2016-12-19

Book Review: "Identity and Violence" by Amartya Sen

I've recently been able to read the book Identity and Violence by Amartya Sen. It's a relatively shorter book, taking me ~3 hours to finish. The author focuses broadly on how personal identity is neither singular nor static, but is multifaceted, context-dependent, and dynamically evolving over time based on the choices people make. He further argues that a lot of sectarian strife (whatever identity the sect may encompass) occurs because people can be led to make one facet of their identity encompass their entire identity and to then act in destructive ways based on that. Additionally, he provides numerous examples of how facets that tend to be associated with individual cultures (whether ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other), with such shoehorning leading to detrimental stereotyping and unsupportable cultural fatalism, have in fact emerged over many such cultures across continents at various points in time, sometimes independently, while other times due to cultural contact and diffusion. With this, he suggests that a lot of the well-meaning efforts to integrate religious minorities into Western society, as well as efforts to reconcile religious or ethnic factions that have been at war in other countries, are misguided due to their single-minded focus on the same sorts of categorization that have led to such conflicts in the first place, and that instead, such efforts should appeal to the broad variety of identities that people hold dear to them and that make them feel whole.

Overall, I generally agree with the thrust of this book (further justifying the notion that Amartya Sen seems to capture my lay ideas about economics and society in a systematic and scholarly manner), and the numerous historical examples of cultural interaction, cultural diffusion, and the development of ideas such as democratic political participation and the protection of human rights across continents and across time periods of course jibes with things that I've learned in history classes in school and elsewhere. The book is a pretty solid read (despite a couple of minor typos that can easily be overlooked), and it brings forth many interesting ideas. I'm glad that I read it recently, given that issues of privilege, identity politics, and communal violence have been in the news lately; I would perhaps like to think that the author may have articulated ideas of privilege and "intersectionality" before those terms came into vogue in the last few years for people interested in social justice, but something the book makes clear is that these ideas of intersectionality, if not the particular jargon, are probably much older than just a few decades. Despite all of that, I do feel like there may be a few things missing in the discussion, and my question about those issues come after the jump.

2016-12-18

Featured Comments: Week of 2016 December 11

There was one post this past week that got a few comments, so I'll post all of those here.

Review: MX Linux MX-15


An anonymous reader said, "It's simply preposterous that a distro for newer Linux users stops booting at an obscure command-line prompt and that an inexperienced user is required to know or guess or somehow find out that pressing Tab will reveal a list of commands that will enable the boot to continue one way or another (although my guess is that the less-experienced users may also need to guess or somehow find out what those commands actually do). People who are enamored of the command line shouldn't try to produce a graphical OS for newer users."
Following up on that, commenter Unknown had this to say: "that particular problem at boot of the liveUSB is with unetbootin and syslinux. the newer syslinux boot system that mx uses is not installed on all other linux platforms, and as such unetbootin doesn't always work right when using the linux version, depending on the actual host linux system. interestingly, the windows version of unetbootin works just fine. as does dd (command provided on the download site), which doesn't give you the persistence options off the live-usb but will get you a proper live environment to install it."
Reader Jerry3904 countered, "Late to the party here, since this OS is now a year old and MX-16 is being released today. For whatever reason, this diverges from all other reviews we have seen: https://www.mxlinux.org/reviews".

Thanks to all those readers for commenting on that post. In the next couple of weeks, I will have at least one more book review out, and by next month, I will probably have another Linux review of some sort out. In any case, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

2016-12-12

Review: MX Linux MX-15

Originally, this review was going to be of Bodhi Linux, based on a suggestion from a comment in a recent review. However, when I tried it, while it was able to connect to the Internet, it could not connect to its package repositories for me to install any packages, and I figured that there wouldn't be much point in writing a review given that. Then, I thought of trying the latest version openSUSE on the recommendation of a friend of mine, especially given that I haven't tried openSUSE in quite a while; that turned out to only be available in the form of an installation DVD, as no live image is available yet (though I hope to try it when that does become available). After that, I saw some reviews of MX Linux, and thought it might be interesting to try. (Spoiler alert: this review exists because there's enough material for me to write about it.)

Main Screen + Xfce Whisker Menu
MX Linux is an effective merger between the former MEPIS and antiX Linux distributions. It aims to provide a desktop experience that is easy and efficient, with an emphasis on reliability. Its focus is on the Xfce desktop environment, and it uses Debian as its base, along with a lot of the code from the erstwhile antiX and MEPIS. I tried it as a live USB made with UnetBootin, which appears to be the recommended method; in fact, MX Linux discusses many different options for different levels of data persistence from one boot to another in a live USB (though that may also refer to live USB systems made with different tools). Follow the jump to see what it's like.

2016-11-28

Book Review: "The Marketplace of Ideas" by Louis Menand

The book that I have been able to read most recently is The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. The author generally discusses the current state of the liberal arts and humanities in higher education in a historical context, focusing on the tensions that have pervaded it for many decades, including the distinctions between the useful/practical versus learning for its own sake, disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity, generally teaching the liberal arts to all students via a distribution versus core curriculum model, et cetera. The author further discusses how political issues have shaped academic discourse in the liberal arts, as well as how certain features of academia that are perceived to be new are actually logical extensions of features that were in place long ago, and vice versa. Overall, the author argues that much of academic work in the liberal arts, as it is conducted today, is structurally bound by how things were more than a century ago, even as the objects of study have themselves evolved quite a bit over that time.

Having completed my undergraduate education at a technical institution, I expected to see a bit more about the simultaneous evolution of science, engineering, and humanities curricula, given that the author does discuss the shifts in emphasis from teaching to research at major universities, and given the rather broad title and description of the book. Instead, the author admits fairly early on that because he is a history professor by training, his focus is almost exclusively on the liberal arts and humanities. That focus is understandable, yet I feel like by essentially ignoring simultaneous developments in science and engineering in academia, the discussion of the developments in the liberal arts and humanities in academia seems strangely divorced from the historical events surrounding those developments. Moreover, I feel that the author is somewhat siloed in his own view of disciplinarity versus interdisciplinarity in academia by focusing only on the liberal arts and humanities and ignoring how interdisciplinary research has evolved among the various branches of natural science and engineering, which is ironic considering his arguments that interdisciplinarity in the liberal arts and humanities has actually reinforced disciplinary rigidity in those fields; perhaps the author would have been better served by more extensively consulting (or coauthoring) with someone who is familiar with STEM fields in academia, but if he felt that such interactions would only reinforce rigid disciplinary boundaries and would not help mutual understanding across fields, then that may be more reflective of his own siloed experiences and resulting biases than of anything else. Additionally, the author has an occasional tendency to slip into technical philosophical and literary jargon; while the context makes the meaning of such jargon clear enough, it would have been nicer for the author to use more broadly accessible terminology, given that the book seems to be marketed toward a general audience (in line with some of the ideas discussed in the book itself). With all that said, I do appreciate seeing this aspect of academia that I otherwise would not have really seen, given my undergraduate education in physics at a technical education followed by my current status as a graduate student in electrical engineering. While it is short on prescriptions, it is long on context, which is its aim in any case. Finally, the book itself is generally clear and concise, and it is a short, quick read.

2016-11-15

Featured Comments: Week of 2016 November 6

There was one post from last week that got 3 comments, so I'll repost all of those. (This post should have happened two days ago, but I was traveling.)

Review: Manjaro Linux 16.10 "Fringilla" Cinnamon

An anonymous reader wrote, "Manjaro repositories exist since 2014 (more or less). 'free' it's an alias for 'free -h', look at '.bashrc', also 'ls' and maybe 'grep' are often aliases. Note: Manjaro Cinnamon is a Community Edition, I think this clarification is needed."
Another anonymous commenter suggested, "perhaps it is time for a Bodhi linux review?"
Reader Bernard Victor had this suggestion: "You should review Antgeros, a much better Arch based distro than Manjaro. It is much closer to pure Arch, in fact some people call it just an Arch installer."

Thanks to all of those readers for commenting on that post. In the rest of the month, I hope to have at least one more post (unrelated to Linux reviews) put out. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

2016-11-07

Review: Manjaro Linux 16.10 "Fringilla" Cinnamon

Main Screen + Cinnamon Menu
I was going to make this post a review of the SpaceFM file manager (RAS syndrome, I know) upon recommendation by a commenter in a previous post. Then I checked it out for a bit, and realized that while it has a lot of potential for graphical customization, I still wouldn't feel particularly compelled to write a full review about that one application. Instead, I'm reviewing the Cinnamon edition of the latest version of Manjaro Linux. Last year, when I reviewed it, it was still relatively tied to Arch Linux. Since then, it has become much more independent, using its own repositories and maintaining a semi-rolling release model (though maintaining ties via the Arch User Repository (AUR)). Given that, I figured it might be time for a new review to see what has changed. I tried it using a live USB made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

2016-10-31

Book Review: "Why Information Grows" by Cesar Hidalgo

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may be wondering why book reviews have made a return after a 6-year absence. The simple reason is that during my undergraduate and beginning graduate studies, most of my time was consumed with classes, and I didn't have many opportunities to sit down and read books that I enjoyed for great lengths of time. Now that I have passed my general examination and am doing research full-time, though, my weekends are much more free, so I can read and review for pleasure again. Some of these books are from collections/series (like the previous few that I have reviewed here, from the Issues of Our Time series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), while others (like this one) are from the reading list of Zach Weinersmith (author of the webcomic SMBC, which I read frequently).

The latest book that I have read is Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo. It basically goes into an easy-to-understand version of the technical (statistical) definition of information, illustrating with many examples how "information" does not imply "meaning", but that information is a much more fundamental physical concept than simply the ideas of which people can conceive (i.e. metacognition), emerging at many different levels in nature. Information requires energy to occur, solids to be preserved, and computation to propagate and have an influence on its environment, and it is a fundamentally out-of-equilibrium phenomenon. The author then applies this understanding of information to further understand how information occurs in human societies, and how the primary distinction between humans and other animals (or, in other words, "what makes us human") is that we can consciously crystallize and realize information into physical objects instead of simply reacting to the world around us. That said, humans need to form networks at various levels to be able to transmit knowledge and knowhow and thereby realize more complex forms of information, and this transmission is imperfect and not always as efficient as might be assumed from classic textbook models of market dynamics; this can explain a lot of the economic inequalities seen on a global scale.

The book itself is decently written; I think the writing becomes better and more engaging toward the middle and end, whereas the beginning seems rather trite. Additionally, some mention is made of how bureaucratic institutions are far less efficient than markets or networked structures built on trust, yet I would have liked to see a fuller discussion of the similarities and differences of the network structures of bureaucracies versus markets to better contextualize why they operate differently. Finally, I did like the quantitative analysis near the end of the text (along with numerous references to the author's more quantitative The Atlas of Economic Complexity, coauthored with several others) with regard to the correlations between the complexity of a country's economy and its level of economic development, but I would have liked to see a discussion of whether this model of economic complexity is more predictive than more traditional economic explanations. Overall, I do appreciate the pulling together of ideas from fields that used to be disparate, and I think that most of the book is written at a level that an interested layperson can appreciate.

2016-10-19

Book Reviews: "Modern Liberty" by Charles Fried & "Development as Freedom" by Amartya Sen

I recently finished reading the books Modern Liberty by Charles Fried, and Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen. The first was part of the "Issues of Our Time" series, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., of which Whistling Vivaldi by Claude Steele (which I recently reviewed) is also a part; the second was one I chose as a comparison book mentioned in a review for the first on Amazon. Both deal with liberty and freedom, but in rather different ways. Below are my brief, decidedly nonspecialist thoughts on these books (content and style). After the jump will be some musings about issues related to these books. I am not a philosopher, nor am I an economist or sociologist, so many of the things that I say will probably be wrong or inconsistent; please feel free to point out issues in the comments below.

The book by Fried is a detailed defense of what appears (to my untrained eye) to be a centrist libertarian conception of liberty. The author essentially posits that human actions, and therefore the liberty to do so, are essentially individual in origin, so individual liberty should be held paramount, and can be taken to exist even in the absence of the state. He acknowledges the legitimacy of the state to tax and spend (even when the taxation is progressive), but argues that people should keep in mind that the state can simultaneously be the best friend and worst enemy of liberty. Additionally, he argues for equal application of the law as much as possible, and for the state to not interfere with people's choices when such interference would reduce choices that they would otherwise have no problem making, especially when those choices do not directly harm others in a criminal manner, focusing on three examples in particular throughout the book. With this in mind, he argues that the state should discourage certain behaviors through taxation rather than through heavy-handed direct intervention, and that stability in the laws and tax systems enforced is the least bad thing that the state can do with respect to liberty. Though I've focused specifically in pointing out things related to the state, he focuses on more abstract philosophical notions of liberty while simultaneously bringing the reader's attention to more mundane matters such as work, market transactions, and even sexual intercourse to better illustrate these points.

The book itself is fairly short, and moves along reasonably quickly (though I admit that I did get lost in some of the finer philosophical points). When introducing each justification for its conception of liberty, it also introduces each common criticism of that justification, and tackles almost every criticism head-on, without fear. There are quite a few things that I don't agree with about the ideas in the book. The overarching difference that I have is that this conception of liberty focuses on its origin within individuals, whereas I see the manifestation of liberty as being more dependent on societal contexts. An example of this would be in his contention that things like language, music, and culture originate within individuals; I would posit that these things would be meaningless for a single human in vacuum without any human contact, and it is only contact (and the history of such contact) with other humans that gives these things meaning. This is what I see as further leading to the author's general neglect of the consequences of liberty, choosing only to talk about the origins and processes of liberty; while I can see that this is philosophically consistent with the axiomatic treatment of the individual origin of liberty (and this also seems to be consistent with the desire for a static, predictable state due to its focus only on the unchanging processes of liberty, though I wouldn't agree with that either), the biggest issue that I have is that the author brings up the problem of the homeless person who has liberty but cannot make use of it if all property in that person's area is privately owned (and would therefore lead to the homeless person being kicked off of that property), but dances around this issue without really addressing it in a satisfactory way. With all of that said, I did enjoy reading this book overall, as it got me to think about the fundamental origins and processes of liberty in a new way, because before that, I was really only thinking about its manifestations/consequences.

The book by Sen is a longer exposition into how economic and political freedoms have to go hand-in-hand if they are to both be meaningful, and how human development is part and parcel of both. The author goes into how while utilitarian consequential formulations and libertarian process formulations of liberty are both important, both must be taken together instead of taking one or the other for liberty to be meaningful in the context of economics or politics. He further discusses how measures of economic development based solely on income or GDP/GNP per capita are quite flawed, so more nuanced, granular metrics are required, based on how different people's "functions" and "capabilities" operate, are fulfilled, and can be altered. Ultimately, he demonstrates that free markets and economic liberty, in conjunction with institutional corrections for certain glaring inequalities in capabilities, would allow the greatest human development leading to the greatest freedom.

Reading this book made me realize that I had intuitions for many ideas that the author clearly put into words (so I guess for now my lay economic views have a lot in common with those of Amartya Sen); in particular, I was already thinking about how Fried's neglect of the consequences of liberty made his treatment somewhat incomplete, and how humans being social animals means that the circumstances of one's political and economic existence cannot be ignored when considering the meaning of liberty, even before picking up Sen's book. However, there are a couple of issues that I have with this book. One is that there are several times where he repeats a point overly much. I don't mean that he just just repeats few words over the course of the book: I mean that he sometimes repeats entire multi-paragraph passages for no good reason, so the book could be a lot more terse and concise than it is. The other is that he argues that loss of income can affect a person mentally and physiologically in more lasting ways than simply by loss of purchasing power, especially if that person is ill, disabled, or so on, so he argues that specific institutional safety nets (presumably like social security, food stamps, and so on) and not simply lump-sum transfers of money (or increases in income) are necessary for countering poverty and promoting human development. I'd argue instead that if he can say that loss of income (and not just low income) is enough to push people into that downward spiral, then it would stand to reason that providing a strong enough guaranteed safety net through a simple money transfer (essentially, a minimum income, which I will discuss farther below) should be sufficient to prevent that, while simultaneously giving people the choice as independent agents to spend it as they like. Finally, at vary points, he promises to discuss how lessons from development in underdeveloped countries can be applied to the development of marginalized groups in more developed countries, yet as far as I could tell, that promise was never satisfactorily fulfilled. (Also, as a minor quibble: he makes reference to Madhavacharya having catalogued various schools of "Hindu" thought, including Buddhism, Jainism, and various atheist schools of thought, while calling him a Vaishnavite. A simple Wikipedia search shows that this Madhavacharya was a follower of Advaita philosophy, and was a separate person who was born only in the last few years of the life of the Dvaita founder Madhvacharya. It seems odd that Sen, who seems familiar with the "atheistic schools of Hinduism" catalogued by the later Madhavacharya, would make this error, so perhaps this was an oversight by the editor, or maybe the distinction between the two only became clear with scholarship after the publication of this book.)

In the Amazon review that I read, it seemed like these two books would oppose each other, but I would instead posit that they complement each other nicely. That brings me to the end of the review. Follow the jump to see some further thoughts on minimum income and related things that have been bouncing around in my head of late.

2016-10-10

Book Review: "Whistling Vivaldi" by Claude Steele

Last year, Princeton University recommended that the incoming students in the class of 2019, as well as any and all other members, read the book Whistling Vivaldi by Claude M. Steele. I learned at that time that it was a study about the biases we carry and the way society's collective biases can affect us in different situations (along with what corrective actions can be taken with respect to those biases), so it seemed pretty interesting at that time. My interest was further piqued by seeing that my advisor was reading it then too, so I figured I should read it at some point. Classes and (later) preparing for my general examination got in the way, so I didn't really have a chance to read through it until now. Having read through it, I'm writing a short review below (my first formal book review for this blog in a long time), consisting of a summary (that is probably going to be incomplete) as well as some longer questions after the jump. At this point, I should say as a reminder that I am a physicist, not a sociologist/psychologist/anthropologist, so a lot of the questions or remarks that I make will probably be easy to refute with current research in the field; given that it isn't my specialty (so I wouldn't necessarily know how to go about it), and in the interest of starting a conversation, I would like to invite you, the reader, to respond to these issues in the comments below.

The book is written by a psychologist, and focuses on a series of controlled experiments designed to understand the role that societal biases (regarding group identities, such as race and gender) have on people's performance in situations where their presence may or may not be socially expected (e.g. women versus men in STEM fields, or white versus black people in professional basketball). These experiments have been replicated in a variety of settings and seem to show fairly consistently that especially among people who would otherwise be expected (based on prior experiences, such as test scores or basketball performance in high school) to perform well in a field where their group is not well-represented, being aware (generally through life experience, or explicitly in the course of a test in that field) of their group identity can negatively impact their performance, because their minds are subconsciously consumed by the stress of trying to consciously break the stereotype of poor performance in that field by other people in their group, to the extent that this rumination hinders their ability to focus on the task at hand and causes them to perform worse than people in a more fully represented group; by contrast, people in an underrepresented group who are told that their performance isn't meant to be judged as diagnostic of their ability, or who are otherwise convinced that past stereotypes are irrelevant to the test at hand, do just as well as people in a more fully represented group (whose members do not generally see a performance boost from such a treatment). These experiments are fleshed out to a fuller extent over the course of the book, looking at different instances of stereotype threats in different situations, and looking at different metrics (including physiological ones, like blood pressure or heartbeat patterns) for measuring the impact of stereotype threats on performance. As the author offers several lessons throughout the book on what can be done to counter stereotype threat issues, the book closes with a summary of what works under different broad circumstances, and what further issues need to be faced.

There are a few issues that I have with the book overall. One is that the "introduction" of various people (mostly academic collaborators, students, and others in academia) that the author has met seems extraneous. The sense I got was that he wanted the reader to feel personally engaged with the details of the author's academic life, but by giving only cursory importance to these meetings (and then, only to set up descriptions of the experiments they ran), his writing on this matter came out rather stilted in the end. Thankfully, the book itself is fairly short (only 220 pages), so this is less of a problem. The two bigger problems that I have follow. The first of these problems is that in the middle of the book, the author introduces the story of a man named John Henry Martin, born in the early twentieth century, who eventually freed himself from sharecropping servitude and worked incredibly hard to better his lot, though he paid a steep price in doing so (in the form of much worse health and shortened lifespan). This anecdote is used to demonstrate how a great work ethic in conjunction with terrible struggles against difficult circumstances can generally adversely impact a person's life. However, though the chapter ends not too far after that, the remainder of the chapter essentially engages in idle speculation about whether previous examples of people struggling under stereotype threats would have suffered in deeper ways if the stereotype threats were chronic (rather than short-term/acute). Not only was I confused and lost in that short section, but that whole passage seemed rather disconnected from what came before and after. As far as going into the effects of chronic stereotype threats, what comes before is sufficient, and a smoother transition to what comes after would be all that is needed. The second of these problems is that throughout the book, the author tries to use a mix of anecdotes and general descriptions of studies and their results to engage a general audience. The issue I have is that either the anecdotes should be made more compelling to justify the qualitatively-described studies, or the studies should be described more quantitatively to justify the brief anecdotes that precede them; the author tries to be a too clever in splitting the difference, but the end result feels a bit less meaty than I'd like. (As a matter of personal preference, given my expectations of what a description of controlled studies should have, I would prefer that the book feature a level of quantitative description similar to One Nation, Underprivileged by Mark Robert Rank (which I read about a year ago).)

Despite these reservations, I did enjoy reading the book, as it opened my eyes not necessarily to biases per se, but to the ways that biases can affect people's performance (as well as how people affected by these biases view and respond to them). It certainly got me thinking about some of the other ways that biases and stereotype threats can cut. With that in mind, follow the jump to see some questions that I have about the book, and please do respond in the comments with thoughts of your own (especially if you have citations for more recent research that could answer some of my naive questions).

2016-10-03

First Paper: "Nonadditivity of van der Waals forces on liquid surfaces"

My first paper has been published! It is in volume 94, issue 3 of Physical Review E, and an older preprint of it is available too for those who don't have access to academic journals (it has all of the same figures and ideas, though it is missing a few sentences of further explanation as well as a couple of new citations that were inserted for the final publication). In the interest of explaining these ideas in a way that is easy to understand, I am using the ten hundred most used words in English (except for the two lines that came before this one), as put together from the XKCD Simple Writer and the Wiktionary list of the 1000 most used words. I will use numbers sometimes without completely writing them out, use words for certain names of things without explaining further, and explain less used words when they come up. Keep reading to see what comes next.

2016-09-25

Featured Comments: Week of 2016 September 18

There was one post this past week, and it got one comment, so I'll repost that here.

Revisited: Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE + Xfce

An anonymous reader said, "Great review, as always. Hey, if you're in the mood for experimentation give "Space FM" file manager a try. It's very powerful and extensible, it might give you a good experience. Keep up the good work."

Thanks to that reader for that comment; SpaceFM looks interesting enough that I'd be happy to review it in the near future. Additionally, I will have a very exciting research related post either next week or the week after, so stay tuned for that. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

2016-09-19

Revisited: Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE + Xfce

The KDE and Xfce editions of Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" recently came out. Over a month ago, I had reviewed the MATE edition, and while I was generally happy with how it worked, there were a handful of minor usability issues and other niggles that detracted from the experience enough that I couldn't recommend that a newbie install it by him/herself. Given that, I wanted to see if maybe the KDE or Xfce editions could make up for the deficiencies that I observed in the MATE edition. Follow the jump to see what each is like. Given that the main base of Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" is common to all of these editions, I'm not going to spend too much time rehashing things like application installation for their own sake; instead, these reviews will be shorter, and will focus on the differences relative to the MATE edition.

2016-08-07

Featured Comments: Week of 2016 July 31

There was one post this past week that got two comments, so I'll repost both of those.

Review: Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" MATE

An anonymous reader said, "The scrollbar-jumping decision is a mind-numbinglingy stupid UI decision. I'd love to know why the GTK-3 Firefox people thought it was such a good idea (along with removing the up/down arrows on scrollbars). It smacks of the kind of totalitarian UI thinking that drove GNOME 3. It IS fixable by adding a line or two to .config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini (INI??? This isn't windows for god's sake...), but it should never have come to that."
Commenter DarkDuck had a similar review to share: "Yet another "not-so-nice" review of Mint 18. http://linuxblog.darkduck.com/2016/07/linux-mint-18-cinnamon-pity-pity-pity.html".

Thanks to both of those people for commenting. Given that I'm essentially posting only once a month now, I don't anticipate having much to post for the rest of this month (unless I happen to think of something). That said, I do intend to have at least one Linux distribution review out by next month. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

2016-08-01

Review: Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" MATE

My laptop is getting old, and Linux Mint 13 LTS "Maya" Xfce will only be supported for one more year. Given this, I figured it might be time to seriously start looking into newer distributions for upgrade (even if I don't actually upgrade right away). Linux Mint just released its latest version, giving me all the more reason to review it.

Main Screen + Linux Mint Menu
The biggest change (as far as I can see) is that multimedia plugins and codecs are no longer included by default. From what I understand, this was done not due to any legal issue, but because maintaining separate installable/live bootable ISO images with and without codecs was becoming costly in terms of time and effort. Instead, the distribution provides alternative ways to install those plugins and codecs in the live and installed system. There are of course smaller updates to the distribution, including new applications and a new interface theme. (Also, on a much more minor note, although the codename still ends in an "a"/"ah" sound, this is the first Ubuntu-based release whose codename doesn't actually end in the letter "a".)

I tested this on a live USB made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

2016-07-18

Classical Damping of Gases and Oscillators

I was on vacation last week, and during some quiet time, I randomly happened to be thinking about explanations for damping in physical systems. I remember learning in ELE 456 — Quantum Optics, from last spring, that the phenomenological linear damping of a classical oscillator could be derived by coupling a quantum oscillator to a thermal bath of quantum oscillators; each linear oscillator is microscopically undamped, but by treating the bath through statistical thermodynamics, the coupling of the oscillator in question to a bath essentially produces a linear damping coefficient dependent on the spectrum of the bath (and the coupling too). Microscopically, the quantization of energy levels in a linear oscillator makes it easy to interpret how discrete excitations can move from one oscillator to another coupled oscillator, but I was wondering if quantum mechanics is really necessary to explain damping. Follow the jump to see an extremely rough sketch of ideas that may (or may not) justify the use of classical mechanics by itself. (Added after finishing: this turns out to be a rambling and possibly ultimately pointless post with a much clearer and more self-consistent explanation linked at the end, so for the time being, humor me.)

2016-06-20

Autonomous Cars and Autonomous Ownership

I was originally going to do a Linux distribution review this month. However, when I tried a couple of distributions that I wanted to test, none of them would properly boot from a live USB, so I gave up on those. Instead, I wanted to use this space to ramble a bit on what the near-future of self-driving cars might look like. It comes from some conversations I had with my family last weekend while visiting California, after having seen the limited self-driving capabilities of a Tesla Model S (namely, its ability to autonomously pull in and out of a parking space). Moreover, as some of you who know me personally would know, I have a disability that prevents me from driving, so the sight of even minimally-autonomous cars as a present reality excites me, and I'm keeping an eye on current developments in that field/market. Given this, if you'll indulge me, then follow the jump to (not exhaustively) explore some possibilities for self-driving cars.

2016-05-16

Review: Rebellin Linux v3 GNOME

Last week, I finished and passed my generals! This not only means that I can continue doing research here with a roof over my head and with money to feed myself; it also means that I now have the time to get back to doing reviews and posting about other things here. I'm starting this week by reviewing Rebellin Linux.

Main screen + GnoMenu
Rebellin Linux is a rolling-release distribution based on the unstable "Sid" branch of Debian. It features the GNOME or MATE DEs, and its focus is on being easy to use, with special attention paid to user support; in particular, it offers personalized lifetime support after a onetime payment of a modest ($14 as of this writing) fee, and offers free support in the form of the user manual (though that requires provision of an email address, which is a bit odd) and a Q&A section of the site in lieu of traditional forums. Looking at the website, it seems like this is largely a one-person operation, and the website design and some of the words used make it seem a little more amateurish (which is marginally off-putting for a distribution that bills itself as meaning "business"), but it seems like a decent effort from a single person, and I'd like to see what it has to offer in any case. I tried this as a live USB made with UnetBootin. Follow the jump to see what it's like.

2016-04-15

Generals Impending

I briefly thought of doing a review or another longer post this month, but I realized that studying for my generals will require too much of my time and concentration to allow for that. Instead, I'll keep this post as an update about my upcoming generals. My generals will have two parts: the first is a standard research seminar where I get to talk about some of the stuff that I've done over the last year and more, while the second is an oral exam where the three committee members get to ask me more fundamental questions. The oral exam is tricky to prepare for because those questions could in principle be about anything; that said, from what I understand, the committee members tend to ask about things related to my research topics, my coursework, or other basic things that they expect someone in my field to understand, so I basically have to study a broad range of material and hope for the best. The research seminar is a little better, because I have a better sense of my own research than at least two out of the three committee members (the excluded member being my advisor); I just have to make sure that I know what I'm talking about (and on that same note that I don't start making stuff up), so this will require me to go a little broad but more deep into the fundamentals underlying my research.

I said in a post from two months ago that I'm working on projects involving nanoscale wetting as well as more accurate modeling of the optical response of electrons in nanoscale metal structures. Right now, I'm not so sure about the future of the second project, because there still seems to be a lot of controversy about how to properly account for boundary effects in finite metal systems, and our group is not really in the business of making those [more fundamental] decisions; instead, we'd like to use a more well-established model of optical response and hope to show some new and interesting results using novel techniques in computational electromagnetics. Given that, my research seminar is almost exclusively going to focus on the first project, which is a much better-posed and better-developed problem and has consequently led to very interesting results. (I can't really give more details until we put out a publication.)

Anyway, at this point I'm waiting to be over with generals, while studying hard for them as the days count down. I promise that I'll have a more typical post next month, after I finish both parts of generals.

2016-03-21

Review: Black Lab Linux 7.0.2 Xfce

Main Screen + Whisker Menu
This is a review that I've been wanting to do for a while now, so I'm glad I can finally do it. Of course, after this, I'll have to buckle down again and prepare for my general exams again, so another review may not come for another month or more.

Black Lab Linux is supposed to be a distribution that focuses on being easy to use and having a consistent user interface, with the hope of attracting users new to Linux. Unlike many other distributions, it offers professional support (for a fee), and also offers computers for sale that have Black Lab Linux preinstalled. As is typical, the distribution by itself is offered as a free downloadable ISO file, so that's what I tested here. I tested the 64-bit version using a live USB system made with UnetBootin; follow the jump to see what it's like.

2016-02-24

Research and Generals

I was intending to post a review this month, but I got too busy and didn't have the time to do that. Instead, I'll keep this as a short update. Right now, I'm quite occupied with doing research on two projects: one has to do with wetting at the nanoscale, and the other has to do with modeling the optical response of electrons in metals and semiconductors. They may seem divorced from each other at first, but they are both electromagnetic phenomena, and if I consider Casimir forces or heat transfer from metals or semiconductors, they both involve fluctuational phenomena as well. Concurrently with research, I am preparing for my general examinations (often called qualifying examinations elsewhere) which are coming up in April or May. Anyway, hopefully I'll have a little time next month to put a review or another sort of post like that out.

2016-01-24

Featured Comments: Week of 2016 January 17

There was one post this past week that got a few comments, so I'll repost all of those.

Review: Solus 1.0 "Shannon"

Reader whs001 said, "Thanks very much for a thorough review of Solus. I've been paying attention to Ikey Dougherty's work ever since Linux Mint Debian Edition, and I've read quite a few reviews of Solus - yours is more thorough than many others, and the first one I've seen that mentions all the problems you found. At this point I'm relying on reviews of Solus because I can't even get it to finish booting on either of my 64-bit machines. It starts to boot, but hangs up before even getting to the logon screen. Not ready for prime time. I'm actually writing because you are the first review I've ever seen who has complained about scroll bars that jump all the way to where you click rather than just going one "page down" the way they ordinarily do. I have strange problems with that behavior. On my Dell OptiPlex desktop running Linux Lite with XFCE, most of the scroll bars work normally, but in Synaptic they jump down (or up) as you describe. On my Dell Inspiron laptop running Xubuntu, it seems as though the scrollbars in all applications have this stupid jump-down behavior. I would blame that on Ubuntu (particularly since it has a history of messing with scrollbars, giving us that dopey long, skinny place marker rather than the usual squarish one), but Linux Lite is also based on Ubuntu. In fact what I'm running is Xubuntu 14.04 and Linux Lite based on Ubuntu 14.04, so the fact that they have different forms of scrollbar misbehavior is really odd. Thanks again for the review", later clarifying in response to a question from me, "I wrote Solus onto two different USB sticks with dd, and neither one of them would finish booting on either machine."
In response to the above posts, commenter keithbluhm shared the following: "I've been checking out Solus just because, and I'm no computer hardware/software guru, but I was able to install, boot, update, use, shutdown, reboot, etc, etc, using the provided ISO within VirtualBox on Win7...zero issues. No idea what the differences would be between a VM, Live USB, and so on."
Also in response, reader Jake had the following tip: "@whs001: Sounds like an issue with uefi. Check your bios settings and ensure that uefi is first or enabled. Perhaps you need to make sure that your drive is selected as the boot device as well."

Thanks to all of those readers for those comments. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you may have gathered that I'm basically posting around once per month now. That schedule is not going to change much for the next few months. It won't decrease because I do still enjoy posting from time to time, and I would personally feel a bit badly for neglecting this blog for an entire calendar month. That said, it also won't increase because this semester, having finished classes (basically), I need to prepare for my general examinations (also called qualifying examinations) which occur at the end of the semester, which will determine whether I get to stay in my PhD program or not. Anyway, if you like what I write, please continue subscribing and commenting!

2016-01-18

Review: Solus 1.0 "Shannon"

The semester has finally ended, and with that, I am officially done with all of my technical classes forever! (I still need to take an ethics class next semester, but that shouldn't be a big deal.) I've had a free weekend, so I've taken advantage of it by reviewing the recently-released Solus 1.0 "Shannon".

Raven + Budgie Menu
If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you may be wondering why I'm reviewing Solus with a version number of 1.0, if I already reviewed SolusOS 1 "Eveline" over 3.5 years ago. The reason is that this Solus is different from the SolusOS of a few years ago. The deal (as far as I can tell, so if I get parts of the story wrong, please let me know in the comments) is that for the previous SolusOS, version 2 was to be released with all sorts of cool things like an independent base, a fork of GNOME 2 supporting Compiz (separate from MATE), and so on, but then the development team ran out of funds to continue development, so SolusOS died at that point. More recently (around a year ago), the lead developer of the former SolusOS project, Ikey Doherty (along with presumably other people involved with the old SolusOS project, but I'm not too clear on that point), started working on a new lightweight DE called Budgie, built from GNOME 3 technologies to maintain compatibility with the upstream code base (in direct contrast to the forking that Cinnamon and MATE had done). He put it into an independent distribution called Evolve OS, but then a trademark dispute briefly ensued; this was quickly resolved by dropping the Evolve OS name and resurrecting the Solus name, and that is the distribution that I am reviewing today.

I tried Solus (which is only usable on 64-bit systems) on a live USB written with the "dd" command, as this is the recommended method; the Solus wiki explicitly advises against using UnetBootin, and I figured that MultiSystem may not be able to handle a new independent distribution like Solus. Follow the jump to see what it's like.