November 2007
543
That’s how many posts I’ve made in the life of this tumblelog. Perhaps it’s a tad too many.
I’m taking a short break. Emphasis on short and break: I’m not quitting, and I’m going to be back in, probably, less than a week. No need to remove me from your feed readers and tumblr panels as dead weight just yet. I have updated every day for three months, after all;...
[Python-Dev] Proper tail recursion →
I just read Guido’s justification for not optimizing tail recursion in Python. It’s laughably weak:
I’m not interested in adding this to the official Python release.
One reason is that if an exception happens in such a tail-recursive
call, the stack trace will be confusing.
Another reason is that I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to
encourage a Scheme-ish...
psDooM: DooM for Sys A's →
What a neat idea. This is a graphical interface to the ps, renice and kill commands on *nix systems based on the Doom engine. So, you can go around killing processes by shooting them (i.e., monsters representing them) down, and giving them lower priority by wounding them.
website needs traffic? an empirical study of the... →
Alexis Ohanian of reddit gives some sound advice to web startups.
“I have a meta-theory of design that says that if you don’t offer a...”
– Kent Pitman.
Greenpeace - Making Waves: Mister Splashy Pants... →
Because of the huge interest in the competition, we will now hold the competition open for 1 additional week, it will now end the 7th of December. Who will win, Mr Splashy Pants or another name?
The story: Greenpeace adopts a whale. Decides to hold a naming competition. Sets up a poll with dozens of serious names and one funny one. Reddit and BongBoing discover it and mass-vote. Now,...
FollowOnTumblr
Memes make the world go ‘round. These are the ones I currently follow:
marco,
szymon,
cubicle17,
topherchris,
ofvarieddelights,
toldorknown,
nickdouglas,
sillywalks,
nikography,
rale,
travors,
brocatus,
nostrich,
cameronio,
revista,
montoya,
inky,
hospitalville,
thedaytheytriedtokillme,
zetahydrae,
awakeasleep and
phantasmagorical.
Now, what I wonder is this: is it worth putting this...
The Annotated Turing by Charles Petzold →
A Guided Tour through Alan Turing’s Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine, Coming May 19, 2008!
Posting in the hope that I will remember it in May.
NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt →
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is an enormous quilt made as a memorial to and celebration of the lives of people who have died of AIDS-related causes.
Iceland best place to live, Africa worst →
I officially live in the world’s next best country to live in. Somehow, that doesn’t sound as good as “the best country in the world”. Via Montoya.
Seven hottest web 1.0 techniques to trick out your... →
Hehe.
Imagining the Tenth Dimension →
I keep seeing this link around, and it pisses me off to no end. This guy has imagined himself a whole cosmology, had some spiffy animations made for it, written a book on it, and mixed in some fancy references to quantum mechanics and string theory, and people are falling for it like flies.
It’s utter bullshit. Not only is it not science. It’s theology. And like most theology, it...
Lots of helpful links for webdesigners →
297, to be exact.
Painting 2.0 →
Zetahydrae:
I just stumbled upon one of the most l33t things I’ve seen in a while. This paintbrush picks up and captures photons, allowing it to copy the surface of the object it just brushed. So, if you brushed across someone’s eye, then you’d paint blinking eyes. An apple? A dark shade of red. In summary, it’s a magic paintbrush.
Awesome.
Rejecta Mathematica →
A new, open access, online journal that publishes only papers rejected from peer-reviewed journals in the mathematical sciences.
Errare humanum est, eh?
100 Notable Books of the Year - 2007 - New York... →
Via phantasmagorical.
The Big Sleep →
At NY Times.
Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut...
Learn the language that can thwart evil! →
A DS language-learning game with a…somewhat imaginative story.
Colors! and Inchworm: digital painting... →
Still no use if you don’t know how to do homebrew DS cartridges.
Famous Uncracked Codes →
Dunno if these are the most famous, but they’re certainly interesting.
CIA World Factbook →
Why didn’t I discover this wonderful resource before?
The Reality Club: TAKING SCIENCE ON FAITH →
If you encounter this ridiculous op-ed, you owe it to yourself to read some answers by some scientists.
Mystery of German exploding toads →
Nostrich links to autothysis. Here’s an example.
North America, the Balkans Version →
At stange maps, from Matthew White’s Surreal Histories. I originally had the image here, but Tumblr’s image resizing completely ruined it. I crave seam carving!
Age-old question pushes scientists to step beyond... →
(Via).
We talk to young people who have been involved in... →
The Guardian interviewed some youth who’ve been or are involved in gangs. Lots of insightful stuff there—you should go read it. Here’s some:
Disrespecting someone is major these days. When I was growing up, if you disrespect a man you’re going to have to rock him one on one with your hands. Now it’s about shooting. More young people have got guns and they think...
Parting words for dear friends →
A Microsoft developer gives some basic programming advice before leaving.
Revista: No point in this →
Nils quits. He writes:
I’m thinking of deleting Revista. Or at least the content. Or maybe just most of it.
At least, I’m giving up on tumbling for now.
I keep marking most of the tumblelogs I’m subscribed to as “read”. I keep seeing the same crap over and over. The same crap I already read at the original sources most of the time at that.
He makes some interesting point, although I...
Luis Posada Carriles →
This is fucking incredible. In its relentless “war on terrorism”, the US has Luis Posada Carriles, popularly known as Bambi, a Venezuelan terrorist known to have participated (among other things) in the 1976 bombing of a cuban airliner that killed 73 people and suspected of having to do with a 1997 bombing on Cuba, walking the streets. Although convicted in absentia for terrorism, the...
Report on the Symposium: Role of Setting →
By Daniel Abraham.
If a story is set in the world that the reader is familiar with — either by walking out into it every morning or vicariously through our shared knowledge of history and consumption of media — the writer has a very powerful technique available to bring the readers into the setting. You just say it. Watch this:
1930s Berlin. I expect some of you to be unconvinced at this...
Banach–Tarski paradox →
A ball can be decomposed into a finite number of point sets and reassembled into two balls identical to the original.
That is extremely counterintuitive. So is Tarski’s circle-squaring challenge:
Tarski’s circle-squaring problem is the challenge, posed by Alfred Tarski in 1925, to take a circle (including its interior) in the plane, cut it into finitely many pieces, and reassemble...
The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege →
About the implementation of a continuous (no loading) multiplayer RPG game.
The LOLCODE forum... →
Has 1366 members! If there’s a valid use for OMFGWTF, it’s now.
“Bourne Shell Server Pages are ordinary ASCII text files, with the special...”
– Bourne Shell Server Pages.
Some Questions About Moral Paradoxes →
First part of a series that continues here (part 2), here (part 3), here (part 4) and here (part 5).
The Simple Truth →
An “essay” (really, a dialog) intended to restore a naive view of truth.
The 10 people you'll find in any gym →
It’s a list, but it’s not a consume-later list.
An Intuitive Guide To Exponential Functions & E →
I’ll have to look through the articles of the blog tomorrow.
Does perfect code exist? (Abstractions, Part 1) →
Also:
(This is the first of a multi-part series of essays on abstractions that I have planned. The next essay which I plan to write will be entitled “Layer surfing, or jumping between layers”, and will be coming soon to a blog near you….)
Now that is something I look forward to.
EU warns Kosovo on independence →
In Saturday’s Kosovan elections, only three out of 46 000 Serbs in northern Kosovo voted. That’s quite some turnout.
Enough With The Lists →
This is internet wisdom, right there. Wisdom of the ones (as opposed to “of the crowds”), even.
And so, I’m left with this big list of lists (or links to lists) that serves more as a sort of security blanket than as some valued information source. Just as Americans keep piling on stuff and putting it into storage (the storage business is booming these days), we just keep...