June 2009
“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”
– John Stuart Mill.
Balanced Ternary
Quoth Donald Knuth: “Perhaps the prettiest number system of all is balanced ternary.”
Balanced ternary is a fascinating, non-standard positional number system. I’m assuming you’re familiar with positional number systems, like decimal and binary, and can recognize that 10base-2 = 2base-10. Ternary is base-3, so 10base-3 = 3base-10. Ternary uses 0, 1 and 2. Balanced...
“Oh suuure. Rich white lady dies and the media is all over it. What if this was a...”
– reddit.
Tassie wallabies hopping high →
Wallabies are hopping into Tasmania’s opium poppy fields and getting high. The revelation has also solved what some growers say has spurred a campfire legend about mysterious crop circles which appear in the state’s poppy paddocks. In true X-Files style, Attorney-General Lara Giddings said yesterday the drugged-up wallabies had been found hopping around in circles squashing the...
Looking Back: Dancing plagues and mass hysteria →
An article on mass psychological illnesses, from Middle Age dancing plagues — where people would dance for days on end, leading to exhaustion, sores, and sometimes death — to modern-day penis theft (in several African countries, people have been killed, we’re in the 21st century now, believe it or not, for “stealing” or shrinking people’s genitalia).
There are...
“For me, experimentation is not about the technology. In an ever-changing...”
– Ze Frank. He seems to be hinting at this: maybe your efforts are better spent trying to make something within existing technology, instead of chasing after the next big thing.
Passive-Aggressive Vegan Grocery Cashier: A Day in... →
9:20 a.m. Fellow-cashier (Brandi) asks for price on eggs. “The price is too high,” I say. “Too high.” She is so moved by my answer, she does not consult me for price checks for rest of day.3:10 p.m. Smoke break. Co-worker (Dave) says, “I’m surprised you do that.” “Well, being vegan isn’t for everyone,” I counter. Note he must be jealous...
“You have failed to consider the ramifications of the solutions and pose a...”
– Erik Naggum, lisp hacker and troll extraordinaire, who is now dead.
Apparently, he was found dead after some of his irc buddies got concerned about his absence. Talk about living on the internet.
Lucid Screaming
I’ve been to The Matrix, and it was a pretty fucking terrifying experience.
Lucid dreaming, any number of websites will tell you, is dreaming while being aware you’re dreaming. I’ve never consciously tried to induce them, but I’d read about all the wonderful things you could do while controlling your own dream. One technique for inducing lucid dreams is taking a nap a...
“[The children] insisted that their father take them to see the overwhelming...”
– Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
For some reason, I was reminded of this passage recently. It’s wonderful that the most magical part of a book of ghosts and flying carpets comes close to the beginning and describes ice, a perfectly mundane substance. (Disclaimer: I say...
The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats... →
Good profile of Marc Weber Tobias from Wired. (via)
Tobias isn’t crazy. Far from it. He’s a professional lock breaker, a man obsessively—perhaps compulsively—dedicated to cracking physical security systems. He doesn’t play games, he rarely sees movies, he doesn’t attend to plants or pets or, currently, a girlfriend. Tobias hacks locks. Then he teaches the public how to...
“Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations...”
– Microsoft gives itself a ✓ for being so customizable that everything is built in, so you don’t need to and can’t customize Internet Explorer 8 as much as other browsers. Oh, wait. Does that make sense?
Word I Learned Today
Incunabulist, n., someone who is interested in or collects books printed in Europe before 1501. From incunabulum, pl. incunabula, referring to such books. Use may be extended to the earliest extant materials in other fields, so that one may be, say, a computer incunabulist, someone who collects very early computers.
I don’t keep a fancy word journal or whatnot, but I just thought it was an...
Fever° Red hot. Well read. →
Shaun Inman’s attempt to solve the problem of overflowing feed readers. At the moment, I’m using Rososo, which does what I want it to and nothing more, namely, notify me when a site I follow has updated. That’s well and good, but it would make life even easier if it could eliminate most of what I don’t care about while maintaining most of what I do care about, which is what...
Week 22: Lisa Scheer →
I interviewed Lisa Scheer for Too Much Chocolate’s Rotating Gallery.
Bonus: I put my last name on it, which I don’t think I’ve ever done on this blog. So now you know.
Front Pages →
Why didn’t I know about this? Nice.
How does our language shape the way we think? →
There is a fascinating hypothesis called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that says language has a profound effect on the way we see the world. Sapir-Whorf places the causal arrow at language, towards thought: we observe that speakers of different languages act and speak differently in many different ways, such as when it comes to spatial orientation, color, gender, social organization, and so on, and...
“When I teach, it seems like every student wants to do some sort of typology. I...”
– Alec Soth.
“When I was in Taiwan, I heard that they sometimes held dictionary look-up...”
– David Moser, Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard. (I’ve linked to this before, but missed that anecdote — or forgot it.)
Amy Hoy (via toldorknown):
Thinking about your thinking about your thinking doesn’t create world peace, but it does create better work, and better people. And better people create better work. And better people also create more better people, at least in theory. It’s a cycle of awesomeness.
This is interesting, because a recent theme that’s emerged on this blog has been the opposition to...
17-Year-Old Thinks She's Getting Into Photography →
The Onion:After wasting an afternoon taking pictures of a broken tricycle, moss on trees, and the shadow of a wrought-iron fence, Churchill Alternative High School senior Jessica Ivers falsely informed family and friends Saturday that she was getting into photography. “I love the way real film looks,” said Ivers, who has owned the old single-lens reflex 35 millimeter camera for exactly...
“The only people I know who are really not obsessed with sex are heroin junkies.”
– Gaspar Noé. (via Constant Siege)
James W. Heisig, ruining romantic notions since...
My mom: Did you know that the Chinese character for "love" depicts a mother and a child embracing? Isn't that cute?
Me: (looks it up)
Me: Actually, the character for "love" consists of a birdhouse, a heart, and walking legs.
Her: Oh.