October 2008
Tumblr Themes →
I’ll be taking care of Tumblr Themes from now on. Richard doesn’t have the time and inclination, but his repository will live on. I’m not planning on making any drastic changes — I’ll just keep it updated.
Knuth: The Bank of San Serriffe →
To a geek, having Don Knuth admit you’ve found an error in one of his books is kind of like a Christian having Jesus admit they’ve taught him a lesson on the interpretation of scripture (or something). He’s been writing out checks in hexadecimal dollars (0x100 cent, or $2.56 dollars) to people who find errors in his books for forty years. Now he’s been forced to stop,...
The Generic City →
In Dutch architech Rem Koolhaas’s mind, modern cities tend toward The Generic City. The Generic City emerges unplanned; it is soulless, devoid of life and individuality. It is “a city without qualities”. It “will work — that’s all”. There is no urbanism, or so he says, there is only ideology. Peter Lindberg summarizes:The Generic City is a fractal,...
"We are all esotericists and fetishists" →
Things Magazine complains: “we are all esotericists and fetishists… There is no arcana any more, at least not online. Attending unusual trade shows will become a new leisure activity, as perverse fascinations and hobbies spill out of the world wide web in search of a physical manifestation.” I’ve got to admit, I’m a sucker for esoterica. The intricate, the mysterious,...
What word is missing in this story? →
An important and over-used one.
The Einstein-Freud Correspondence →
Speaking of intelligence: here’s Einstein and Freud’s correspondence on war — its causes and how to stop it. Also, unrelated to Einstein and Freud, but related to intelligence: Tomorow Museum asks where the renaissance women are. Why aren’t women writing “big idea” books?
Some observations regarding intelligence
Boy, that sure sounds like an Enlightenment treatise, but it’s no attempt to write that, I assure you. Sometimes you need to state the obvious. Sometimes the obvious isn’t so obvious after all.
Being poor does not mean being stupid, and being rich does not mean being smart. The rich are not always smart and the smart are not always rich. (The poor aren’t poor because...
Rethinking the Fall of Easter Island →
Fascinating. Terry Hunt:
Jared Diamond, a geographer and physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used Rapa Nui [Easter Island] as a parable of the dangers of environmental destruction. “In just a few centuries,” he wrote in a 1995 article for Discover magazine, “the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to...
Plastic Life →
Life isn’t so grand for small plastic figures. (via.)
First Person Plural →
An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self “bind” another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy...
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks...”
– Thomas Edison.
Ground Zero 1945: Drawings by Atomic Bomb... →
Tomiko Konishi was a young girl the day the atomic bomb hit Hiroshima. Years later, at age 58, she drew a series of images to relate her experience. Her drawings—with text translated to English—follow.
Monsters in mid-1870s Japanese news prints →
(via C-monster.)
CameraBag flickr group →
Sometimes, the effect is wonderful. Other times a blurry, low-res image is just that.
Franz Kafka, “Poseidon” →
Short and sweet.
Recent reading, online
Reading short fiction and reading fiction on screen are two things I’ve been slowly adapting to over the last year or so. I’m sure having a short story in one tab among a dozen others isn’t exactly the ideal situation for reading fiction, but it’s not without its virtues. Turns out the right names, a little Google-fu and patience can find you a lot of good short fiction,...
How Muslims Made Europe →
Recounts the history of Muslim rule in Iberia, and its impact on European identity. This stuff is interesting. (via.)
Worlds: Controlling the Scope of Side Effects →
Alessandro Warth and Alan Kay introduce a new language construct to javascript: worlds.
This paper explores the idea of “tabs for programming languages”, which we call worlds.
A world is sort of like a transaction, sort of like a namespace. You sprout a new world from the current world, and then you perform your changes — copy-on-write — and then you choose whether to commit your...
“The socially contingent features of one’s situation—one’s racial heritage,...”
– The Call of the Tribe, by Glenn C. Loury.
Yan Tan Tethera →
English and Scottish shepherds used a special numeral system for counting sheep, derived from a Celtic language.
Different number systems for different contexts occurs in other languages as well. For example, in some Phillipine languages, there are native numerals into the thousands which are used in regular discourse, but in the context of money and time, Spanish numbers are used.
And while...
Don't Write Like an Idiot →
See also Bob’s Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, Basic and Advanced You’re, It’s not Its, alt.possesive.its.has.no.apostrophe and d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y. This has been an educational broadcast. Tune in next time. (Let’s hope Muphry’s Law is nowhere to be found.)
Tonight I'm gonna party like it's 1899 →
You can define steampunk as visions of the future that never was, as seen through the technology of the Victorian era, when things were made of pistons and steam rather than silicon and transistors,” says Slater, who is dressed in a ruffled white shirt, pegged trousers and spats. “It’s an aesthetic, a geek culture, a craft culture.”
The Guardian takes on steampunk,...
Why I Blog →
Andrew Sullivan’s love letter to blogging. (Fimoculous says this “will probably be the most quoted thing on the internet for the next few days.”)
He offers some new ideas: the blogging form is more accountable than newspapers, “because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness”. But “the triumphalist notion...
Neat lil' css trick
a[href$=".pdf"]::after {
content: " (pdf)";
}
PDFs tend to be large and unwieldy, and they like crashing browsers. Many people like to be warned that a pdf is lurking behind some innocent link. Here’s one little trick that appends a warning to every link that ends in .pdf, via CSS. Spotted here.
If your readers are using a decent browser, it’ll even work!
“What I would like to do is to take very bright kids, and give them fundamental...”
– Gregory Chaitin on how he would revise math education.
Late Bloomers →
“Why do we equate genius with precocity?”, asks Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker. A while back Jason Kottke posted about David Galenson’s theories about early peakers versus late bloomers. Via that post, we find this article, which describes how Gladwell’s initial article on the topic was rejected:When Mr. Gladwell submitted an article about Mr. Galenson’s ideas to The...
What is your Myers-Briggs personality type? →
Which one is it that believes Jungian typology is pseudoscientific bullshit? ‘Cos that’s the one I am. (via talby.)
“If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal...”
– Edgar Allan Poe, Marginalia.
“It’s hard not to find Borges amusing … he was just so odd. Manguel...”
– When Is It Okay to Read About an Author’s Private Life?
Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu, The Prime Number... →
With sound effects. (via.)
Weird Tapes: Get Religion EP →
Free and good. Must be your lucky day.
WikiVS →
A wiki of comparisons.
The Atlantic's New Look →
The Atlantic has redesigned its website, and apparently the print magazine, too. The website got ten times uglier, and if that is truly the cover for the November issue, I feel sorry for them. It’s horrible. Why they insist on repackaging their good content — which lived perfectly well in the old packaging — in this kind of sub-par design is beyond me.
I’ve got to hand it...
Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs →
Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen. The computer had found a way to get out of the game. When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory – just like in the movie.
An enjoyable read.
Thinkism →
Kevin Kelly (via inky):
No amount of thinkism will discover how the cell ages, or how telomeres fall off. No intelligence, no matter how super duper, can figure out how human body works simply by reading all the known scientific literature in the world and then contemplating it. No super AI can simply think about all the current and past nuclear fission experiments and then come up with working...