February 2008
Something Like A Phonemenon →
An early attempt at creating a “perfect” ortography for English, from 1846. Needless to say, it failed on both technical and social grounds. The ortography was far from perfect, and the author’s “most sanguine expectation that it will meet the entire approbation of the public, and be speedily adopted” was never satisfied.
God’s Country →
Eliza Griswold in The Atlantic, on religious clashes in Nigeria:
Someone shouted arna—infidel”—at the Christians. Someone spat the word jihadi at the Muslims. Someone picked up a stone. “That was the day ethnicity disappeared entirely, and the conflict became just about religion,” Abdullahi said. Chaos broke out, as young people on each side began to throw rocks. The candidates ran for their...
Leap second →
2008 has a leap day, but did you know that 2005 had a leap second? So had a few other years. These are added to account for the fact that the Earth’s rotation continually slows down.
This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains... →
This is a pretty good deal for researchers, and an even better deal for Netflix. Good article, too.
The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What... →
Wired on the growing neurodiversity movement, and recent research that shows, among other things, that autistics probably have much higher intelligence than previously believed.
The Medicated Americans: Antidepressant... →
Charlie Barber writes for Scientific American about depression, and the conflation of depression (feeling down, a little sad, not quite yourself) and Depression (major depressive disorder, rendering a person constantly sad yet so apathetic that they often can’t even muster the energy to kill themselves).
It is as if from the early 1990s on (nicely coinciding with the mass penetration of...
The Graphing Calculator Story →
A classic. I still don’t know exactly what I’ll end up working with, but I do know how I want to do it: like this. Because I care. (Not that sixteen hour days sounds very attractive. I was more thinking of the “because I care” part)
Bottles of Water →
I must be the last person in the universe to link to Stuff White People Like, but what the hell. Behind the satire, they make a good point, which is that there’s no good reason not to drink tap water. Especially when you have some of the world’s cleanest water readily available, like we have in Norway.
This rocks
Tumblr has updated again. And it rocks, again. If you want to go exploring, consider this post a SPOILER. Highlights:
Radar’s back, now not the latest posts, as the earlier version did, but some more editorial control, at least partially based on stuff like reblogs.
Dates! Not romantic ones, but date pages, like this. See the theme page. Also, there is now a {block:Pagination} block.
...
cubicle17 turns one! →
Congrats! This sounds awfully familiar:
So far in my lifetime, I’ve had approximately 8,000 blogs, all with success rates that approach 0. That changed (although, only slightly) one year ago today, when I signed up for the 2488th Tumblr account and made my first post.
Incidentally, it’s almost exactly half a year since Daily Meh started up.
“What a casual developer needs to know about cryptography is, never implement it.”
– Thomas Ptacek. I.e., it’s so damn hard to get right you should use it but never implement it yourself.
Chocolate Con Leche Tumblr Theme →
Late to the party, but that does look rather nice. Good work, Vidar.
Murphy's Law Strikes Again: AS7007 →
It was an average day in 1997. The Internet, fledging compared to today’s
standards. Internet operators (mostly!) trusted one another. SMTP servers
would be open relays; a number of open web proxies and anonymous dialout
servers were available. People were worried about running out of IP space.
Network Operators were worried about the CPU on their routers being
taxed dealing with a full...
79 Years of Best Picture Winners in Posters →
Of these, the best is IMO the Godfather poster. Most of them are remarkable, though some (like the Forrest Gump poster) feel perfect once you’ve seen the film. But really, the poster is supposed to represent the movie in a remarkable way without depending on its audience having seen it. (via AZSpot)
The Ebb and Flow of Movies: Box Office Receipts... →
Now that’s an awesome graphic. Mouseover to get names not marked with a point on the graph by default.
Hans Reiser: Once a Linux Visionary, Now Accused... →
Hans Reiser, the main man behind the ReiserFS filesystem, is on trial for killing his ex-wife, and he’s using geekiness as a defense. Read this Wired piece on the case from last Summer, then read this Washington Post article on the trial from yesterday.
Reiser is relying on geekiness and Asperger’s Syndrome to explain why he “didn’t understand” that the extremely...
Liveblogging the Oscars →
Kottke’s spoof commentary is as meaningful as any idiot who thinks “hey I’m gonna be a new media reporter and liveblog the Oscars omg!” is cool’s:
8:34p: I’m told that the ceremony has started.
8:55p: What else is on right now: The Mummy on Encore, Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Fox Movie Channel, Miller’s Crossing on Encore Action, The Departed on...
The Case of John/Joan →
From The Rolling Stone, 1997:
In 1967, an anonymous baby boy was turned into a girl by doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital. For 25 years, the case of John/Joan was called a medical triumph — proof that a child’s gender identity could be changed — and thousands of “sex reassignments” were performed based on this example. But the case was a failure, the truth never reported. Now the man who grew up as...
Echocrome Trailer →
Trailer for what looks like a delightful upcoming PS3 game. As one redditor said it, “it’s like playing a damn Escher painting.” That’s just plain awesome. It’s also a triumph of gameplay over graphics. I wonder why they couldn’t just release it for Wii—the wiimote looks perfect for the perspective-turning controls, and it doesn’t look all that...
The Dyatlov Pass Mystery →
Now that’s creepy.
The case of the ex-girls →
Unsatisfyingly short article, but it’s the best I could find online. Guevedoce is the nickname given to a strange genetic anomaly especially common in the Dominican Republic, where it affects about 2% of children. It literally means something like “penis at 12”. The children are genetically male, but due to a genetic anomaly, look like girls at birth and up until puberty. Thus...
Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career) →
Chez Pazienza:
When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, “We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees.”
Jesus, we have a Gestapo?
A few minutes later, I was off the phone and out of a job. No severance. No warning (which...
lowercase L →
Ever notice hand-written signs with letters in all-caps, except for the letter L? It looks like an uppercase i … WHY DO PEOPlE WRITE lIKE THIS?
I was going to comment that it had become cool to complain about bad punctuation after The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks took off, but these two blogs were actually both started in July 2005, only two days apart.
...
The Perry Bible Fellowship enters semi-retirement →
When I heard PBF was ending I thought about how a more hardcore version of me would climb a nearby mountain and stand there screaming “Nooooooooo” as loud as a human voice allows. But then it turns out that PBF isn’t actually ending:
“It’s really not as big a deal as it might seem,” Nicholas [Gurewitch, PBF creator] said today. “I’ll simply be...
Paleo-Future →
A look into the future that never was.
Brilliant.
The Sandwich Boundary theory →
Yay, economics that makes sense.
The Sad Tally →
Infographic on suicide at the Golden Gate bridge. Which reminds me, I want to see The Bridge sometime.
Statistics
I remember I wrote a script some time ago to analyze outbound links from a tumblelog using the Tumblr API to see if I could spot a pattern; it was one of those Japanese tumblelogs that update a billion times a day. I was wondering if it was spam. The data were inconclusive (bummer!), but it later dawned on me that the concept could be extended to provide some more general statistics on a...
Czech police wonder where bridge has gone →
There’s a bridge-thieving mafia loose (or perhaps there are several). A 4 ton railway bridge was stolen from the Czech border town Cheb, a historic 300-year-old-bridge is being fitted with an anti-bridge-theft device, a a 200-ton steel bridge was stolen in Russia, and then there was the two Macedonian masterminds who stole two bridges. Something must be wrong in the world when a reporter...
Obsolete Skills Wiki →
Ah, the nostalgia. Adjusting The Tracking On AVCR. Handwriting (lulz). Installing Linux From Floppy Disks. Long Division. Popping Corn In A Pot With Oil. Thinking For Oneself [and English Capitalization Rules, I think]. VCR Programming. And people are arguing about the cause of failing NES cartridges.
This thing is lovely. Nostalgic, bitter, bittersweet (not all of these are really obsolete, of...
Overload
Alright, I love xkcd as much as anyone, but if it gets constantly posted everywhere, it’ll lose its appeal. Therefore, in service of the public (obviously), I’ve compiled the best of xkcd, in the hope that an epic overload will make me and anyone else who might feel tempted to post an xkcd comic in the future think twice. After all, chances are we’ve seen it . At least after...
More details on the redesign →
Jeff Croft on his recent redesign (which is quite nice, if (as he himself points out) a little low-contrast), and why he doesn’t use Tumblr for his tumblelog:
Tumblr is awesome. I really, really like it. I’d recommend it to almost anyone. However, it isn’t quite robust enough for my needs. There are three main things I consider essential to this site that tumblr just can’t do:
Comments:...
Patterns - Migraine →
Oliver Sacks reflects on migraine patterns, or “visual migraine”:
I have had migraines for most of my life; the first attack I remember occurred when I was 3 or 4 years old. I was playing in the garden when a brilliant, shimmering light appeared to my left — dazzlingly bright, almost as bright as the sun. It expanded, becoming an enormous shimmering semicircle stretching from the...
The Limits of Quantum Computers →
Scott Aaronson’s draft for a recently published Scientific American article.
Music Video for MGMT's "Time to Pretend" →
The embodiment of the “WTF?! But the music was nice” genre of music videos, via the recently started music tumblelog tuneage. This is the hi(gher)-res version; the video is also available on YouTube.
Antikythera mechanism →
The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical calculator (also described as the first “mechanical computer”) designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, in 1900. Subsequent investigation, particularly in 2006, dated it to about 150-100 BC, and hypothesised that it was on...
“If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is...”
– Jack Handy (thanks to these #tumblrs for introducing me to the deep thoughts).
Kosovo Declares Its Independence From Serbia →
As expected, Kosovo is now independent, with US and EU backing, but with the opposition of Serbia and Russia. Moscow, of course, is in it for the money and because it’s looking to gain any edge against the west it can. Meanwhile, there’s tension in the Serbian governing institutions as the pro-Western, pro-EU President Boris Tadic’s attempts to get Serbia on the track to EU...
Jonathon Keats →
In 2002 Keats held a petition drive to pass the Law of Identity, A=A, a law of logic, as statutory law in Berkeley, California. Specifically, the proposed law stated that, “every entity shall be identical to itself”. Any entity caught being unidentical to itself was to be subject to a fine of up to one tenth of a cent.
Keats copyrighted his mind in 2003, claiming that it was a...
Top 5 Ways to Hack the Surface of the Earth →
I usually don’t like this kind of list, but this is just too cool. (via Anarchaia)
