dan ‘and’
BCA = baca ‘read’
JG = juga ‘also’
PASTI = pasti ‘definitely’
LO = (e)lo ‘you’
MKIN = makin ‘more and more’
CEK = cek ‘check’

So that would work out to: “@PutriAZSYA Very excited just because One Direction is coming to Indonesia. You’ll be even more excited if you join LittleQuiz @1D_CrazyLovers, and also read FFNY. You’ll definitely get more and more excited. Check Fav6.”

May 19, 2014 at 5:07PM
via Language Log http://ift.tt/1h1wAaW

Math drinking

May 23, 2014
By

New awesome thing, launching very shortly!

May 22, 2014 at 11:00PM
via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (updated daily) http://ift.tt/TBZBVS

A nice summary of the latest thinking about inflation during the early moments of the Big Bang.

Guest Post: Max Tegmark on Cosmic Inflation
By Sean Carroll

Most readers will doubtless be familiar with Max Tegmark, the MIT cosmologist who successfully balances down-and-dirty data analysis of large-scale structure and the microwave background with more speculative big-picture ideas about quantum mechanics and the nature of reality. Max has a new book out — Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality — in which he takes the reader on a journey from atoms and the solar system to a many-layered multiverse.

In the wake of the recent results indicating gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, here Max delves into the idea of inflation — what it really does, and what some of the implications are.

Thanks to the relentless efforts of the BICEP2 team during balmy -100F half-year-long nights at the South Pole, inflation has for the first time become not only something economists worry about, but also a theory for our cosmic origins that’s really hard to dismiss. As Sean has reported here on this blog, the implications are huge. Of course we need independent confirmation of the BICEP2 results before uncorking the champagne, but in the mean time, we’re forced to take quite seriously that everything in our observable universe was once smaller than a billionth the size of a proton, containing less mass than an apple, and doubled its size at least 80 times, once every hundredth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, until it was more massive than our entire observable universe.

We still don’t know what, if anything, came before inflation, but this is nonetheless a huge step forward in understanding our cosmic origins. Without inflation, we had to explain why there were over a million trillion trillion trillion trillion kilograms of stuff in existence, carefully arranged to be almost perfectly uniform while flying apart at huge speeds that were fine-tuned to 24 decimal places. The traditional answer in the textbooks was that we had no clue why things started out this way, and should simply assume it. Inflation puts the “bang” into our Big Bang by providing a physical mechanism for creating all those kilograms and even explains why they were expanding in such a special way. The amount of mass needed to get inflation started is less than that in an apple, so even though inflation doesn’t explain the origin of everything, there’s a lot less stuff left to explain the origin of.

If we take inflation seriously, then we need to stop saying that inflation happened shortly after our Big Bang, because it happened before it, creating it. It is inappropriate to define our Hot Big Bang as the beginning of time, because we don’t know whether time actually had a beginning, and because the early stages of inflation were neither strikingly hot nor big nor much of a bang. As that tiny speck of inflating substance doubled its diameter 80 times, the velocities with which its parts were flying away from one another increased by the same factor 2^80. Its volume increased by that factor cubed, i.e., 2^240, and so did its mass, since its density remained approximately constant. The temperature of any particles left over from before inflation soon dropped to near zero, with the only remaining heat coming from same Hawking/Unruh quantum fluctuations that generated the gravitational waves.

Taken together, this in my opinion means that the early stages of inflation are better thought of not as a Hot Big Bang but as a Cold Little Swoosh, because at that time our universe was not that hot (getting a thousand times hotter once inflation ended), not that big (less massive than an apple and less than a billionth of the size of a proton) and not much of a bang (with expansion velocities a trillion trillion times slower than after inflation). In other words, a Hot Big Bang did not precede and cause inflation. Instead, a Cold Little Swoosh preceded and caused our Hot Big Bang.

Since the BICEP2 breakthrough is generating such huge interest in inflation, I’ve decided to post my entire book chapter on inflation here so that you can get an up-to-date and self-contained account of what it’s all about. Here are some of the questions answered:

• What does the theory of inflation really predict?
• What physics does it assume?
• Doesn’t creation of the matter around us from almost nothing violate energy conservation?
• How could an infinite space get created in a finite time?
• How is this linked to the BICEP2 signal?
• What remarkable prize did Alan Guth win in 2005?

April 21, 2014 at 10:22AM
via Sean Carroll http://ift.tt/1ltNr9d

Describes what confirmation of the inflation theory implies…

03/19/14 PHD comic: ‘Cosmic Inflation Explained’
By

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: “Cosmic Inflation Explained” – originally published 3/19/2014 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

March 21, 2014 at 3:02AM
via [Untitled] http://ift.tt/1jaBPv1