September 2008
The Lake Woebegon Distribution →
This is a recurring joke on Prairie Home Companion, broadcast from the fictional town of Lake Woebegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” And indeed, they can’t all be above average. But they could nearly all be above average. And this is actually an extremely common situation.
My heavens, I just realized that what I’ve...
Prediction vs Explanation: A Puzzle →
David Friedman poses a puzzle:
We do ten experiments. A scientist observes the results, constructs a theory consistent with them, and uses it to predict the results of the next ten. We do them and the results fit his predictions. A second scientist now constructs a theory consistent with the results of all twenty experiments.
The two theories give different predictions for the next experiment....
The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief →
Puzzle records are records where one side contains two or more separate, unconnected “sides”. Depending on where the needle is put down, either of the two sides could be played (but not both). The effect, then, is as if there are two sides on one, and which one is played is randomly determined for each play. The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief is a puzzle record....
Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder →
Larry Ellison:
The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do,” he said. “The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion. Maybe I’m an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It’s complete gibberish. It’s...
Unix utilities I want on Windows, pt. 1
Suppose I’m writing a markdown file in my favorite text editor and I have a markdown2html <input file> <output file> program that converts it to html. Every time I save, I’d like to regenerate the html file. No problem:
keep markdown2html markdown-file.txt html-file.html
Or maybe I want to restart a program every time I edit its configuration file. Or something. This...
Hello, I’m Your Food →
Meat-eating in Korea is very literal. Humanity’s participation in the food chain is much less disguised than it is in North America, where people are happy to pretend their bacon burgers or pork tenderloin medallions are magically synthesized for the express purpose of being delicious.
In an unsettling twist, restaurant signage follows suit. Many restaurants advertise specialties with pictures of...
Assuming you built a tunnel from one side of the... →
I bet you know the answer to this one. It happens to be as many minutes as there’ve been years since Time magazine first wrote about it. It also happens to be, you know. (via.)
A bugged life →
The story of how one man extracted the 27-year-old PLisp. Epic. (Incidentally, I agree with the unrelated aside at the beginning about The Lives of Others. See it.)
And it doesn’t work! AAARRRGGGHHH!!!
By this time I am completely obsessed. I am determined to get this damned disk image come hell or high water. I am MacGuyver. I eat bugs for a living. No stupid 8-bit machine is going to...
Warning to advertisers on 2012 cash-in →
Under the 2006 London Olympic Games and Paralympics Games Act, normally innocuous words such as ‘Game’, ‘Medals’, ‘Gold’, ‘2012’ and ‘Summer’ cannot be combined in any form of advertising around the Olympics, with anyone flouting the law facing a fine of up to £20,000… The legislation is based on that used for the 2000 Sydney...
Useless Calculations →
A Fermi problem is “an estimation problem designed to teach dimensional analysis, approximation, and the importance of clearly identifying one’s assumptions” (wiki.) Abbas Raza demonstrates some, including estimating the weight of all the air in the Empire State Building, and the future of energy consumption:
… given our current worldwided energy consumption, and the fact...
ryanestrada.com →
Wednesday, September 17th was the second Ryan Estrada Day. I posted 70 comics around the web. I’m going to be posting the strips here, one by one, once per hour.
What’s more absurd? Creating a Your Name Day or convincing seventy webcomic authors to publish your guest strip on the same day? (I know which is more amusing.)
metametameta
I was reading this list of proofs of God — which is really entertaining, but you’ve probably already seen it — when I came over this really clever argument:
META-PROOF
(1) This is a proof of God’s existence.
(2) If the reader finishes reading this proof, the existence of God will be proven to him/her.
(3) If the existence of God is proven, then God exists.
(4)...
“In China during the 1980s, a doctor wasn’t any richer than a worker. The doctors...”
– The Chinese author Yu Hua discusses working at a Cultural Center. Sounds like my kind of job — excepting the low wage, of course.
Mom, Dad, I'm Into Steampunk. →
Incidentally, a good book where “dirigibles can travel through space and time” is The Scar. Bonus: it’s not steampunk.
Just Asking →
David Foster Wallace’s contribution to The Atlantic’s “Future of the American Idea” issue.
Are some things still worth dying for? (…)
In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot...
“Schooling leads people to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with...”
– Ivan Illich. (He also said, “The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should, may, and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of...
Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics →
From 1929. Unlike the Tractatus, it’s pretty readable (and short).
I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the...
Geocide in fiction →
The complete destruction of rocky planets, gas giants, stars and frequently entire universes is a concept which dates back hundreds of years and has appeared in every significant medium. Here I aim to list the methods — real, imaginary, whatever — which have been used in fiction to destroy planets.
My favorites, oddly enough, are the less science-fiction-y:
Find some angels that...
Quick follow-up to my feminism post. It provoked more response than I’d expected. Some of the responses are to stupid to warrant addressing (they involve name-calling, pronouncements that I’m simply wrong for reasons the author does not care to explain, or they involve the phrase, “USA is as much of a patriarchy as Saudi Arabia”). Some aren’t.
Robot-heart writes:
...
Why I'm Not a Feminist
This post has been brewing for a while. The title determines whether or not this is the sort of thing you will be interested in. If you don’t care for the title, I suggest skipping.
I’ve got to admit, I’m a little annoyed about self-righteous feminists. Feminists who manage to say that theirs is a “fight to be seen as human beings, because so often women (and men) are...
2002's News, Yesterday's Sell-Off →
Google finds an article from 2002, when United Airlines filed bankruptcy — only the article didn’t state a date, so Google assigns the current date. One quick Google later, and the story ends up in a Bloomberg feed. Then stock traders read the feed, sell off their shares, and UA’s stock falls seventy-five percent in minutes. Fun fun fun.
There are layers of stupidity here: the...
The Henry Ford of Literature →
When Emanuel Haldeman-Julius drowned in his backyard swimming pool, on July 31, 1951, he was popularly regarded as a has-been, even in his adopted hometown of Girard, Kansas. (…)
It was an odd ending for a man who, in just over thirty years, had become one of the most prolific publishers in U.S. history, putting an estimated 300 million copies of inexpensive “Little Blue Books” into the...
Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
→
More on the death — or not — of privacy by social media, this time from the NY Times. (Previously.)
Ted Dziuba: Chrome-fed Googasm bares tech pundit... →
Inky links to this:
Well, at least Blodget sort of understands what it takes to run a web browser. I can’t say the same for Michael Arrington, who runs the Special Olympics of tech media, TechCrunch. Arrington fancies himself a kingpin of Web 2.0, but when he starts saying shit like this, it’s hard for him to keep the respect of people who, you know, understand how computers work:
...
“If the Singularity ever does arrive, I expect it to be plagued by frequent...”
– Scott Aaronson.
Speech! →
John McWhorter attempts to explain “Why political oratory sounds so weird.” (Via Language Hat.)
Welcome to the Hotel 747 →
When a jumbo jet dies (and plenty of them do these days), it’s usually sold for scrap or sent to bake in the desert until the end of time. But Swedish entrepreneur Oscar Dios has a better idea for the 30-year-old junker he bought — turn it into a hostel.
Turning an old plane into a place to spend the night is cool. But turning it into a place where we can afford to spend the night is...
Burma: A Special Supplement (from 1958) →
The Atlantic reprints a special supplement which originally ran in 1958, when Burma was still a democratic republic. Thus we may read pieces such as this, knowing that the democratic government fell to a military coup that led to military dictatorship that continues to this day only four years later:
By about 1952, the round had been won, and the enemy was defeated, though roaming bands of outlaws...
Markets in self-constraint, a continuing series →
The Danish gym chain Equinox offers an innovative membership plan, called “Kommer du?” (Do you come? or Are you coming?): show up at least once a week, and you don’t pay anything. If you fail to exercise at least once a week, you’ll be charged a 399 DKR membership fee for that month (~$75). “If you come… we pay. Train as much as you’d like, but at least...
Eight pages of beauty and heartbreak. →
Friends, I come bringing Eastern European goodness again. This time, a short story by Darko Macan and Tihomir Celanovic. Mister Bookseller is unsurprisingly about a bookseller, but what’s curious is that his shop seems to have a copy of each book ever — in fact, it has all the books ever.
(Despite the warning, the content is completely SFW.)
Illeism →
Illeism is the act of referring to oneself in the third person.
To my constant annoyance, my parents, and especially my father, frequently refer to themselves in the third person (illeize?) when speaking to me and my siblings — (t)he(y) never does it when speaking to anyone else. Since this kind of talk is associated with small children if anything, and he’s only using it when he...
Did a sixteenth-century heretic grasp the nature... →
Once he arrived and mounted the pyre, a crucifix was held up to his face. According to a witness, he turned away angrily. He could not speak; he had been gagged with a leather bridle. (Or, some say, an iron spike had been driven through his tongue.) He was tied to the stake, and the pyre was lit. When it had burned out, his remains were dumped into the Tiber. As Ingrid Rowland writes in “Giordano...
Tumblr Explore informs us how many posts have been made during the past day. The statistic for today shows about 40 percent more posts than the one for last Sunday. Does that mean Tumblr users are living their lives forty percent more on weekends (as opposed to just documenting them)?
Django 1.0 released! →
How not to rush software projects: do like Django.
San Serriffe →
On April 1, 1977, The Guardian published a seven-page special report about San Serriffe — also known as Hoaxe, capital Bodoni — a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. (Via.)
Cheney Waits Until Last Minute Again To Buy Sept.... →
Busy dealing with important paperwork and other vice presidential duties in recent weeks, Dick Cheney was forced to put off until the last minute a cherished annual tradition: gift-shopping for his favorite holiday, 9/11.
“I have a feeling this is going to be the best Sept. 11 ever,” Cheney said with a grin. “I just dread the day I have to tell my kids that 9/11 isn’t real....
“Oh Lord won’t you buy me a PDP-10
My friends all hack Vaxen; I must make amends...”
– Early hacker songwriting. From another file on that server we learn that:
21963283741 is the only number such that if you represent it on the PDP-10 as both an integer and a floating-point number, the bit patterns of the two representations are identical.
Bet you didn’t know that, huh?
