Links for the week of Jul 16th

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  • Wal-Mart To Become Green Umpire – Wal-Mart arguably has more control over and insight into its supply chain than any other company on earth. The information they need in order to be able to force their suppliers to produce the goods as cheaply as humanly possible overlaps substantially with the information required to provide transparent information about the environmental impacts of those same products. Wal-Mart says they want to use this power for good… for telling, in condensed form, the sustainability back-story for their products. But will they tell the truth? Will it be transparent? Will it be verifiable? And even if it is… will their customers care? Might it change their customer base?
  • Howtoons – A series of comics which both tell stories, and inspire kids to build their own toys and tools. Wonderful hacker propaganda.
  • Where's the Real Bottleneck in Scientific Computing? – A story about a computer scientist talking to physicists who have hundreds of thousands of lines of code, and don't know what version control or unit testing is. Hmm. I guess I don't really know what unit testing is either.
  • Software Carpentry – A Python based tutorial for scientists and engineers who need to learn how to (actually) program. How could it have taken this long to appear?

Published by

Zane Selvans

A former space explorer, now marooned on a beautiful, dying world.

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