October 2007
GUIs
Cameron Hunt and Marco Arment don’t like cross-platform graphical user interfaces, because they work, well, the same cross-platform.
While I applaud the effort to get into the heart of matters without pussyfooting around (“I don’t like cross-platform GUIs because of their cross-platform-ness”), I have no idea why they would say so. Especially, as people who have ever...
Theocacao: Satisfying UI Design is Often Illogical →
Speaking of which, the use of Courier on the frontpage of The Cacao is an example of unsatisfying UI design. (via).
Police: Boy playing with matches started... →
I want to ask, why the hell didn’t he come forth at first, but at the same time, it’s painfully obvious.
Ranter →
The Ranters were a radical English sect in the time of the Commonwealth, who were regarded as heretical by the established Church of that period. Their central idea was pantheistic, that God is essentially in every creature; this led them to deny the authority of the Church, of scripture, of the current ministry and of services, instead calling on men to hearken to Jesus within them. Many Ranters...
“The cinema is little more than a fad. It’s canned drama. What audiences really...”
– Charlie Chaplin.
Anonymous edits to English Wikipedia (almost) in... →
Very cool.
The Universe of Discourse : Undefined behavior in... →
The Universe of Discourse rocks.
“The Texas State Library and Archives Commission is declaring there are too many...”
– State report says Texas has too many reports.
Top 87 Bad Predictions about the Future →
Great. I think I’ll be throwing around these for days. Well, privately, anyway.
(Via Anarchaia.)
New Definition for Myocardial Infarction (Heart... →
The number of patients who are diagnosed with heart attack will increase by at least 25% under this new definition, according to some estimates. Officially, the incidence of heart attacks will rise. Therefore, in a year or two expect breathless news stories about the alarming new “epidemic” of heart attacks. Any time we get better at making earlier diagnoses of any disease - whether...
Spam
I just got an email from someone I didn’t know, looking very much like spam, saying “This isn’t meant as spam.” I had to look. It turned out to be a link (and summaries) of a podcast I just might find interesting.
I may have just received the first useful spam ever. Someone pinch my arm.
Urban Dirty: Free texture stock photography →
Urban Dirty is a regularly updated online photo library featuring 243 gritty, grimy and sometimes slimy images for use in design and artwork creation.
In other words: more grunge than you’ll ever need.
Semantics
Semantically, a chronological list of blog posts is an ordered list—perfect for the <ol> tag. So, why aren’t the semantic web enthusiasts using it on their blogs?
“A lot of people feel like we’re pretty much irrelevant, and that they know...”
– New York Times senior software architect (phew! what a job title) Jacob Harris.
The Blum Blum Shub Algorithm →
A pseudorandom number generator, invented by—you guessed it—(Lenore) Blum, (Manuel) Blum and (Michael) Shub.
A Crash Course in the Mathematics Of Infinite Sets →
Great exposition, interesting subject matter.
“Calvin: A painting. Moving. Spiritually enriching. Sublime. “High”...”
– From (naturally) Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Waterson. The strip is probably online somewhere.
Rare Bill Watterson Art →
Including some of what he made before Calvin & Hobbes.
Google Experimental Search →
Google experiments with alternate views of search results, sometimes with amusing results.
“I’m officially fed up with people who use nonsensical “screen...”
– Obeastiality.
But is that really so? Most sites I use that require you to have a username, require it to be unique. Most also don’t allow you to choose a screen name that differs from your username. And as for the tumblr followers thing, the name that shows up is the url you’ve chosen...
Thought
Are there any countries other than USA whose inhabitans have stolen the term for an inhabitan of an entire continent? In the US’s case, they’ve stolen the term for something often divided into two continents, South and North America, calling themselves simply Americans. You don’t hear Norwegians call themselves Europeans when you ask what country they come from; you don’t...
12 [Sarcastic] Reasons Why Gay Marriage Shouldn't... →
These work pretty well if you’re not American, too. Via zetahydrae.
“How long are we to continue a search before we have a right to give up the...”
– — William Dembski, in Intelligent Design (disclaimer: according to a secondhand source.)
What is extraordinary is that this is essentially an argument for strong atheism, articulated in a book arguing for intelligent design. I wonder if Dembski’s supporters know he feels this way? Or perhaps...
This is How You Pronounce Ubuntu →
I just read the entire comment thread. A bunch of people who care enough to argue about the pronunciation of technical jargon online, and only one of them cares to use a phonetic alphabet like IPA or X-SAMPA?
Hint to internet language nerds: When you say, “Lih-nuchs” or “DEH-bee-en” or “LIN-ux” it is not clear how you’d pronounce that, when the...
Review: Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science →
Helpful in connection with recent results.
“Ethics is the normative science of conduct of human beings living in society.”
– Says aatw. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), there’s no such thing as a normative science. Ethics, certainly, is not scientific. If held to a scientific standard, any ethical maxim fails, because they are simply not scientific facts, if they are facts at all (I don’t think so).
White Is the New White →
From A Brief Message.
Floating Utopias -- In These Times →
China Mieville writes about the utopian ideas of seasteading, and laments the demise of utopian thinking for its own sake:
Floating cities are dreamed of because how cool is that?—an entirely legitimate, admirable reason. The archives of seasteading are irresistible reading, the best of the utopias are awesome, and floating-city imaginings are in themselves a delightful mental game. The problem...
“At the time of the French Revolution of 1789, only about half of the population...”
– Lingua Franca. (hat tip)
The 10 Most Terrifyingly Inspirational '80s Songs →
This surely needs no further comment.
Historian: World was created 6010 years ago →
Ussher “One of history’s most famous and well-respected historians”?
Ha ha ha.
Future to Newspapers: Jump in the river →
The idea seems to be: for news not to be olds, it needs to be as close to live as possible. Therefore, within a year, all newspapers will have “Newsrivers”, which are some kind of unspecified technology that is somehow part of the “live web” and not the “static web”.
I don’t know about you, but I feel like this is old news, or olds, as the article calls...
“The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clockface maintained since 1947 by the Board of...”
– Doomsday Clock.
SCRAPBOOK :: Firefox Extension →
A Firefox extension that allows you to save web pages. Sounds so simple, but it isn’t. I haven’t yet tried it, but from looking at the features, this has a lot of potential: by saving the whole DOM, including links and images to some arbitrary level, the days when I could go to an old web page just to find that it’s gone, relocated, changed, hid behind a subscription wall, taken...
Google Translate: sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy →
If you enter “sarkozy sarkozy sarkozy” without quotes and try to translate it from French to English, it comes out as “Blair defends Bush”. With quotes, it becomes “Bush defends Bush”.
Whatever would I do if I didn’t have reddit to tell me these things?
Urban Legends Reference Pages: The Golden Compass →
This is hilarious. Instead of actually going out, getting the books and reading them, people go to Snopes. Oh well.
Of course, the conspiracy theory is not true. If people took the time to read the books, they would see that they’re not about what they think it’s about. I guess thinking about deeper layers of meaning is too complicated for some people.
Anyway, His Dark Materials...
The Internet? Bah!/ Hype Alert: Why Cyberspace... →
From 1995. Rarely do I have such mixed feelings about an article. This one is simultaneously totally right and hopelessly wrong in hindsight. It points out all the right things, and many of them still hold—yet the internet revolution happened anyway.
(Via Anarchaia.)
An Apology
When I named this ‘log Daily Meh, I had no idea how many blogs there were with names of the form “Daily *”. I swear.
Platonism in Metaphysics (Stanford Encyclopedia of... →
Alright, I’ve read every argument listed at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for and against metaphysical platonism, and I remain unconvinced. Apparently, this is the minority view.
“I habitually click and drag to highlight text while reading web pages. The NYT...”
– New York Times Kill Doubleclick Dictionary. Browing NYTimes.com is now sane.
Bob Jones University Dress Code →
Making normal fundies look positively progressive since 1927.