September 2007
“Seriously, everyone… don’t you think the list posts are getting a...”
– Marco.org. My next post will be called “3.14 things that annoy me”, and the top item will be list posts.
Underground ‘terrorists’ with a mission to save... →
Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city’s [Paris’s] neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their supporters, they are the white knights of modern culture, renovating...
Creationism out of the classroom →
The UK bans creationism in Science classes. Here in Norway, no one has even attempted to get ID into classrooms, so there is no need to ban it. Yet.
Depersonalization →
Depersonalization is an alteration in the perception or experience of the self so that one feels detached from, and as if one is an outside observer of, one’s mental processes or body. It can be desirable, such as in the use of recreational drugs, but it is usually referring to the severe form found in anxiety and in the most intense case, panic attacks. It is most often described as a...
Cyber Nations, an online nation simulation game →
Trying this out for a while. I tried NationStates a couple of years ago. It didn’t keep my interest. Perhaps this will.
“I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity,...”
– Baruch Spinoza.
Do your own thing →
Marco writes: Do your own thing. It’s great. I, of course, totally agree. It fits nicely with my view of people/motto/whatever, which is this: Everyone is more than the sum of the labels one can apply to them. Don’t try to be less.
How to create a language →
Everything you ever wanted to know.
Well, not really. But there’s always the ZBB.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger: Two Environmentalists... →
For angry heretics on the run, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger sure know how to enjoy themselves. Sitting in a cozy Berkeley restaurant just a few blocks from San Francisco Bay, exchanging tasting notes on the vermentino (“cold white wine is so good with fatty, fried food,” Shellenberger says), they recount with perverse pleasure, in tones almost as dry as the wine, how...
Discordianism →
Discordianism is a modern, chaos-centered religion founded circa 1958–1959 by Malaclypse the Younger with the publication of its principal text, the Principia Discordia. It is widely regarded as a parody religion, and has been called “Zen for roundeyes”, based on similarities with absurdist interpretations of the Rinzai school. Discordianism recognizes chaos, discord, and dissent as...
Coudal Partners' Layer Tennis →
Nice idea, well executed. I guess I’m not cool enough, because I’d never heard of Kevin Cornell before. He wins this, in my opinion; besides generally keeping a more coherent narrative, after Inman went way over time with volley 8, he shot back with the gorgeous volley 9. I’m definitely gonna have to follow the next matches.
Hat tip to Cubicle 17.
More Women Online →
According to this, contrary to popular belief, there are more women than men online (in the US, anyway). Note, though, that they define an internet user as “someone ages 3+ who accessed the Internet in the last 30 days from any location”. It doesn’t say anything about people who frequently go online.
The Museum of Online Museums →
As title says.
Wouter's programming language page →
I ponder programming language designs for fun and intellectual challenge, but I never seem to get them into a usable state. Then I come across this page. Damn. Let’s say I admire this guy’s ability to pull things off.
Mohammadreza Mirzaei Photography →
Mohammadreza Mirzaei has some nice, minimalistic pictures of silhouetted people.
Mohammadreza Mirzaei photographs with precision and dispassion. Setting up his camera at a distance, he sees and records anonymous people,
“humans”, making cameo appearances, alone or in groups, frozen
against backdrops of expansive and empty white skies.
Via quipsologies.
The seductive allure of neuroscience explanations →
Researchers found that sprinkling irrelevant neuroscience into explanations of psychological phenomena significantly increased people’s ratings of them, even when the explanations were wrong.
Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they
contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation
of a psychological...
Magnetic Vision? →
This is simply fascinating. I heard about it on NPR. While it is well known that birds are sensitive to the earth’s magnetic field, and use it to navigate, apparently it’s only been recently shown that this sensitivity is connected directly to the visual system (at least in some birds). The idea seems to be that the bird has evolved a mechanism for essentially seeing the magnetic field, presumably...
“In my experience, most tumblelogs don’t last more than a couple of weeks.”
– Christian Neukirchen on the Rails podcast.
The Burma Campaign UK Home Page →
Found through Miscellany from Past and Present.
MI5 | Spy Gadgets in World War II →
James Bond is famous for his many gadgets, like exploding pens, jetpacks and laser beam watches. Unfortunately, many of them are made up - real spies don’t use jetpacks, though they do use other gadgets. But what did they use before things like computers and lasers had been invented?
As it turns out, exploding chocolate.
The Poison NULL byte →
If you’re a web developer, don’t fall for it. As someone on reddit found out, Adobe did.
Why a person doesn't evolve in one lifetime - The... →
There’s no reason in principle that individual cells in multicelled creatures couldn’t evolve, just as whole organisms do, writes Nature. In practice, though, mutant cells that don’t do their jobs so well tend to replicate faster, and that’s, you know, bad. The only place this is good is in the immume system, since it needs to be able to handle new diseases. Unfortunately:...
Blue Eyes: The Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World →
(Solution).
An Invitation to Higher Dimensional Mathematics... →
Great. Now I just need to digest that, and then that Fields Medal will be mine. Well, maybe not, but I might’ve learned something. At least until the point where fancy notation took over. Via Anarchaia.
Run away the ray-gun is coming : We test US army's... →
Shudders. I don’t wanna see that over here.
Seed: Scientific Literacy and the Habit of... →
The First Prize Winner of the Second Annual Seed Science Writing Contest answers the question: What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st Century?
The User Experience of a Blog →
Astheria is a nice example of what minimalism can do (well, a little color wouldn’t hurt, but still).
This article examines blog conventions. I’m not sure I agree that you should always have your blog look like a, well, blog. I mean, it’s not like you start blogging because you want to have a blog, you do have something you’d like to share, right? I don’t think all...
“Duverger’s law is a principle which asserts that a plurality rule election...”
– Duverger’s law on Wikipedia.
Name that Color →
The color on “Daily Meh” and text post headings is calld “Don Juan”. Feel the vibe? Via Cameron.
So, I’ve been reading lots of responses to CD Baby abandoning Ruby/Rails for PHP. The question is: what’s the big deal? Whatever happened to “right tool for the right job, end of discussion?” There is only one brand of drama worse than soap operas, and that is internet drama.
National Punctuation Day →
Today is National Punctuation Day.
PINOLE, CA — National Punctuation Day, the holiday that reminds America that a “semicolon is not a surgical procedure,” celebrates its fourth anniversary September 24. But what started as a clever idea to remind corporations and professional people of the importance of proper punctuation has turned into an everyday mission to help school children learn the...
Germany tightens control of Wikipedia edits →
Germany will be the first country to wield tighter control of the user information posted on Wikipedia.
The German language version of the online encyclopaedia will restrict instant editing to allow “trusted editors” to look over the content before it appears online.
The changes will come into effect later this year, and could be applied to the English language version of Wikipedia...
MIPS-X →
The processor includes an instruction called hsc, which means halt and spontaneously combust. This is executed by the processor when a protection violation is detected. It is a privileged instruction available only on the -NSA versions of the processor(The MIPS-X project has been supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under contract).
It doesn’t only happen in crappy spy...
1GB, 20 years ago and now →
A comparison.
The Dollar in Decline →
What does next mean? →
Looks like I’m not the only one bothered by this. On some sites, “next” means “back in time” and on some it means “forward in time”, and the same goes for “previous”. This means extra effort for the person using your site or your program. It’s not much extra effort, but it’s a little. It builds over time. It gets annoying.
This is...
How to Do Philosophy, by Paul Graham →
Paul Graham takes it upon himself to show us all how to do philosophy. In a way, it’s refreshingly honest and ambitious; in another, it’s old news, sometimes even plain wrong.
What strikes me is the justification those who proclaim philosophy dead or useless use. They invariably arrive at this conclusion by philosophizing. So, Paul Graham’s philosophizing has made him realize...
2007 FIFA Women's World Cup →
You don’t hear much about the Women’s world cup. Norway is in the Semi finals, so I guess that’s one reason to care.
Inventions I wish existed, part I
I wish there were selective ear plugs. Not just ear plugs that can shield you from specific frequencies, but ones that you could program to follow a specific channel of sound, be it a conversation, the TV, a bird singing outside your window or the buzzing of an old fridge, and follow that channel, even if your fridge suddenly exploded or the TV jumped between frequencies like a kangaroo on illegal...
