Leo 4.11 final: Python scripting IDE

Leo 4.11 final is now available here.

Leo is a PIM, an IDE and an outliner for programmers, authors and web designers. Leo's unique features organize data in a revolutionary way. Python scripts can easily access all parts of Leo outlines. See Leo's tutorial for more information.

The highlights of Leo 4.11:
---------------------------

- Leo's tutorials have been rewritten and simplified.
- Greatly improved abbreviations, including templates.
- Clones are now valid anywhere in @file nodes.
- Leo now warns if a .leo file is open elsewhere.
- Leo's IPython bridge now works with IPython 1.x.
- Added support for @testsetup and @testclass.
- Added support for sessions.
- Added colorizing themes.
- A colored border highlights the pane with focus.
- Added support for the clojure, markdown and TypeScript languages.
- Added importers for .ipynb, .otl and vimoutliner files.
- Many new and improved commands, plugins and scripts.
- Dozens of bug fixes and code-level improvements.

Links:
------
Leo:       http://leoeditor.com
Docs:      http://leoeditor.com/leo_toc.html
Tutorials: http://leoeditor.com/tutorial.html
Forum:     http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor
Download:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/leo/files/
Bzr:       http://code.launchpad.net/leo-editor/
Quotes:    http://leoeditor.com/testimonials.html

Leo 4.11b1 released

Leo 4.11 b1 is now available at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/leo/files/Leo/4.11-b1/
Leo 4.11 contains over a year's work on Leo.

Leo is a PIM, an IDE and an outliner for programmers, authors and web
designers. Leo's unique features organize data in a revolutionary way.
See http://leoeditor.com/tutorial.html

The highlights of Leo 4.11:
---------------------------

- Leo's tutorials have been rewritten and simplified.
- Greatly improved abbreviations, including templates.
- Clones are now valid anywhere in @file nodes.
- Leo now warns if a .leo file is open elsewhere.
- Leo's IPython bridge now works with IPython 1.x.
- Added support for @testsetup and @testclass.
- Added support for sessions.
- Added colorizing themes.
- A colored border highlights the pane with focus.
- Added support for the clojure, markdown and TypeScript languages.
- Added importers for .ipynb, .otl and vimoutliner files.
- Many new and improved commands, plugins and scripts.
- Dozens of bug fixes and code-level improvements.

Links:
------
Leo:       http://leoeditor.com
Docs:      http://leoeditor.com/leo_toc.html
Tutorials: http://leoeditor.com/tutorial.html
Forum:     http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor
Download:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/leo/files/
Bzr:       http://code.launchpad.net/leo-editor/
Quotes:    http://leoeditor.com/testimonials.html







Edward

Obama takes "full responsibility" for spying on virtually everyone?

Here's how the President can truly take full responsibility for the spying mess: grant Edward Snowden a full pardon for all acts committed to date.  Nothing else will convince me his words aren't empty.

The Guardian's NSA Files

Read the articles on the Guardian's NSA Files page to find out exactly how much privacy you have.  The answer is none whatsoever.

A letter to Nature

Here is a letter I have just sent to Nature.

You have done a disservice to your readers with Professor Juma's review of Brian Arthur's book in Nature 499, 150–153 (11 July 2013). The Nature of Technology is risible twaddle, and should not have been promoted in Nature.

The review states: "This is an antidote to pessimism that belongs with the works of Joseph Schumpeter, Thomas Kuhn and Ilya Prigogine. It has universal appeal as a source of insight into how creativity can solve our most pressing economic, social and environmental challenges."

A more thoroughly misleading book review can hardly be imagined.  In fact, the book discusses none of the world's economic, social and environmental challenges, and has nothing of value to say on *any* topic. Placing this author on a par with Thomas Kuhn is a very bad joke.

You owe it to your readers to do at least minimal checking of the appropriateness of the books you review, and the basic honesty of the your reviewers.

Let's put tobacco and terrorism in perspective

According to the CDC (Centers for disease control and prevention):

"More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by all deaths from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined."

And the big bugaboo, terrorism, doesn't make any part of this list.

Wow: the history of the D-Wave quantum computer

This video has totally changed my perception of the state of quantum computing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptuFckypqzE

For those who say they have nothing to fear from government spying...

 One feeble excuse some people give for condoning massive spying is, "I have nothing to hide."

Does that include your social security number, your credit card numbers, and your bank account numbers?  How about all your passwords?  Aye you sure government doesn't know them all?

There are over 1 million people in the US with top-secret security clearances.  How confident are you that all of them are to be trusted?

Water in the Anthropocene

A brief, beautiful overview of worldwide water shortages.

https://vimeo.com/66087863#

Privacy soooo important for aparachiks, not so much for citizens

Change we can believe in?  Hahahahahahaha.

Reducing population without war, famine and disease

The following is a copy of an email I have just sent to Albert A. Bartlett.

I have enjoyed immensely your lecture about the exponential function.  Your web site states you have given this lecture 1600 times.  This is an incalculable contribution to the world.

The version I saw was a YouTube video that you gave perhaps 15 or 20 years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb3JI8F9LQQ&list=SP6A1FD147A45EF50D&feature=plpp_play_all

At the end of the video, you asked for corrections for any calculations that might be in error.  I only know of one such--your discussion of population in that lecture is misleading.  Perhaps you have already corrected it :-)

At about the 9 minute mark of part 2 you said the following: "I have to realize that anything that just lowers the death rate makes the problem worse." Consequently, you say that the items on the left hand side of the Table of Options (shown , Medicine, Public Health, Sanitation and Peace "makes the problem worse".

While strictly true (almost by definition), nevertheless your statement is highly misleading.  Perhaps even tragically misleading.  Indeed, Medicine, Public Health, Sanitation and Peace do not just lower the death rate.  They also tend (in the long run) to lower the birth rate even more!  Indeed, disease, famine and war typically tend to increase population.  The best (perhaps the only) way to control population is the increase the well-being of mothers and infants.

This was the message of the late, great James Grant of UNICEF.  Imo, every person who talks about population issues really must understand this counter-intuitive fact if they are to avoid uttering nonsense.

To see the truth of Grant's assertion, it pays to study very closely the statistics at the back of every edition of UNICEF's State of the World's Children reports.  The 2013 report is at http://www.unicef.org/sowc2013/files/SWCR2013_ENG_Lo_res_24_Apr_2013.pdf

As you will see, as death rates decline, birth rates decline more.  This is why many countries in the world have total fertility rates below the replacement rate.

The correlation between U-5 mortality rates and total fertility rates holds true both "horizontally" and "vertically".  That is, the correlation holds at any particular time when comparing different countries.  Countries with lower U-5 mortality rates have lower fertility rates.  But the correlation also holds in any single country over time.  As death rates decline, fertility rates decline even more, in any country you choose to study.

Although correlation does not necessarily imply causation, it is fairly easy to see what is leading to reduced fertility rates.  As death rates decline, there is no need for mothers to raise "extra" children to replace those expected to be lost to disease, wars and famines.

There are, of course, other factors at work.  I highly recommend this report: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf There are many interesting things in the report.  To highlight a few.

1.  You will not be surprised to learn that seemingly minor changes in projected fertility rates have huge consequences when "multiplied" over many years.  In a sense, this report merely illustrates the properties of the exponential function.

2. The essay in part 2 of the report are fascinating.  Population experts can interesting and important things despite massive uncertainties.

Again, many thanks for the enormous contributions you have made to the world.  I trust you will come to agree that the best way to reduce world population is to reduce the death rates among infants and children everywhere.

Shocking conclusions from basic arithmetic

George sent me this link as a response to a previous post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY&list=PL6A1FD147A45EF50D&feature=plpp_play_all

This is a fascinating, brilliant video.  It vividly demonstrates the utter cluelessness of large parts the economic and business world to the implications of basic mathematics as they apply to non-renewable resources.

When you pray to God, what are you praying to?

Science is now in the position to tell us what praying to "God the Creator" means.  It means praying to evolution!

The scientific evidence is overwhelming that evolution, and nothing else, created all living things. For a refutation of creationist claims, see: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html  Or read, Why Evolution is True

Praying to evolution is hopeless.   Evolution is a blind, uncaring process, not a being.  Evolution is not the kind of thing that could "hear" our prayers, or care about our prayers, or do anything about our prayers.

Otoh, mindfulness meditation, something that could be called a form of prayer (but not a prayer to anything or for anything) is, in my experience, quite valuable.  The reason is straightforward: mindfulness meditation requires no intellectual baggage.

Equating evolution with God immediately clears away massive amounts of confusion:

1. All theological debates become moot. For example, the question of why "evil" exists is transformed.  As theology, the question disappears.  As a topic for inquiry in the biological sciences it has great interest.  It leads to the notion of  Evolutionary Stable Strategy which is well worth a separate blog post.

2. All concerns about "what God wants us to do" disappear.  All morality, or lack thereof, comes from us (by way of our evolutionary makeup)!

3. The belief that "everything has a purpose" or "everything is for the best" is seen as the risible nonsense that it is.  Evolution has no purpose!

Before any of you despairs, I would like to point out one not-so-obvious consequence of evolution as designer: namely that our understanding of evolution does not directly affect the world as it is in any way!  That is, the world we inhabit, in which love, morality, purpose, truth, beauty exist, is not affected by the theory of evolution.  They still exist, just as they have always existed.  The only difference is that we are seen as the authors of love, morality, purpose, truth and beauty, not some non-existent God!

When we rid ourselves of childish, pre-scientific notions of God, we free ourselves to ask much more interesting questions, such as, "what evolutionary forces act on us and societies so as to affect our choices?"

Why I am finding it difficult to concentrate on computer programming

The evidence is overwhelming: on humanity's present course of inaction, world civilization has just *decades* left before it starts to unravel into famine and war caused by global climate change.  Civilization might hold on for another 5 or 6 decades; it might collapse in as little as 15 or 20 years.

For those of you who still don't get it, here is a comprehensive rebuttal of climate-denial cliches:
99 One-Liners Rebutting Denier Talking Points — With Links To The Full Climate Science
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/07/1972581/99-one-liners-rebutting-denier-talking-points-with-links-to-the-full-climate-science/

The catastrophic effects of climate change are not news, but the quickness of the impeding collapse was news to me just a few weeks ago. Here are some sources:

An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/14/1009121/science-of-global-warming-impacts-guide/

Climate wars, by Gwynne Dyer
http://www.amazon.com/Climate-Wars-Fight-Survival-Overheats/dp/1851688145

The Burning Question: We Can't Burn Half the World's Oil, Coal and Gas. So How Do We Quit?
http://www.amazon.com/The-Burning-Question-Cant-Worlds/dp/1781250456

TED Talk: Climate Change is Simple
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ktYbVwr90

Global Warming's Terrifying New Math
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719

It seems too late to hope for real governmental action to reduce CO2 emissions directly, though some government ministers are beginning to wake up.  Here's something encouraging from today's news: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22745578.  Otoh, President Obama is finding it hard even to kill the Keystone pipeline!  Hope for a carbon tax seems forlorn.

The last, faint, hope is to discover ways of removing *billions* of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere and the oceans. This isn't completely impossible, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal, but the world needs to be removing those billions of tons of CO2 *now*.  We are nowhere near doing that. At best, we have preliminary research, such as:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: P. furiosus turns CO2 directly into industrial chemical
http://edreamleo.blogspot.com/2013/05/proceeding-of-national-academy-of.html

You can also google "CO2 to fuel" to see other approaches.

My children are increasing likely to die from the direct and indirect effects of mass starvation, wars, civil unrest and the general breakdown of society that ensures. The odds that my own generation of 60-somethings die from those effects are also increasing at an alarming rate.  (Those who don't understand how such probabilistic statements could make sense might want to study Bayesian statistics. A good introduction from a recent pycon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bobeo5kFz1g)

In short, business-as-usual and life-as-usual seem pretty much irrelevant.

One part of the practice of mindfulness meditation is the development of the awareness of the "impermanence of all things".  One exercise asks us to imagine everything (and everyone) around us disappearing or dying. Imo, this is an excellent spiritual practice.  Alas, we can now see *how* everything will *actually* disappear.  Way before we are ready ;-) It's a truly terrifying prospect.  It is as if we were living in 1935, facing world war two without any hope of winning.

The only positive responses I can see to this situation are

A) telling as many people as possible about the impeding catastrophe in the hope that something might (finally!) be done and

B) attempting to maintain as much personal equilibrium as I can.

In fact, the famous zen story has always applied to everyone and everything:

A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger.

He fled, the tiger after him.

Coming to a precipice,

he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge.

The tiger sniffed at him from above.

Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him.

Only the vine sustained him.

Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away at the vine.

The man saw a luscious strawberry near him.

Grasping the vine with one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other.

How sweet it tasted!

From Darwin's Dangerous Idea: why we can believe scientific theories

The following quotation is from Darwin's Dangerous Idea, by Daniel C Dennett.  This quote applies to all strongly-confirmed scientific theories, including global warming.

"The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering.  It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story.  Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge. New discoveries may conceivably lead to dramatic, even 'revolutionary' shifts in the Darwinian theory, but the hope that it will be 'refuted' by some shattering breakthrough is about as reasonable as the hope that we will return to a geocentric vision and discard Copernicus." [Emphasis in the original]."

Denialist "arguments" are rubbish because they don't unravel any strands, let alone enough to let Gulliver get up.

Everything you need to know to refute climate denial trolls

 ClimateProgress contains a superb reference for rebutting 99 climate-denial trolls.

Each troll (skeptic argument) is followed by a one-line rebuttal, a paragraph rebuttal, and links to multi-page references containing nothing established science.

Read this page, keep calm, and you *will* win any argument with the trolls.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: P. furiosus turns CO2 directly into industrial chemical

UGA discovery may allow scientists to make fuel from CO2 in the atmosphere: http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/uga-discovery-may-allow-scientists-to-make-fuel-from-co2-in-the-atmosp/

Here is the abstract of the referenced article PNAS. I don't have a subscription:

Exploiting microbial hyperthermophilicity to produce an industrial chemical, using hydrogen and carbon dioxide: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5840.abstract?sid=7125bcb6-b8cb-41da-96f8-322cb6b641cc

Here is an earlier article from PNAS, in full:

Mechanism of oxygen detoxification by the surprisingly oxygen-tolerant hyperthermophilic archaeon, Pyrococcus furiosus: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/45/18547.full.pdf+html?sid=7125bcb6-b8cb-41da-96f8-322cb6b641cc

Global warming will destroy our world sooner, rather than later

Burning proven reserves of oil and gas will destroy the world:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719

Full details here:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Burning-Question-Cant-Worlds/dp/1781250456

Warming won't stop at 2C, or 6C or 8C

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7ktYbVwr90

One-liner rebuttals of denier bullshit, with links to the science:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/05/07/1972581/99-one-liners-rebutting-denier-talking-points-with-links-to-the-full-climate-science/

From a great blog:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/issue/

It's time, way past time, for action.