let's stumble towards success and pack some snacks for little breaks

Anyone know of an apartment or room in the Boston area available this summer? macey_muse and her boy need somewhere to live, and their planned accommodations just fell through. June through August, preferably MIT-accessible. Comment or contact me directly if you know of anything, and I'll give you Macey's contact info.

[Poll #1726538]

I just scored a stereo (two-cassette, five-disc tray) with a subwoofer and two tower speakers off Craigslist Free Stuff. It's gorgeous, and it seems to work fine--all the appropriate lights turn on, and I can hear the music really faintly when I play a CD. I just have to find the appropriate cables to plug the speakers in. The backs of the speakers look like this. What do I need? I've never put together one of these setups before.

Yesterday I decided I wanted to learn how to make a mashup. So I downloaded Audacity and found copies of "Dig It" from Holes and "Diggah Tunnah" from The Lion King 1 1/2, and I spent a few hours googling tutorials and screwing around with Audacity to figure out how it works, and I spent a few more hours sampling and experimenting and generally having a good time. And I just finished a rough cut, and the program was acting kind of weird, taking a long time when I told it to play, so I saved it and restarted the application.

Now it's giving me an error message saying it can't open my file because it doesn't exist. There's just shading in the segments where the music was. The only version it will open is the mp3 I exported of the first few seconds to make sure exporting would work. I saved and opened the file several times before, so I don't know what's wrong. I really don't want to lose all that work. Obviously it wasn't good, because I've never done this before and I didn't have individual tracks to work with, but I spent a lot of time on it and I want it back. Anyone know what might have happened?

Okay, I want to learn Python. Anyone have a recommendation for a good tutorial? Know of any introductory books? Mike said he'd be interested in learning it with me, and he has some programming experience, but mine is limited to very basic HTML. Also, I'd like to find an introductory book about programming in general from a more conceptual point of view, if anyone knows of something like that.

The entry Mike just posted, c&p'd in the hopes that someone on my flist might be able to help out:


Posting this from Julia's computer.

So yesterday afternoon the screen of my laptop (Inspiron 1721) suddenly went black. No odd noises, no minor glitches leading up to it. It just suddenly blinked out. I powered off and back on, and it won't start. I've turned it on and off several times, waiting for various intervals in between. The power light's on, and there's... the usual sounds it makes when it starts, for the most part, but the hard drive light stays off and the screen stays black - except for one random time when the Dell startup screen came and went as usual before the screen went back to black.

It's been randomly BSoDing maybe once or twice a week for as long as I can remember (at least as far back as January), but I'd been writing that off as just a thing PCs did.

Things Google has led me to believe I should try: Battery's relatively healthy and fully charged, if the gauge lights are any indication. AC adapter looks good. Reseating the memory hasn't had an effect. Pressing Fn as I turn it on is supposed to launch diagnostics - it causes Caps and Num Lock lights to blink and Scroll Lock to shine steadily, but I can't find anywhere that lists what, if anything, that might mean.

Does anyone have any advice?

From what I've seen, the process of altering controversial beliefs (religious, political, moral, etc.) tends to follow a pattern: kids fervently uphold their parents' views when they're young, then start to listen to enough of the counterarguments to become agnostic on the issue, then pay no attention to it for a while, and then finally decide to actually focus on the question and make a decision about it. I've seen this happen with the change from conservative to liberal, the change from religious to atheist, the change from atheist to religious, the change from omnivorous to vegetarian or vegan, and a host of others. The final perspective isn't always in opposition to the original--my opinion on abortion followed these steps from knee-jerk blind acceptance of one side (of course abortion should be legal, and you're just wrong if you think otherwise) to ambiguity and active ignorance (I'm not sure what I think, and I'd really rather not talk about it) to a period of careful consideration, after which I settled on my original opinion, but with actual reasons and a new capability of discussing it on a rational level. That period of indecision and not thinking about it is, I think, important to the process, and I've discovered through interactions with a lot of people that pressing the issue when someone's in that stage is about as pointless and frustrating as trying to argue with someone who's knee-jerk convinced that they're right.

My mother is--surprisingly, for someone normally so adamantly in favor of scientific progress--against vaccination. None of her kids, including me, were vaccinated when she had control over the decision. I believe Clayton and Lincoln have still never been vaccinated; Cordell had to get his shots before he could go to Japan, and I had to get mine before I could come to Clark. I've been in the "ignoring the decision" stage for a few years on this. I thought about it a little when I got jabbed for Clark, but I think I was still not quite ready to attack the issue.

I just read an article about it in Wired, and now I'm ready to take a look at the science and make a decision. So: tell me what you think, and back up your position with links and names and studies that I can look into. I suspect most of my flist is pro-vaccination; if you aren't, and you're afraid of getting jumped on, feel free to contact me privately or delete your comment immediately (I'll get it e-mailed to me).

EDIT: Please be civil.

An image of a brain from above with an iron rod speared through the left frontal lobe in the same place as Phineas Gage, designed to resemble a heart with an arrow through it.

Alternatively, the image of Gage's skull with the iron rod through it nestled in a mass of Purkinje neurons, stylized like the traditional badass skull-with-fire tattoo.

Thoughts?

Can anyone explain to me why the t-statistic approaches the z-score as n approaches infinity, rather than as n approaches N? Is it just assumed that an unknown population size is infinite? I asked the teacher, and she didn't know. It's not important to actual calculations, of course, because there's obviously no way for n to be greater than N; I'm just curious.

What's your definition of respect? Is it a feeling or an act? Under what circumstances, if any, would you fake it?

EDIT: My answer, if anyone was curious: I think the word "respect" means two things. One is external--being polite, using deferential terms, that sort of thing. The other is a feeling, and several of you summed it up well. The part about being fake, though... I don't think my customers at Pier 1 are under any delusions that I actually think their needs are important, and I don't think the teachers I dislike believe that all of their students love them. I can show respect for them without feeling it, and I think everyone involved understands and accepts that. Faking respect would be leading someone to believe that I actually feel it for them when I don't, and the only reason I can think of for that would be brown-nosing, which I try very hard not to do, despite the difficulty of expressing my feelings of true respect without appearing to be sucking up. It's a complicated social dance, and it interests me.