This blog post highlights a video on how to use regular expressions.
It’s been a while since I did the MySQL QA and Bash Training Series. The 13 episodes were quite enjoyable to make, and a lot of people watched the video’s and provided great feedback.
In today’s new video, I’d like to briefly go over regular expressions. The session will cover the basics of regular expressions, and then some. I’ll follow up later with a more advanced regex session too.
Regular expressions are very versatile, and once you know how to use them – especially as a script developer or software coder – you will return to them again and again. Enjoy!
Presented by Roel Van de Paar. Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended
This blog post highlights a video on how to use regular expressions.
It’s been a while since I did the MySQL QA and Bash Training Series. The 13 episodes were quite enjoyable to make, and a lot of people watched the video’s and provided great feedback.
In today’s new video, I’d like to briefly go over regular expressions. The session will cover the basics of regular expressions, and then some. I’ll follow up later with a more advanced regex session too.
Regular expressions are very versatile, and once you know how to use them – especially as a script developer or software coder – you will return to them again and again. Enjoy!
Presented by Roel Van de Paar. Full-screen viewing @ 720p resolution recommended
“Virtual unwrapping” has revealed text from the book of Leviticus inside an ancient scroll.. (Image: Seales et al./Science Advances)
For over forty years, archaeologists have longed to peek inside a badly damaged ancient scroll found on the western shore of the Dead Sea. Now an international team of scientists has managed to do so by virtually unrolling the scroll, revealing the text hidden deep within: the first few verses from the book of Leviticus.
It’s a striking example of using advanced technologies to shed light on ancient secrets. The details are described in a new paper in Science Advances.“The En-Gedi scroll is proof positive that we can potentially recover the whole text from damaged material, not just a few letters or a speculative word,” lead author Brent Seales, of the University of Kentucky, said during a press conference yesterday.
The virtual unwrapping software package is called Volume Cartography, and it should be available sometime next year as open-source software. Because it is completely non-invasive, this new multi-stage approach could be a game changer in the analysis of fragile archaeological objects.
First, the team scanned the scroll using micro-computed tomography—a commercially available machine often used for cancer imaging. Then they used a process called segmentation to digitally create pages, followed by texturing and flattening techniques. Finally, they virtually “unrolled” the scroll to reveal the writing inside.
“We’re losing precious information about our history every day, not because we cannot decipher it, but because we can’t access it in the first place,” Phillipa Benson, managing editor of Science Advances, said. That’s because most analytic methods would damage or destroy these precious artifacts. “So many researchers have to choose between preserving the integrity of a physical artifact or extracting the knowledge it contains.”
First excavated in the 1970s, the scrolls were recovered from the ark of an ancient synagogue at En-Gedi (“spring of the goat”), the site of an ancient Jewish community that was destroyed by fire around 600 CE. The scrolls were far too badly damaged to permit any significant analysis. Honestly, although technically they are made of animal skin parchment, they’re pretty much just small lumps of charcoal to the naked eye, like this one:
This lump of charcoal is actually one of the oldest known fragments of a biblical text, second only to the Dead Sea Scrolls. (Image: Shay Halevi/Israel Antiquities Authority)
The lumps are so fragile that merely touching them caused them to deteriorate even more. According to co-author Pnina Shor, director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Project at the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem, when the scrolls were first excavated, a team member brought in the box of charcoal chunks and asked her to scan them. “I said, ‘You must be joking,’” she recalled.
But decades later, when she was selecting various unwrapped Dead Sea scrolls for scanning, Shor plucked one of the lumps out of the box to include in the scanning, just in case. And that was the only scroll that turned out to be significant in the batch, most likely because of the presence of metal in the ink.
But it still wasn’t possible to see what might be inside. That’s when Shor contacted Seales, an expert in advanced digitization techniques for examining damaged materials. “The magic—or secret sauce, if you will—is not in the scanning alone,” said Seales. His analysis combined digital scanning of a rolled-up object (like the En-Gedi scroll) with a series of imaging processing techniques that ultimately produce a flattened-out unrolled image of the interior layers.
They weren’t expecting to find actual, readable text, but they did. “Of course, we were elated,” said Seales when he first realized the markings were textual in nature. “But I think the real joy came when Pnina send me back the [analysis] results. Because then I knew that not only were we seeing writing, but it was readable, and she and her team were able to identify it as a known text. At that point we were absolutely jubilant.”
Appropriately enough, given that the scrolls were damaged by fire, the passage deals with burnt offerings.
“Never in our wildest dreams did we think that anything would come out of it,” Shor said. “The discovery of the text in the En-Gedi scroll absolutely astonished us. It was certainly a shot in the dark.”
The image quality is good enough that it was possible for Hebrew scholars to perform textual criticism.
“I think we can safely say that since the completion of the publication of the Corpus of Dead Sea Scrolls about a decade ago… the En-Gedi Leviticus Scroll is the most extensive and significant biblical text from antiquity that has come to light,” said co-author Michael Segal of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who analyzed the text from the resulting digital images. “We were amazed at the quality of the images. Much of the text is as close to readable as actual unharmed Dead Sea Scrolls.”
This text survived, Segal said, because the scroll was rolled in such a way that the opening verses were on the inner layers, protecting from being completely destroyed by that sixth century fire. The hope is that more of the text could be recovered over the next few months.
According to the textual analysis published by Segal and his colleague, Emmanuel Tov, today in the journal Textus, there are 18 lines of text in each column, containing all consonants and no vowels. For instance, “Kentucky” would have been written as “K-N-T-C-K” and the reader would fill in the vowels. “This means that the scroll was written before the ninth century, when the vowel signs were invented,” said Tov.
And the passages are identical, right down to paragraph breaks, to the so-called Masoeretic text—the most authoritative Jewish text, according to Segal and Tov, dating from the medieval period. Carbon dating further refines the time period as being from the second, third, or fourth centuries.
Seales and his colleagues are still working to virtually unwrap the outermost ayers of the En-Gedi scroll, although they are not optimistic since they are so badly damaged. In the future, Seales hopes to further refine his approach to image scrolls with other kinds of ink chemistries, as well as applications in forensic and intelligence gathering. “Damage and decay is the natural order of things, but you can see that sometimes you can absolutely pull a text back from the brink of loss,” he said.
When the En-Gedi scrolls were excavated from an ancient synagogue’s Holy Ark in the 1970s, it was a bittersweet discovery for archaeologists. Though the texts provided further evidence for an ancient Jewish community in this oasis near the Dead Sea, the scrolls had been reduced to charred lumps by fire. Even the act of moving them to a research facility caused more damage. But decades later, archaeologists have read parts of one scroll for the first time. A team of scientists in Israel and the US used a sophisticated medical scanning technique, coupled with algorithmic analysis, to "unwrap" a parchment that’s more than 1,700 years old.
(credit: Science Advances)
Found in roughly the same area as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the En-Gedi scrolls were used by a Jewish community in the region between the 8th century BCE and 6th century CE. In the year 600 CE, the community and its temple were destroyed by fire. Archaeologists disagree on the exact historical provenance of the En-Gedi scrolls—carbon dating suggests fourth century, but stratigraphic evidence points to a date closer to the second. Either way, these scrolls could provide a kind of missing link between the biblical texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the traditional biblical text of the Tanakh found in the Masoretic Text from roughly the 9th century. As the researchers put it in a paper published in Science Advances:
Dating the En-Gedi scroll to the third or fourth century CE falls near the end of the period of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls (third century BCE to second century CE) and several centuries before the medieval biblical fragments found in the Cairo Genizah, which date from the ninth century CE onward. Hence, the En-Gedi scroll provides an important extension to the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls and offers a glimpse into the earliest stages of almost 800 years of near silence in the history of the biblical text.
How to read a burned scroll with computers
But it wasn’t until University of Kentucky computer scientist Brent Seales developed a technique he calls volume cartography that archaeologists actually got that "glimpse." Seales had previously worked on a project to read fire-damaged scrolls from the library of a wealthy Roman whose home in Herculaneum was destroyed in the Pompeii eruption. He suggested that Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Pnina Shor scan the scrolls using X-ray micro-CT, which is essentially a very high-resolution CT scan of exactly the same type you might get in a hospital. Indeed, Shor explained in a press conference that her team used a medical imaging facility to produce digital scans that she sent to Seales to analyze in Kentucky.
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"Unpatent is a crowdfunding platform that eliminates bad patents," reads their web site. "We do that by crowdsourcing the prior art — that is all the evidence that makes clear that a patent was not novel — and filing reexamination requests to the patent office." An anonymous Slashdot reader reports:
"Everyone in the world can back the crowdfunding campaign against the patent," explains their site, which includes a special section with "Featured stupid patents". The first $16,000 raised covers the lawyers and fees at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and "The rest is distributed to those who find valid prior art…any evidence that a patent is not novel. We review all the prior art pieces and reward those that may invalidate a claim… Then, we file an ex partes reexamination to the USPTO."
Their team includes Lee Cheng, the legal officer at Newegg, "worldwide renowned as the patent trolls’ nightmare," as well as Lus Cuende, who created his own Linux distro when he was 15 and is now CTO of Stampery, a company using the Bitcoin blockchain to notarize data.
They’re currently targeting the infamous US8738435 covering "personalized content relating to offered products and services," which in February the EFF featured as their "stupid patent of the month." Its page on Unpatent.co argues that "Taking something so obvious such as personalizing content and offers…and writing the word online everywhere shouldn’t grant you a monopoly over it."
Unpatent’s slogan? "We invalidate patents that shouldn’t exist."
It’s not every episode of cult animated series Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, but Adult Swim has just made a binge-worthy selection of episodes from over nine seasons available for free and easy streaming. The occasion is a sad one—the passing of lead animator and voice actor C. Martin Croker—but there’s no better way to pay tribute.
Here’s the full list of the bite-sized episodes, which—again—one must merely click to enjoy, no need to muck around with cable provider logins. The guests are a great representative of what a wide-ranging show Space Ghost was, with famous folks like Alice Cooper, Charlton Heston, Chuck D, Kevin Smith, Tyra Banks, Willie Nelson, and William Shatner showing up to take part.
Over the weekend, one of the people behind Adult Swim’s Space Ghost Coast to Coast cartoon passed away, and the network has decided to honor his memory by making episodes of the show available for free. C. Martin Croker voiced two characters on the show, Zorak and Moltar, as well as serving as an animator on the show and other projects. Like many shows of its era, viewing the old episodes is difficult since the DVD releases are now out of print. Adult Swim says it has posted every episode "that we could get our hands on," and you can watch them here with no log-in required.
In memory of our friend C. Martin Croker, @adultswim is putting every episode of SGC2C up on https://t.co/tSHbtM7czW, available w/o login.
For over a year now I have been blogging about Trump’s talent for persuasion, and that gives people the impression that I prefer him as my president. That is not the case. I’ll tell you why at the end of this post.
The best choice for president depends on the types of challenges ahead. And the future has a habit of surprising us. We have no way to predict whether Clinton or Trump would end up being the right match for an unpredictable future.
That said, let’s talk about assessing the risk – to the country – of Trump versus Clinton. My observation of their histories and their personalities suggests that Trump offers America an entrepreneur’s profile of risk, whereas Clinton would be more like investing in a CD at your bank. Which is better? The answer for you probably depends on how old you are, how selfish you are, and how much money you have.
If things are going well for you and your family, you probably don’t want to rock the boat. In that case, Clinton is a good choice for you. But if you are young, or things are not working out well for you and your family, it would be rational to accept higher risk with the hope of getting a bigger/faster improvement.
But how big is the Trump risk to the economy and the country in general? Let’s talk about how Trump has managed risk in the past. That’s the best way to predict how he will do it in the future.
Diversification: Rule #1 for an investment portfolio is diversification. Trump probably wasn’t sufficiently diversified early in his real estate career, but now he has his name on about 500 entities and he has succeeded across multiple fields. He understands diversification. That’s good.
A-B Testing: One of the best ways to manage risk is to try things on a small scale and only double-down if the test is a success. We see Trump trying out different Linguistic Kill Shots to see what sticks, changing campaign staff as needed, and employing different campaign strategies depending on the situation. We observe him being decisive when things don’t work (firing people) and we watch him pivot quickly based on what he learns from testing. That suggests a “systems” type of mind, as opposed to a “goal” mentality. You can read more about that distinction in my book, which you might enjoy because it has pages. The summary is that systems-thinkers manage risk better.
Licensing: A big part of Trump’s business involves licensing his name. I know a lot about licensing because I have done if for years with Dilbert. Licensing is a great way to manage risk because I get paid in advance even if the product that Dilbert’s image is licensed to adorn does not work out. Trump does the same. He gets paid even if the project with his name on it fails. That’s good risk management.
Likewise, Trump almost certainly negotiates for a lump sum advance payment from publishers for his books. Trump gets paid even if the publisher loses money. That’s good risk management.
Likewise also, The Apprentice probably paid Trump a guaranteed minimum no matter the ratings. And if the show had failed, Trump would not have any personal investment in it. He only had upside potential.
Two Ways to Win: We often see Trump choose strategies that have two ways to win and no way to lose. That’s the best risk management of all. For example, when Trump warned that Iran should release American prisoners before he gets elected, he created two ways to win and no way to lose. If the prisoners were released (and they were), Trump could claim his threat was effective. (He did.) If Iran kept the prisoners, Trump could say the United States needs a bad-ass President like him to deal with Iran.
Bankruptcies: When the general public hears that Trump had several bankruptcies (out of hundreds of projects) they think that means he did something wrong. Business people see a different picture. They see a diversified portfolio of projects that are wisely siloed into their own corporate entities so some can fail without taking the others with them. That’s good risk management because one would naturally expect several failures out of hundreds of projects.
Marriages: Trump is married to his third wife and still has good relationships with his exes. Apparently Trump had good prenups, and good lawyers. He managed the risk of divorce better than 90% of the people I know.
Alcohol and Drugs: Trump has never had a drink of alcohol or an illegal drug, because of the risk. If you have ever consumed alcohol or taken illegal drugs, you have a far higher tolerance for risk than Trump. He removed those risks from his life. And those are some big risks.
Seeing the Future: One way to reduce risk is to predict the future better than those around you. We know that Trump went all-in on his run for president this time, but in prior election years he dropped out early. Apparently he made the right decision this time because he could see himself making it all the way.
We have also witnessed Trump using unorthodox campaign strategies that almost everyone else in the world thought would fail. But apparently Trump predicted the future better than the pundits. His methods have worked.
Trump hasn’t predicted the future correctly every time. As noted, several of his projects did not work out. But evidently he expected there could be some losers among his projects because he set them up as separate entities that could fail on their own without dragging down the rest.
Listening to Advice: One of the criticisms we heard about Trump early in the campaign is that he wouldn’t listen to experts. But now we have lots of examples in which he has done exactly that. His entire campaign has transformed in the past six weeks. We watched Trump assess the changing election dynamics, take advice from advisors, adapt his approach, and spike in the polls.
Trump is also good at firing people. The smartest person I know told me that the most important skill of a leader is firing, not hiring. No one is smart enough to hire the right people every time, so firing is the more valuable skill. Trump apparently has that skill. Consider how hard it was to fire his longtime friend Corey Lewandowski, and later Paul Manafort. Trump pulled the trigger both times. And both moves proved to be helpful.
Trump’s Ego: Trump’s showmanship and branding comes off as ego, and narcissism, and that can be scary to the public. You want to know your President is making decisions based on what is good for the country, and not what is good for the President’s ego. But Trump’s appearance on Jimmy Fallon went a long way toward changing perceptions about his ego. Trump let Fallon mess up his famous hair on TV, and it humanized Trump. We watched Trump put his ego aside with no real effort.
We also see Trump doing more outreach to the African-American community, toning down his rhetoric (mostly) and generally doing what the public has been asking him to do. That suggests a candidate who has control of his ego. He listens to the people and gives them what they want.
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In my personal situation, things are going great for me, so that suggests Clinton would be a safer choice in terms of managing my risk – both financially and physically. Change isn’t necessarily good for me. But I’m also at a point in my life where I’m focused on providing some public good before I check out of the computer simulation we call life. So if my American teammates prefer a Trump-like risk – because they think change is needed for their own benefit – I’m okay with that. Pick the president you want and I’ll work with it. I’ll be happy either way.