Basically, if you're a coder and you make documents or images which are complicated, structured, data-driven or orderly enough to seem amenable to programmatic construction, then Postscript really is worth learning. It would be no problem to whack together an open source toolchain for making videos using postscript too, if you were trying to make programmatic 2D or 2.5D animations. Just sling ghostview and ffmpeg together and Robert is your parent's brother. Javascript with SVG or Canvas is certainly better if you need interactivity, soft realtime or web-only delivery though.
Hey, that's a pretty handy document. Interesting to see it support PS in the context of LaTeX and Word.
I used to dream in PostScript I was coding in it so much -- the experience was dreaming about stack-oriented coding, as opposed to vector visuals, for clarity. I got started coding in PS on the NeXT in '91 doing data driven graph visualizations. PS was great for some algorithmically-generated logos too. Really fun were some fractals which strained the imagesetters and printers they ran on. Learning PS really paid off though when I ended up using it to create a database publishing engine for real-estate listings. It used Python for data wrangling and orchestration and then PostScript for the dynamic book generation and layout. It was used back when real estate agents relied on giant books printed daily, which this engine generated for dozens of markets across Western Canada. These documents were pretty gnarly too, including property-type-specific templates, various indexes, property images, market-specific variations, etc -- and doing all that with the absolute control which PostScript permitted was fantastic. It would have been nightmarish to try to do such things in LaTeX, Word or the DTP tools of the era. PDF rendering was automated with GhostView so the whole toolchain was open source.
I'd suggest that if extreme precision, detail and complexity are your requirements and especially if rendering to PDF and screen bitmaps are needed then PostScript is still very relevant. It's also quite fun as a developer.
At first I thought "wow, they're so smooth" but then realized that the dynamics must be so incredibly fast that the fuzzy smoothness is really just motion blur. Amazing though....
The article said that they form as ionized balls that can move at ten percent of the speed of light. That's almost 30 million miles an hour! I don't know what to say, except that nature is f'ing amazing!
And I'd love to know what those downward branching structures are...
Doubtless there are lots of other ways to get it running but I just tried it myself by:
* 1990
* System 6.0.5
* Customize...
* Machine: Mac II
* Infinite HD > Multimedia > HyperCard > HyperCard
Hi Hussam. I really like the hTime idea! The compelling perspective on this, for me, is to see it as a planetary frame of reference for thinking about time. Of course there is UTC but we don't casually and habitually speak about UTC because it involves "conversion" (between our own TZ and UTC) and "disambiguation" (what what, are we talking about UTC here? gotta check the TZ, ah, yes). The way your hTime differs is that it uses new a new alphabetic nomenclature for the global time, so it carries the signal right on its face that it is this new system. Definitely a subtle point, but I think a reasonable one. It'll be great when hTime "faces" for smart watches are available. That would speed adoption by making it easier for people to start "living" in planetary time. Personally, I'm all about this planetary cognitive context in my own work, so I have sympathy for the challenges you're dealing with landing the message of the value that hTime offers. Good luck and keep it up, it's an important innovation.
It looks like one of the authors is on HN with us. Can you offer any insight into the cause of the confusing language in the "Science News" piece? It reads like it was written by a bot not a human.
In the sentence "With the theory physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler were able to prove that when two high-energy photons collide, a positron and an electron arise, i.e. matter is formed" shouldn't the word be "predict" not "prove"?
A more flagrant example of a strange word choice for a human science writer to make is "A direct conversion would require a laser that emits gamma-ray photons in a highly concentrated steel." Shouldn't the word "steel" instead be "beam"? This seems like the sort of thing an uncomprehending bot might do, conflate those two words.
Are my the nits I've picked, above, unfounded? Does the author of the original paper have any information which might suggest that an actual human wrote the "Science News" piece?
If not I would suggest that we've got a bot on the loose! Eeek!
Further, I think I'm seeing rather a lot of "content" floating around recently which smacks of machine origins.
Author here, thanks! I am not familiar with this website (science-news.co) so I cannot comment on the quality of the writing (or human origin). I agree with you that "prove" should be "predict" - they did not prove anything except that from a theory standpoint, this process can happen in quantum mechanics.
The sentence about lasers is also strange, I have no idea what is meant there. My only guess is that it might be trying to describe some laser experiment that uses lasers to "heat" a hohlraum to produce a field of photons. Then some other high energy photon beam is used to collide with the photons inside the hohlraum.
You've previously asked for examples [0] of this type of fraud on HN: so this is one example! Credit to 'smurpy' in this thread, who noticed the 'bot'-like writing style.
Automated synonym replacement is the current cutting edge in plagiarism, or more generously, avoiding automated plagiarism detection. There was recently a large scandal in which some large number of scientific papers were traced to a ghostwriting house via their automated synonyms.
So my guess would be that the science news "author" is rewording things to avoid stepping on another author's copyright.
Yes, photons are bosons / force carriers, but they interact with charged particles, and in this case produce e+ e- pairs via this Feynman diagram [1]. By rotating the diagram in spacetime, you get different known interactions: pair production (this topic), pair annihilation (same diagram running the other way in time), and, if memory serves, Compton scattering.
"Rotate the diagram in spacetime" would make for some top-tier technobabble (not expressing doubt that it is a real thing, just wow, it sounds so cool).
Ok, so high enough energy photons fluctuating to other particle/antiparticles and then being able to interact with other high enough photons is an explanation I'm willing to settle for, because I thought that multiple bosons can occupy the same space, thus they were not able to interact with each other, by the "boson" definition.
It's still blows my mind that a photon could do that -- turn into a particle-antiparticle pair, the pair then quickly gets annihilated and turns back into the same photon and continues in the exact same direction and form the initial photon was travelling.
But if this process is real, does it mean that high energy photons travel slower than low energy photons?
Because low energy photons could not transform into particles that have mass, while higher energy photons could and thus spend just a liiiiiiitle bit more time as massive particles that can't travel at the speed of light.
Two thumbs up for Refactoring by Fowler. Exactly. Even if you already know know the 300 odd refactorings he documents... The fact that his names let you talk about them with your team or more easily treat them as abstractions is a powerful win. That book is one of the best investments you can make.
Here is a version which uses OSX's say command for a spoken announcement of "github is up again". It also checks once every minute instead of once a second.
while true; do curl -s https://status.github.com/api/status.json | egrep 'good|minor' && say -r 160 "github is up again" || echo -n .; sleep 60; done
Edit: accept a status of minor as an indication of up-ness.
