Autarchy of the Private Cave

Tiny bits of bioinformatics, [web-]programming etc

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    WolframAlpha: sophisticated online calculations resource

    29th June 2009

    If you ever need to glimpse at the properties of the Poisson distribution with lambda=0.16, or find the factorial of 6163338 (as a gamma function), then Wolfram|Alpha is a perfect tool for you (unless you have some math package at hand).

    The motto of Wolfram|Alpha is Making the world’s knowledge computable. Basically, it is like Mathematica plus a growing corpus of factual numeric data, plus a system to interpret user’s input. This is a nice online reference and computation platform.

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    Posted in Links, Software, Web | No Comments »

    HospitalityClub.org and CouchSurfing.com

    4th September 2008

    These are the addresses for those who would like to travel lightly, meet new people, get new friends, hang out with interesting people, or just find a shelter for a night in the foreign country.

    I’m now registered in both systems (and getting “verified” in CS), and so far I stayed with three people (at two places) found via HC and CS. Both experiences were highly positive. Actually, my world outlook changed quite a bit after my first stay: I heard from someone that

    it’s better to trust wrong person once, than always distrust all the people

    But building trust, despite being central to HC ans CS, is only one – basic – component. Cultural exchange and knowledge sharing are also important, though so far I was unable to comprehend these components sufficiently to write on them.

    At the CouchSurfing.com website, it appears to be popular to put some test/quiz results into profiles. These are the tests:
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    Posted in Links, Misc, Society | 1 Comment »