March 2008
The chimp who thought he was a boy →
Sad, really. This is what happens when you willingly fuck with sentient beings’ heads, be they chimps or humans.
mickeyrosa.com →
The blog of John Chang, who managed (manages?) the MIT blackjack team whose adventures beating casinos are portrayed in the upcoming (or already in cinemas, depending on where in the world you are) movie 21. In his own words:
My name is John Chang. I am the basis for Ben Mezrich’s characters Mickey Rosa (from Bringing Down the House) and Victor Cassius (from Busting Vegas). Kevin Spacey plays...
Demiurge →
Demiurge the Latinized form of Gk. demiourgos (δημιουργός), lit. “public or skilled worker” (from demos “common people” + ergos “work”) and hence a “maker”, “artisan” or “craftsman”. In later philosophical and religious language it became a term for a creator deity, responsible for the creation of the physical universe.
The...
RFC 882 DOMAIN NAMES - CONCEPTS and FACILITIES →
Reading about DNS, I stumbled onto this. It’s the first part of the original proposal for DNS (the second is RFC 883). As well as being an interesting bit of history, it’s also funny to see how usage changes:
As applications grow to span multiple hosts, then networks, and finally internets, …
The eighties gave us not only Rick Astley, but also the internets. Back then...
Fold-Ins, Past and Present →
Al Jaffee’s fold-ins for Mad magazine, from the 1960s to the present, in interactive form.
Awesome.
“Norbert Wiener begins his autobiography with the words “I was a child...”
– The late Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem describes himself as a child.
Daylight saving time around the world →
Today’s the day the clock suddenly jumps forward. A couple of hours ago, in fact. Here’s an amusing example of bureaucracy:
In Norway, DST (locally known by the expression “summer-time”) was introduced in 1916, 1940-45, and 1959-65. The arrangement was highly controversial, and in 1965 parliament (Stortinget) decided that enough was enough, and discontinued the practice. In...
Asaph Microblog →
What looks to be a super-lightweight tumblelog engine that doesn’t try too hard — in fact, looking at the screencast, it positively doesn’t try at all. And succeeds.
I’ll have to try this out. Not as a replacement for Tumblr, mind you, but just for kicks, and for possible use in future projects (via anarchaia — happy 3 year birthday to my favorite tumblelog, btw).
FkConflict →
I spent (read: wasted) over an hour on this risk-alike today. It’s only 4092 bytes of Java bytecode, submitted for the Java 4K contest. That somewhat diminishes my pride over conquering its AI, I must admit. But it was fun!
“What I love is passion. One of my fascinations is trade magazines. I love...”
– China Miéville, in The Believer. In case I hadn’t mentioned it once or thrice here already, I feel the same way.
Apropos, I’m reading Miéville’s The Scar at the moment, if you care. It’s good so far. Oh, and when he proclaims that “I very much like arcane words and...
Life Goes On In Tehran - A Monthly Photoblog →
Mission Statement: To show that regardless of what any president would have you imagine, despite what any media outlet would have you believe, life goes on in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran.
How foreign it really is hits you when you get this kind of image caption (for this picture):
In case you still think Iranian women are dressed in burkas like Afghan women during the Taliban, think again. The...
Mexico's Emo Witch Hunt: mob attacks in Mexico... →
Wow, just wow. Seriously?
Sign Up Forms Must Die →
Thus spoke A List Apart, anyway.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in... →
A classic, by Nobel Laureate in physics, Eugene Wigner. It’s — at least to this reader — in passages dense, and the examples he uses include quantum mechanics, which is hardly accessible to the general reader (such as me).
His point, though, is fairly accessible: it’s surprising, at least so surprising that we ought to be able to give an explanation for it, that...
The situation with reddit is a unique one →
Lol, internet drama. Paul Graham wrote an essay that didn’t sit well with reddit. So he wrote a “clarification”, which to many redditors seemed to say the exact same thing. So he continued the eternal circle with this comment on his own reddit-like site, Hacker News. And now that has spawned yet another reddit thread.
Why am I telling you all this? Because it’s funny. The...
Being Poor →
By John Scalzi. I somehow missed it when it was fresh.
EXPELLED! →
Classic. PZ Myers, notorious skeptic and blogger, went to a screening of the creationist propaganda movie Expelled, and was… Expelled. Denied entrance. But the ultimate irony is this:
They singled me out and evicted me, but they didn’t notice my guest. They let him go in escorted by my wife and daughter. I guess they didn’t recognize him. My guest was …
Richard Dawkins.
And...
From "happy hacking" to "screw you" - the story of... →
So… in the course of six months Meraki has gone from “happy hacking - buy our equipment and use it to help poor people access the net” to “pay three times as much for our hardware and we’ll install whatever we want on it, whenever we want, and you can’t look under the hood to see what it’s doing or install your own software on it.”
Now that sucks....
Among the Believers →
NY Times feature from some time ago about the lovely magazine n+1, and The Believer (whose loveliness I can’t assess, not having read any of its articles).
One of the many things I want to do before I die is start a magazine. A real, print one.
Time to get tough: How being nasty can improve... →
While I do agree that getting married when you’d rather not out of the goodness of your heart is, well, silly, this is obviously stupid advice — at least if you want people to like you, not just respect you out of fear.
Oh, and isn’t it ironic how someone titled their book “How I got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a S*** About You”? If you didn’t give a shit what...
Absurd Entries in the OED →
So this guy spent a year reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary. I can’t decide whether it’s awesome or sad. One thing I’m certain is, it’s entertaining. (via numblr)
World's best-known protest symbol turns 50 →
The “decoding the logo” bit is nice. I didn’t know.
“There once was a man named Bertold
Who drank beer when the weather grew cold...”
– From LimerickDB, via the Snowclones Database.
One More Thing
While we’re on the subject of American politics — I promise, this won’t become a regular topic on Daily Meh — Daniel Shusta responds to my post. You’re free to ignore this post if you, like me, find American politics mostly boring. First, there’s this:
Oh, and Simen? Generally when we disagree with others, we don’t just tell them ‘your speech sucked’. I,...
The Star by Arthur C. Clarke →
Clarke’s Hugo Award-winning short story from 1955. Being an atheist it’s almost natural that I don’t agree with the narrator in passages such as this:
I know the answers that my colleagues will give when they get back to Earth. They will say that the universe has no purpose and no plan, that since a hundred suns explode every year in our galaxy, at this very moment some race is...
Someone Had to Say It: Obama's Recent Speech...
I don’t usually blog about American politics, because it’s boring and I have no power whatsoever to influence it. I’m not American; American domestic politics have very limited effect on me and I have no way to change its foreign policies anyway. But I see the internet is crazy about Barack Obama’s speech. Someone has to say it: the speech pretty much sucks.
Aside from the...
Wikihistory →
And here I thought time travel had been done to death. I’m happy to be proven wrong, though.
Moustache Me →
Brilliant. These guys understand what the world needs: more ads with moustaches on them. To that end, they’ve set up a moustache-sticker store.
Who Are We?
We are upper lip vigilantes with a world vision of peace and moustaches for all.
Double Maze →
I’ll be away for the next few days. In the meantime, have a Russian puzzle flash game. Instructions: use your arrow keys. You’ll understand.
“The difference between a quickie review (“thumbs up!”) and genuine...”
– The New York Review of Science Fiction’s Writers Guidelines. Note the “we recommend these considerations to all reviewers everywhere”. This isn’t specific to sci-fi, it’s applicable for any kind of literature reviews.
What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium →
“What would it be really like to live in the world of…?” is an inappropriate question, a category error.
Pretentiousness at its best. Who is M. John Harrison to tell me what questions I will and will not ask about fiction? He writes:
Like all books, Viriconium is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to “make real.”
Well, of course! That’s why it’s a...
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James →
I ended up reading significant portions of this story today, despite it being 1. Late Victorian, written in a style that today could be described as nothing other than “very purple prose” and 2. a ghost story (or is it?) — both of which should, on the face of it, have made me despise it.
I suppose I should read the whole thing and then watch The Innocents, reputedly the best...
Curry's paradox →
Curry’s paradox is a mischievously subtle paradox. It’s easy to miss the fact that it’s a paradox at all.
One instance goes like this: If this sentence is true, then the Moon is made of cheese. Is it true that if the statement is true, the Moon is made of cheese? Yes, if the statement is true, then the Moon is made of cheese, because that’s what it says. So, it’s...
The world's 50 most powerful blogs →
These are, according to The Observer, the world’s 50 most powerful blogs. Some of the choices are dubious, others are certain, and like journalists often do, they’ve managed to write an introduction that’s almost embarassing to read:
From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It...
Pitchfork Gives Music 6.8 | The Onion →
Oh, The Onion, what would we do without you?
Music, a mode of creative expression consisting of sound and silence expressed through time, was given a 6.8 out of 10 rating in an review published Monday on Pitchfork Media, a well-known music-criticism website.
“Music’s first offering, an eclectic, disparate, but mostly functional compendium of influences from 5000 B.C. to present...
Self-Made Philanthropists →
Now that’s a good idea: non-profit investigative journalism, funded by philantropic money and run with the effiency of an (ideal) corporation.
Kelvin Is Lord! →
Start the Century right…
YOU TOO can be
CONSERVED FROM ENTROPY!
KELVIN IS LORD!!!
ALL PRAISE THE LORD KELVIN!!
Only The One, True Lord KELVIN
Can Conserve You From Entropy!
Hahaha. Genius. Behind the frontpage lies a serious library of actual papers by Lord Kelvin. (via Anarchaia)
“I must have been seventeen or eighteen when I worked one summer in a hotel run...”
– Richard Feynman, as quoted in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
I never liked the idea of tips. I want to pay a business for a service or product; I don’t want to be responsible for the employees getting paid their due. That should be the company’s task to manage. The customer is...
Donkey Kong and Me →
Great story from game programming’s youth.