April 2008
Old Bailey Online - The Proceedings of the Old... →
As much crime as anyone could want. They recently added another 100,000 new trial accounts, bringing the total to almost 200,000.
A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.
“Do unto others before they do unto you.”
– Devil’s Golden Rule (i.e., some wise-ass nailed the thinking of certain world leaders).
Homer CSS →
You might have seen this, but I just want to point out the awesome implementation. This is 3d ascii art! The building blocks are characters, which are then positioned on top of each other and colored using CSS. Finally some innovation in the field of ascii art, after a standstill since the old BBSes.
Mmmm… One Star-rific! →
John Scalzi has a healthy attitude. Though I’ve never read any of his books, I’m increasingly of the opinion that I should. One of the reviews is amusing:
I could not finish reading this book because it bored me to tears. There are dialogs after dialogs, but no action. If this is a movie, there will be only one scene in the whole movie, of people talking to each others.
This reviewer...
Hans Reiser is guilty of first-degree murder, the... →
The geek defense didn’t work!
“I am credited with being one of the hardest workers and perhaps I am, if thought...”
– Nikola Tesla.
Assassin's Creed, I can't quit you →
Assassin’s Creed pc port: an exercise in shitty UI design.
Mass Attack FAQ →
A number of incompetent tech journalists and bloggers have spun this story as an attack against a vulnerability in Microsoft’s IIS web server. This link explains what really happened. Which seems to be the following:
A number of incompetent web developers — there are many of them — made websites that don’t properly validate user input. The result is that crackers can input...
InformIT: Interview with Donald Knuth →
An interview with Don Knuth, in which we see him harping on test-driven development and questioning the usefulness of multi-core processors, bashing reusable code (‘To me, “re-editable code” is much, much better than an untouchable black box or toolkit. I could go on and on about this’), and learn that he’s an emacs user, works on an Ubuntu laptop with no internet...
“The Genographic Project’s findings are also consistent with the idea -...”
– Human line ‘nearly split in two’. Wow.
Linguistic Relativity
One of my pet peeves is the widespread and false belief that language shapes thought, and not the other way around. Most recent example:
Our words define how we think about things.
In reality, no one knows exactly how much influence language has on thought, but based on the available evidence, which is scant, almost all experts agree that linguistic determinism, the idea that language defines or...
Koro: A Natural History of Penis Panics →
Belief in fatally retracting genitals, or a belief in genital theft, is usually known by the name ‘Koro’. This article examines historical and contemporary accounts of Koro and looks at some of the explanations for this intriguing phenomenon.
Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits... →
Who says superstition isn’t dangerous?
Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected...
Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn?... →
Really interesting article on what science tells us about memory and learning — as well as a portrait of Piotr Wozniak, who has completely devoted himself to his approach to learning.
Iraq War Coalition Fatalities →
The Iraq War Coalition Fatalities Project is an interactive animated chart of US and coalition military fatalities that have occured in the war in Iraq since the onset, mapped across the dimensions of time and space.
Also, some thoughts on objectivity:
Although I originally set out to create something as objective and apolitical as I possibly can, this project … made me question the notion...
“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche.
The Norway Vote - What really happened →
A firsthand report on the farce of a meeting that resulted in Norway’s YES vote to standarizing OOXML:
And his decision was to vote Yes.
So this one bureaucrat, a man who by his own admission had no understanding of the technical issues, had chosen to ignore the advice of his Chairman, of 80% of his technical experts, and of 100% of the K185 old-timers. For the Chairman, only one course...
People's Olympiad →
In protest against the 1936 Berlin Olympics, which the Nazis used for all its worth to promote their views on Aryan race supremacy and the glory of the Third Reich, alternative olympic games were planned for July 19 to 26 in Barcelona, Spain. Ironically, just as the games were about to begin, another fascist, Franco, made a grab for power. Tough luck, there.
Maybe we should stage a People’s...
DHH Talk - Startup School 2008 →
I don’t have any startup plans in the immediate future, but I can’t help but appreciate DHH’s simple business model:
Build a great application.
Charge for it.
Profit!!!
How much web 2.0 stupidity would not have been inflicted on the world if just a certain percentage of web startups took this advice?
Sada Abe →
Sada Abe is infamous in Japan for erotically asphyxiating her lover, Kichizo Ishida, on May 18, 1936, and then cutting off his penis and testicles and carrying them around with her in her handbag.
(Don’t worry, there aren’t any pictures of the crime in the article.) Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more disturbing:
The presiding judge over the trial admitted to being...
Italian convicted for staring at woman on train →
An Italian man was given a suspended jail sentence for staring too intensely at a woman sitting in front of him on a train.
A judge sentenced the man in his 30s, whose name was not revealed, to 10 days in prison and a 40 euro fine after a 55-year old woman filed a complaint for sexual harassment.
Wow. Hysteric much? Bloody stupid.
Cassette From My Ex →
They were into you, so they made you a tape. Today you don’t have a cassette player, but you still can’t toss that mix. We share the stories and the soundtrack to your earliest loves.
Epicureanism →
Maybe it’s time to give Epicurus some love: Plato et al have had 2,500 years, but the ideas of Epicurianism fit in much better with modern thought. For example, Epicurus was a materialist, 2,300 years ago. He believed thought was nothing more than atoms in motion. He did believe in gods and souls, but he believed they, too, were composed of atoms. He is acknowledged as the first to formulate...
Beru's Disney Comics Fan Page →
I used to be a major fan of Donald Duck & co. as a child, so when I discovered that there are good quality scans of many of the classics, such as Barks and Rosa, it was definitely a nostalgia trip, but reading these stories has made me realize that they display some good storytelling, too. Oh, and since I’m on the topic: I have an uncle who is over fifty and still buys Donald Duck &...
Goodbye. →
Daniel Holz on John A. Wheeler, who recently died. I’ll let Holz describe his merits:
I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and was looking for a thesis advisor. Jadwin Hall was an intimidating place. Plenty of names familiar from my textbooks. Nobel laureates scattered about. And we were expected to just barge into their offices, and ask to work with them.
One office door was always open....
(not) printing flash
Brocatus asks:
How can I not have realized that flash in a webpage is not printed when you print the page; it just leaves a big empty spot. Incredible. No info to be found on how to change this as well. I’m actually appalled. So, what to do… create a print specific version of the page, regardless of the wonders of modern css? Anybody any idea?
First of all, you keep as little as possible in...
Here’s an interesting idea. Mark Pesce did the math back in 2005 and found that for the price of one (of many) ad spots on popular tv programs, an advertiser could actually buy the whole episode and distribute it themselves. This would mean that they got the sole ad spot, and they could brand it however they please, like putting a “bug” (like tv channels put their logo in a...
Seed: Suspending Life →
Now, together with Mark Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, I believe we have found a possible biochemical scar, present within living animals, that links Earth’s greatest mass extinction to a single substance: hydrogen sulfide (H2S). Hydrogen sulfide is a relatively simple molecule that gives rotten eggs their distinctive foul odor and is quite toxic—in...
“Sometimes it’s impossible to resist the appealing thought that there are...”
– Source. I’ve seen many hackers make this mistake.
Lonely Planet's bad trip →
Lonely planet guidebook author Thomas Kohnstamm admits that he made up and plagiarized large parts of his books. Of his book on Colombia, he says, “I wrote the book in San Francisco. I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate”, claiming he didn’t get paid enough to actually travel there.
Das Rad (or, The Wheel) →
An animated short about the evolution of man through the perspective of two rocks on a hillside.
This one’s just brilliant.
Internet Celebrities →
You got to love someone who fires away tirades like this:
I hate internet celebrities because they cannot imagine a world without their Macbooks and their wi-fi. They natter away incessantly in their insulated little worlds where everyone drinks soy lattes and fires off tweets from their iPhones when not doing interviews with that pest Robert Scoble on his Nokia N95.
Beyond Bittorent throttling...
What person who has actually changed the world do...
I watched one of those idealistic “change the world” short films on YouTube today, and it occurred to me that most of the people who watch it will never change the world in any significant way. This led me to the question, What person who has actually changed the world do you admire?
My answer? Norman Borlaug.
The Soiling of Old Glory →
Slate “slide-show essay” (their words, not mine) on Stanley Forman’s iconic photo of a white teenager attacking a black lawyer with a flagpole w/American flag.
Design on Your Own Time →
You may have seen this already, so let me instead of recapping offer some original thought.
I strongly believe that any person who wants to make a living out of fine arts and design better be ready to put forth the dedication and effort required to innovate. If you have no desire to innovate, this is not the field for you. There are plenty of people out there doing the same old thing and it’s...
