It’s work toward a successor to Iff. It’s still an early beta; I’m not even sure I like its address. Comments welcome.
“Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.”
It’s not particularly impressive to match arbitrary images against the fixed stars. It is impressive to do it with so much tolerance for blur and clutter, and to make it so friendly.
Welcome to the future, where matter compilers cut sheets of invented molecules with beams of light for the cost of a meal.
A pleasant little OS X graphics and interactivity environment for Python. Reminiscent of Logo, Postscript, and (dare I say?) HyperCard.
“All your solar and aurora needs in one place!”
Sign yourself and a buddy up for a free account. It doesn’t do anything nasty with your e-mail address, and using it for 30 seconds will make it clearer than this explanation:
We have acceptable systems for writing code alone (text editors), natural language alone (word processors), and code in teams (version control systems).
But writing natural language in teams is a huge disaster. People put up with ridiculous systems like mass-CC’d e-mails of Word documents.
So Draftastic is like version control for prose. If your group is writing a report, you pull up Draftastic and write it at once. No lock fights. No accidentally typing on top of someone. Everything updates live (no Flash, just Ajax, and it works with JS off too).
It’s like a whiteboard, or a whiteboard-model collaborative editor, only it’s designed for actual work. You get histories, diffs, a permission system – things we rely on in coding but haven’t learned to ask for in natural language.
Draftastic is a business venture by Nick and me. The more bug reports and feature requests the better. Enjoy!
Not a new idea, but very good prose.
Scott Aaronson hits exactly the right note. Again.
Via Anarchaia. Again.
There seems to be a rehabilitation of him in the air.
Whaaat?
That’d be Bodger.
Via Sam.
They take the busses; the coyotes get the light rail.
Via Platypus.
This is an excellent introduction to a lot of good questions about broadcast ethics. I can think of at least one sf book where it’s illegal to report on terrorism, but no one seems to be saying that aloud in real life.
A Fortran successor from Guy L. Steele. As you might assume, his presentation is fascinating. It’s really Unicode, there’s an redefinable juxtaposition operator (a b being a×b is redefinable), and on the whole it approaches live math notation: “opr (n:ℕ)! = if n=0 then 1 else n·(n-1)! end”.
Including, delightfully, a discussion of spectral lines before they were explained.
A perl precursor.
A show specific to that time, place, and group of characters, I would have thought. The only good news is Josh Lawson.
24 m below the surface, 180 km from the nearest dry land.
PDF. A close relative of JPEG 2000.
One of at least two patents that claims to be able to compress anything. The proof that this is impossible is left as an exercise to the reader, the reader’s pet, and particularly developed cheeses in the reader’s fridge.
Via Bodger.
As Reddit points out, ASCII only is ridiculous.
Favored for cyanotype prints because it’s slightly alkali. The cheapest conforming paper is Crane’s Diploma Parchment.
“Honorable Members opposite squeal like stuck pigs.”
The weirdest television I’ve seen all year: two twentysomethings (mladići in Serbian) share an apartment with noted war criminal Ratko Mladić. Hilarity ensues!
My family’s neighbor when I was growing up. Well deserved.
How to work quickly in small problem-solving groups.
“The current shipping season runs from mid-July to the beginning of November. The use of icebreakers could significantly lengthen the shipping season.”
No.
I’ve never played hunter, but I gather his strategy of grabbing aggro and hitting FD is pretty standard. I leave it to you, reader, to muse on the ways in which games about contention might be more than training for aggression.
Via Anarchaia.
My interpretation lately has been that articles organized as lists are popular because they’re mostly about one thing. People try much too hard to give blog posts etc. clever titles and surprising twists, but with “10 things that …”, you know what you’re getting.
Fairly early in their run, they made a best-of CD with a run of 1000, called it “Illegal Download”, and only gave out to fans who’d shown exceptional dedication. Like many others, apparently, I figured the title was ironic and that we would signal our understanding of this, and respect for the craftsmanship of the show and the co-operation of its distributors, by not illegally downloading ripped copies. Now that the show’s ending, Tony Martin addressed the fans in a cutting “explaining stuff to tards” voice and told us we didn’t get the point and Triple M had to go and do our work for us. Tsk tsk.
It was a catchphrase in Greek class by late 2002, and I assumed it was from “The Daily Show”.
What are they thinking? “Get This” is the best contemporary radio comedy I’ve heard, and it rates great. The on-air guys are already happily working for half pay. If it “soaks up production and editing time”, they should hire Mattie Dower an assistant and be thankful.
E.g., Kim Hill’s interview with Jeremy Pope.
Where did Bruce meet his CIA handler? How did Neal Stephenson explain pho? What did Jesus have at the Last Supper in Cuzco? You’ll have to read it to find out, because you can’t search it, because it’s in some crazy obfuscated DRMy form. The ironing is delicious.
I was all but certain I’d already Iffed this.
Confused? Compare with spelsau.
Via Platypus.
Hey, I have that lens.
By a neighbor of my family.
“Always take the side of the elephant.”
Via Bodger.
His books aren’t in Project Gutenberg. This biography doesn’t make it as clear as it might that exporting tea from China to India was quite illegal; at best it was smuggling.
As the Reddit comments point out, (1) their numbers seem quite low, and (2) it’s scary even to bring this up because saying you’re worried about seeming creepy seems creepy. Who knew moral panic might cause problems?
More generally, are formal and informal thinking continuous?
Second, perhaps, to Chad.
This kind of thing is often in play in everyday life where people are being mocked for supposed irrationality.
Comedy gold. Via Platypus.
Via Mom.
I had a lot of these already. I alternate between thinking the island are over- and under-represented online.
Ryanair for the US, basically.
Remind me to learn statistics.
I can’t listen away.
As I was explaining to Platypus just now, it’s sometimes funny because it’s foreign and their concerns are laughable, and sometimes because they’re funny.
As it says on the first page, descriptions of the bowline often come with an ominous but useless warning that sometimes bad stuff happens. This is reassuring.
It’s shameful that the official version isn’t free. It’s a government work and a generally useful safety supply.
Comenius’s illustrated kids’ encyclopedia from 1658, in churchified Latin. God bless humanism, that’s what I say.
The Noctilux is an old Leica lens that opens to f/1 – three or four times faster than most lenses around these days – and thus lets you use richer film when it’s darker.
3 g daily orally seems to cause only constipation. I estimate there’s about a gram per letter-size print.
Daylight saving time extension clearly did not work around the 2000 Olympics. I maintain that DST is repulsive in every important way.
Heehee! They used “span”!
The 50 guilder note especially was brilliant and influential.
“With the speaker jammed in there, the battery, the PC104 stack, I could just barely zipper up the back of the bear and provide an honest to god, $800 Internet-enabled storytelling stuffed animal.”
Approved of by Jeremy Clarkson, which is a nontrivial achievement.
These Romans are crazy!
Via Bodger.
What tipped him off? Was it the higher temperatures?
Apparently details are in.
The “Black Cat, White Cat” guy.
Myhrvold was the guy who said some dinosaurs might be able to make 200 dB cracks by whipping their tails.
Someone put ISO 3 online.
Wiseman was involved.
“Spelling or grammar flames always contain spelling or grammar errors.”
Especially because people seem to switch into some kind of heaving, clunking, pseudo-RP Pedant’s Dialect.
Via Bodger.
Reactionaries are much funnier when they’re overseas.
Full of naughty naughty s-expression sex.
Man, I remember being hypnotized by this at the Seattle Science Center in 1992 or so. I never knew it was made on a Connection Machine.
Richard Kelsey took his front end, which was a very aggressive CPS-based optimiser, and extended it all the way down to the ground to produce a complete, second compiler, which he called “TC” for the “Transformational Compiler.” His approach was simply to keep transforming the program from one simple, CPS, lambda language to an even simpler one, until the language was so simple it only had 16 variables… r1 through r15, at which time you could just kill the lambdas and call it assembler.
Students saw problems in Enron in 1998, two years before its stock peaked.
I used it when I wasn’t using GrayAmp.
Via Bodger.
Very reminiscent of Guitar Hero.
Via Platypus.
Oh, the things I learn when I drop by freenode for the morning.
NCE NCE NCE!
Starring Asher.
(Sorry if Iff is becoming nothing but googles of things from my childhood.)
Good ole Lore.
Once I spent several days tracing a scan of one of these. Good times.
Kind of odd because it’s set on a fictionalized version of the tiny island where I grew up. The writer’s daughter read it aloud to us at school, and we could recognize individual trees in several illustrations.
Tonight’s re-reading.
Hey, these are more predictable than those!
Some good design if you look hard enough.
“Let me make this clear: you will be eating potato chips that most people will never get to eat.”
Via Bodger.
They’re good, but Tufte should stop burbling whimsey about them.
Via Bodger.
How they found a radioactive Soviet spy satellite in Northern Canada.
Monotype’s metal Bembo was a god among fonts, but the first popular digital version was mediocre. In the past few years many people have tried to get it right, but none of the new ones are both good and on the open market. Aetna is too spindly and poorly spaced. Monotype’s new Bembo Book is too chubby and poorly spaced. Matthew Carter made a promising one but signed it over to Yale. Edward Tufte made a very good one, perhaps the one we need, but doesn’t distribute it because he’s “not in the type distribution business so it will not be made available”, the jerk. So we’re still waiting.
I missed this when it came out. Google for more complete references.
An islander. I don’t believe everything he says, but I pay attention to it. The kelp powder is excellent popcorn seasoning.
Interesting if true.
“Life-styles on Waldron require good physical health and a sense of self-reliance. Living accommodations are modest cabins, heated by wood and with minimal indoor plumbing.”
Swiped from OISD’s frameset. The photos are so old that I’m in one of them.
Where I come from, we call it “linking”.
“The Java Language Specification” wins. I seem to recall Spivak was pretty good too.
My tastes aren’t obscure enough. The mainstream keeps finding out what I’m into.
the main language used for the Shuttle
Good dimensions for things designed on grids. Mmm, smooth.
I’ve been watching Ian Hislop on HIGNFY.
The aggrieved tone of the article really sells it.
It sounds like a silly name, but it probably just means “breasts”.
Via Bodger.
Reports of an exceptionally practical aphrodisiac.
Evidently roughly equivalent to CBC Radio 2.
Incidentally, I always assumed “catamaran” was from Greek “kata-” (via, by, according to, down, etc.) and perhaps something akin to the Latin “mare” (sea), but it’s from the Tamil “kattumaram” (tied wood).
An equatorial range apparently shed 1e8 km2 of delicious sediment into the oceans about 550 mya, thus causing the Cambrian Explosion.
The English, I gather, regard him variously as a politician with a sense of humor or a cryptofascist posing as a buffoon.
Iff will be back stronger than before when Qwest hooks up the DSL. It’s been two weeks.
I’m told by earnest people that it’s the best ever.
Scheme48 is, of course, independently named for having been first implemented in that amount of time on 6-7 August 1986.
It loses a lot without the delivery, but it’s still genius.
Via Bodger. A physics simulation of the hardware would be more impressive.
Now to read it.
If I recall correctly, it sometimes marks hot, smoky industrial districts as fires.
OMG, that’s going to be some fun data.
Photos of pets are the next big thing, man.
404’d!
I hope this is a diagram of propagation across the front pages of Robot Wisdom, Daring Fireball, Reddit, Fark, Slashdot, Boing Boing, Digg, Metafilter, Wired News, and so on – the hoppingest secondary news sites. I suspect that they prey on each other in about that order.
For personal amusement, I’d like to see the network of pickups between Iff, Anarchaia, and Grow-a-Brain, which have a friendly plagiarism rate of perhaps 1/40.
Escher: “By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations I had made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics.”
Gosh, I dunno. Extended to 2400 mm, that’s only f/11.
“They are making little headway with the unconverted because they have forgotten to define the music as something worth loving. If it is worth loving, it must be great; no more need be said.”
And all for less than the price of a house.
It would be interesting to specify a matrix code with a tiny tiny virtual machine (forth? postscript?) – then you’d have some real quinery.
Early modern guerillas.
“If this anomaly trend continues, the North-East Passage or ‘Northern Sea Route’ between Europe and Asia will be open over longer intervals of time, and it is conceivable we might see attempts at sailing around the world directly across the summer Arctic Ocean within the next 10-20 years.”
May the internet live a thousand years.
Terrible, terrible graphic design all through it. Begging for some Tuftization. If you scrape the data and run it through a real grapher, drop me a line and I’ll link to it.
Body armor is getting good enough that things that used to kill you leave your body intact but your drain bramaged.
Gangster cats. Via Platypus.
In the LtU log, happily enough.
With Magic.
Found by amateurs.
As Wheel put it, “Damn! The smooth gentleman thief isn’t supposed to be caught by pansy-ass Austrian civil servants! He’s supposed to be taken down during a deadly game of cat and mouse with a rugged American hero with a tormented past.”
How true that is. How very true that is.
With mathematical and conceptual backgrounds.
Iff bug: the title field munges both escaped and unescaped versions of Frédo Durand’s name. How embarrassing.
An island the size of a large boulder all alone between Ireland and Iceland.
If XML were Forth.
No PDFs of the tables yet.
Arrow must be a strange man.
Old. Via Platypus?
Just skimming, “2276-07-04 21:00:00” is kinda suspicious.
The best photo search by sketching I’ve seen yet.
Apparently I’m the last one to hear about them. This one song I’m listening to is real promising if it’s the good kind of campy.
This seems to be an Australian word for a simple map of paths, extended to simple flow charts and so on. I can’t find an etymology; perhaps a map such as might be drawn with a stick in mud?
“It is a particular problem on Christmas Island. Instead of forming colonies with a single queen, it now forms supercolonies with several queens which cooperate rather than fight. This aggressive insect has devastated the wildlife of the island. Using formic acid it will overpower sizeable creatures like reptiles and coconut crabs and has killed 10-20 million Christmas Island red crabs.”
“Salt not good. Sugar not good. Oil not good. Fat not good. Blood pressure, heart problems. Yup, Yup.”
Click past the front page and through the hideous navigation. The photos are superb.
“We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.”
A trillion words of text and the tools to parse it. Hmm. Any bets that Google isn’t the singularity?
All at least partly right.
Greenpeace hacks GM soybean fields in France.
A game show I would point my eyes at.
Also via Bodger.
Via Bodger.
“Reliable, efficient transmission control for networks that suck.”
“Sin is not just a restricted list of moral mistakes. It is living a life turned in on itself where people ignore the consequences of their actions.”
Mmm, fake macros with stupid (in the affectionate sense) Perl tricks.
Julieclipse, one of my best friends, died on 11 July. Stopping Iff was not at all in her spirit, but I couldn’t be bothered to think about it for a while. Now it’s back.
“Since Diophantine equations are undecidable in general, there’s no way to build a POSIX-compliant grep.”
The Economist on gerrymandering.
I shall watch this with a great deal of interest.
“Like many of my students, I have hypersensitive hearing, and I’ve always been easily overwhelmed by certain noises. I used to get unusually upset by seemingly minor sounds around the house. I also remember fixating on symbols, creating patterns, and repeating them in my head when I was a kid.”
Delightful old illustrations.
Via Julieclipse. Good for the Ad Council.
With awesome mesh maps.
Terms as in periods, not names.
Sign me up.
I’m looking at WVS’s photos and listening to the lead-up on CBC 2. Canada’s so kawaii.
Oh. My. Goodness.
James Lovelock is my new old hero.
Issue #1: Destruction of the Ring.
Issue #2: Pulling the rug out from under terrorists.
“The problem is not that these computers might one day resemble humans; it is that they already resemble gods.” Old gods, maybe.
A war game, featured in Blink, that Middle Eastern guerillas were winning against impressive tech.
“The explosion caused disruption to the game, damage to the building, and some injuries to those attending the match. Play was resumed after the lunch break, and the game was played to a conclusion that evening. Hashimoto, holding White, won by five points.”
Very 90s but in a good way. Via Lemonodor.
Like the signs suggested for libraries. Not very fine, though – a fuller scheme would tell what hadn’t not happened, not unwhen, and so on.
Wonderful photos – terrible interface.
I’m sitting in the Black Cat now, and I can bingo without turning my head.
Authority should be held as locally as possible.
It reads like a tasteful nerd’s sketchbook, which it is.
You know, I’m beginning to get a tiny bit sick of terrible Flash interfaces.
I haven’t Iffed this because I’ve been expecting it to take off and top all the bookmarking sites. No, really.
“The first lending and borrowing exchange.” Gonna be keeping an eye on this.
NSFW in parts.
He politely hints that he thinks the “Inconvenient Truth” trailer sucks too. Via Julieclipse.
Mostly by taking photos of awesome colors.
As Wheel pointed out, “No one wants to have some unmonitored person get on a train and give everyone diabetes.”
I really like his stuff, but had been waiting to Iff it until it came in a nice interface. I gave up. Apparently most of his recent ones, including “National Geographic” work, are with a 6-megapixel Nikon.
Via the Wayback Machine.
A tiny, well-featured lisp. Can be squeezed to a 20 kB binary. The docs could be used as a general introduction to lisp.
At least for married people.
Well, about $130 in 2006 dollars.
Old film and old metal finishing sure did collaborate well. I swim right there in summer. The Richard Brummett mentioned took some excellent photos in Vietnam between going to college with Fox News’s Bill O'Reilly.
Then again, who is? The Blue Cascades III report referred to above is excerpted here. (What’s that? More than a cursory site of its own? But why would coordinating and disseminating vital disaster-preparedness information involve the Internet? Especially in the notoriously poorly wired PNW?)
Parody of twenty-year-old educational videos. Brilliant.
Let’s take it for granted that we’re all going to compare it to Spore, okay?
With great old photos.
Via Anarchaia.
Weird and unpleasant. Will Prudential start giving you a heavily disclaimed horoscope? Merrill Lynch brand palmistry? Wells Fargo tarot?
An art history short in the special floating-neoclassicism postmodern style of the East Coast in the early 80s.
I think it’s terrible. I expect to wholeheartedly agree with the movie’s point, but the trailer seems disingenuous, tawdry, and annoying. I hope they know what they’re doing.
Via Platypus, noted lover of animals.
Via Julieclipse.
From Anthony Lane’s article in the current “New Yorker”, in which he points out that Ryanair is practically free.
Exaggerated.
A very, very good drummer and storyteller. He came to the island school about ten years ago as a visiting artist. “Ldy” is pronounced “day”.
US propaganda.
One insipid hash of iconography.
One so-so salmon and Rainier.
One striking, detailed, and generally awesome whale.
Washingtonians, do your duty and vote 3.
They’re a-lookin' for gravity waves. I was on a Reed Reactor field trip at the Hanford observatory in January 2003, and it was awesome.
So far it’s only fairly efficient and takes a lot of space.
Maybe only appealing to fans and already-potential fans. Take the “iPod/iTunes” version.
I’ve long wanted to do something a little like this per-user with system software instead of multi-user on the web.
I missed this somehow. I hope you like high dynamic range, film grain, and excellent composition.
Laugh along with witticisms like “sour makes merrily for – our forest laughs itself dead” and “everything borrows. Also my heart pumps.”
Did you know that he remains the only Australian Prime Minister to be dismissed? That “when Senator Lionel Murphy resigned his NSW Senate seat in January 1975 to take up his appointment as a judge of the High Court of Australia, the Liberal State government of Premier Tom Lewis refused to replace him with a Labor nominee”?
I was trying to re-find this when I found the IDF pictures the other day, lest you think I regularly Google such things out of the blue (women “fully clothed” (gun or tank)). Anyway, this is easily in the dozen most surreal pages I’ve seen in my many years on the web.
Punchy and undercaptioned.
This was told to me, almost sentence-for-sentence, by someone who died before this version was written. Folklore indeed.
The astute reader will recall that the US, in sum and in part, is deep in the red.
Many fascinating similar series are linked in the comments etc.
Fawning and management-oriented but good.
“One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran.”
What a terrible idea.
Fonts are one of very few things I wish courts were stricter to protect as intellectual property; this might take us in the right direction. The precedent in the US is basically that fonts are trivial and no amount of similarity constitutes infringement.
Cool, but they should stop justifying the text right away.
Via Bodger.
Or “Plan 9 from User Space” – some of the Plan 9 operating system’s tools ready to run on other platforms. It’s installing as I type.
Right on. (I feel similarly about the verb “author”.)
See also its sibling.
Many of the examples should be familiar to readers of Tufte and Huff.
I can’t stand this stuff. Not even ironically.
Photos, mostly of water and night. Exceptionally graceful sharpening and color balancing.
Via Lemonodor.
So far (not very far) so good.
Remastered with new tracks and relicensed; remixing starts 11 April. This is my third draft trying to explain what the album sounds like and why it’s so great – never mind. Just go listen.
The Canadian national pastime is insisting that Canada has a wonderful and distinct culture. The thing is, it does, so the insistence is hilarious to an outsider.
By people I know. Crazy, crazy people.
You can find emulators and applets around the web.
Woot!
“Already there are a half-dozen computer software programs on the market, such as Digital Darkroom, which allow the user to ‘edit’ photographs digitally. The technology is still in its infancy, but the picture-altering capabilities of the million-dollar Scitex is fast moving into the hands of anyone who owns an $8,000 personal computer. … And then there is the digital camera, a sort of hand-held freeze-frame video camera that should be a hot seller in the 1990s.”
Well suited to tossing at people in ugly global warming flamewars.
Funny what I forget to post here.
A 97,280-byte FPS.
“I think creationism is … a kind of category mistake, as if the Bible were a theory like other theories … if creationism is presented as a stark alternative theory alongside other theories I think there’s just been a jarring of categories … My worry is creationism can end up reducing the doctrine of creation rather than enhancing it”
At landfall, Larry was the size of Katrina. No deaths reported yet.
A prospective operating system. Where many OS doodlers are asking “how do we make people do things right?”, they’re asking “how do we do things right?”. Reminds me a bit of Plan 9.
Via my brother.
Don’t believe anything else this guy says.
“In 1995, the Irish government saw potential in international ‘Irish’ revelry. They reinvented the holiday at home to kick-start the tourist season. Now thousands of partiers head to Ireland for the ‘St. Patrick’s Day Season’ as Guinness has called this time of year. (It used to be called ‘March’ or, for Irish Catholics, ‘Lent.’)”
For $3e7, it had better fly on one wing.
If you aren’t violating reasonable standards of privacy, it’s about as legal as looking around – i.e., it’s just another public place. Security employees on the ground would do well to consider (a) that photography has never been integral to any act of terrorism and (b) that amateur photography has often been indispensable in crime and disaster investigations.
Photos during the 2004 campaigns. He died while working on this project.
“[The phonograph’s] first great star was an operatic tenor, Enrico Caruso, whose voice remains one of the most transfixing phenomena in the history of the medium. The ping in his tone, that golden bark, penetrated the haze of the early technology and made the man himself viscerally present.” – Alex Ross.
New album just out.
See the obvious place for background.
The delivery is terrific; unfortunately the video is missing. Tell me if you find it anywhere.
If Stanley Kubrick asks you to mount an f/0.7 Zeiss lens made for NASA, you do so.
Diverse comments.
C’mon – let’s smooth those graphs out a bit.
“The good Laird was yesterday declared ‘legally dead’ at 11.55am by his medical entourage of Dr Freeze, Dr Snakes, Dr Beere, Dr Weeds and Dr Qualified, who mixed the science of cryogenics with the dark arts of shamanism in Garden Place.”
“From top to bottom: Ayn Rand, Aristotle, an Ancient Egyptian scribe writing on a piece of papyrus; prehistoric artist, painting, Neanderthal shaping a rock with another rock, Homo Erectus, discovering fire.”
Best. Gimmick. Evar.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
“This is my whirlwind languages tour – the one I was going to write for the Amazon Developers Journal this month, but couldn’t find a way to do it that was… presentable.”
“You miss your old typewriter? You want your Macintosh to play typewriter sounds when you press the keys of your keyboard? You even want your keyboard to play your own sounds? Then Typewriter Keyboard is what you need!”
Will Wright’s newest game. Google Video also has a shorter version with just the on-screen stuff, but the introduction is excellent.
“I’d really like to work toward a grammar for complex systems and present someone with tools for designing complex things. I have in mind a game I want to call ‘Doll House’. It gives grown-ups some tools to design what is basically a doll house. But a doll house for adults may not be very marketable.”
Via Platypus.
Somehow I missed this. Why’s he gotta be so cool?
Jim Wester is one of the few blacksmiths still making fine tools (and one of the few still innovating). I got to learn the basics from him for a few months. He’s a great guy all around – just don’t get him talking about boats.
Mostly waves.
If a dollar bought you a thousand pixels, how many would you get?
In 1978, a DC-8-61 crashed near Portland when it ran out of fuel because the crew was distracted by a landing gear problem. An excellent case study in emergency management.
So many of them sound pretty.
Possibly my very favorite Icelandic string quartet. Back in the day, they opened for Sigur Rós.
Honey rolls right off.
Oceania is great in Google Earth.
He’s very good but very popular. I will follow this closely but I fear it will get fluffy.
Via Anarchaia.
Listed without the obscenities, of course.
Right on. Sticking your poison in a barrel is better than putting it out of sight and having it end up in your lungs. Radioactivity is not Magic Evil.
Proportional to the size and number of the products, this must be one of the most delicate manufacturing processes out there.
For a quarter the price, I’d so get one.
Plenty of institutions that should know better seem to think that “www.” instead of “http:” means “it’s on the web”.
“The single most important skill for a computer scientist is problem solving. Problem solving means the ability to formulate problems, think creatively about solutions, and express a solution clearly and accurately.”
Time not spent watching “Bathtime in Clerkenwell” is time wasted.
Text input without speech or a keyboard.
Maybe you have to know the characters. I dunno.
Via Platypus.
A reconstruction of Nero Wolfe’s house. Tricky, because it – like he – was fictional.
An opera about Imelda Marcos by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim. It was only a matter of time.
Do not read these if offensive things offend you. It’s essentially a filthy-humor contest.
Via Grow-a-Brain, like most good things.
His writing is pretty good, but his ads and documentaries are outstanding.
They do some nice stuff all around.
A little electrical system to keep table saws from removing too many fingers. Spiffy videos.
It seems significant to me that they’re luring the gulls with fish which they could otherwise eat; i.e., they aren’t just using a (para-)tool, they’re also giving up a lesser resource for a greater. But IANAWB.
Pretty, but with a lousy interface.
A foot of rain in January, and now a big storm. I blame it on La Niña.
I’d like to see this combined with ultrasound.
Trademark law looks to be getting even uglier.
They made a profit of about $36,130,000,000 in 2005, the largest of any publicly-traded corporation ever. They are not universally loved.
Like a solar tower without the tower.
“‘It’s not an encouraging data point that these dudes could find the damn thing,’ observes the University of Maryland’s Lewis.”
Via my brother.
Decode the ugly orange bar code on USPSed envelopes.
I’m a sucker for a terrace.
Of great interest, and rightly so, to the “Vogue”-reading teenage girls here.
Via my brother.
(I’m still alive. I just spend most of my time online with Google Earth. Expect the usual posting rate to resume within two weeks.)
Spolsky compares recursion and pointers to Latin and Greek. “CS is proofs (recursion), algorithms (recursion), languages (lambda calculus), operating systems (pointers), compilers (lambda calculus) – and so the bottom line is that a JavaSchool that won’t teach C and won’t teach Scheme is not really teaching computer science, either.”
“‘They call, they write, they send postcards, they show me script changes, they send me pornographic pictures and models of the monsters,’ Mr. Sendak said. ‘They’re very attentive. They make me useful to them.’”
I have the CM in a bag with Plan9 and HyperCard. Sniffle. I’ll miss you guys.
You know, my birthday’s coming up, and those hypercube shirts are hot.
“Our public schools have turned away from the source of Truth, to teach our children that our sacred English language has descended from other languages. The poor impressionable youngsters are taught AS A FACT that English words have certain ‘root words’, even though this is only a theory. The FACT is, God Almighty created all languages complete when he confused mankind’s original language as punishment for our transgression at the tower of Babel.”
See UTS for a prospective amelioration.
I won’t have a steady supply of intarwebs for a few weeks, so Iff will be semi-dormant. If you just can’t get enough, browse the complete archives and make sure you didn’t miss anything.
Watch Hanan emigrate!
“The snow was falling down. I pressed the button, and suddenly we were floating. It was an incredible feeling, to realize that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation.”
Marshall McLuhan and Glenn Gould are still worrying people.
“The main logistical trick, should you ever want to do this yourself, is to take a picture of the recipient with the camera before giving it to him. Then, after the roll is developed, you’ll know which prints belong to which person.”
A promisingly nimble-looking text editor for OS X. €39, though.
Raw workflows are expensive or laborious, but less so with dcraw.
Lots of cameras can, in theory, write DNGs. Lots of image editors can, in theory, read DNGs. The gap is made of greed: deliberately bad co-operation, planned obsolescence, and “integrated marketing strategies”.
For free!
Via Platypus.
“We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base … There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities…. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an option to be part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves.”
Digitally splicing a sliced-up tapestry can be really tricky even if you’re a world-class nerd with two bodies.
“The lights were dim. The walls are concrete and painted white. The brothers project images on the walls, and they also use the walls as a whiteboard to perform calculations with erasable markers. The walls were covered with scribbles – work in progress. Most of the floor consisted of a vast digital image, in color, showing a hundred and fifteen different equations arranged in a vast spiral that breaks up into waves near the walls – a whirlpool of mathematics.”
Greenglass and Rosenberg, so it is said, used nothing more than a ripped Jell-O™ box top as a token. It’s neat how easily verifiable yet difficult to reproduce (or nondestructively manipulate) a small broken object can be.
Via Robert.
A day of photos of the water squished back into an orthogonal map.
Dig the distortion shadow apparently cast by the exhaust of the boat at about 9:20:06.
Draw your own comparisons.
My, what a fine culture they have.
I have seen a lot of esoteric programming languages, but this is exceptional for sheer elegance of inelegance.
Like most people with a clue about computers, I have much less trust in Diebold than in the good old-fashioned Oregon vote-by-mail system.
A triumph of graphic design.
“In the past we believed in John Frum but now we believe in Jesus.”
Nerd self-parody.
I don’t agree with everything he says and implies, but he’s taking a much saner approach than most.
Well written. This is the preparation algorithm that makes bzip2 so strong.
“Briefly, our algorithm transforms a string S of N characters by forming the N rotations (cyclic shifts) of S, sorting them lexicographically, and extracting the last character of each of the rotations. A string L is formed from these characters, where the ith character of L is the last character of the ith sorted rotation. In addition to L, the algorithm computes the index I of the original string S in the sorted list of rotations. Surprisingly, there is an efficient algorithm to compute the original string S given only L and I.”
See also the Red Book, the Blue Book, and “Thinking in PostScript”.
Ever wonder why “The Blue Lotus” and “Tintin in Tibet” were the best ones?
Man, speaking of stuff I’d forgotten. Mom took my brother and sister and me to one of these – in 1998? – and it was amusing but unpleasant.
I’ve been remembering a lot of stuff I’m surprised I hadn’t put here before.
“Using sources that include leading Evangelical and other Protestant scholars, Papal Encyclicals and Jewish scholars, I prove that tax policy structures meeting the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics must raise adequate revenues that not only cover the needs of the minimum state but also ensure that all citizens have a reasonable opportunity to reach their potential.”
Try a mismatched language and text for a ridiculous accent.
That’s Blixa Bargeld … you know, from Einstürzende Neubauten.
Via Ryland.
I don’t like the idea and I don’t like the site so far, but someday it may get interesting.
Programming language design musing.
“In a profession plagued by, ‘when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’ we get really excited when someone is able to come along and prove that everything really is a nail if lambda is the hammer.”
Via Bodger.
Ooo, oo, IMBY, please!
Woo! Alex Ross!
“I’ll repeat my outré contention that classical music, for all its elite trappings, is actually a radical, disruptive force in American culture, whereas most popular culture, for all its rebellious trappings, is intensely conservative.”
See, for example, “Rapport fra Nordsjøen i storm” for more cool pictures of Ekofisk.
And why not?
Via my brother.
Azeroth is the the World of Warcraft landscape.
Via Wheel.
Via Grow-a-Brain.
I wish he’d give the source in postscript.
“During my second term as governor, Arkansas made a great effort to attract new, advanced technology. Although I was in the smallest and poorest state in America, I was concerned about the entire world. I paid close attention to China’s reforms, and deeply admired Chief Architect Deng Xiaoping’s statements about science and technology.”
The lights on the ski resort about halfway along can be seen on moderately clear nights from the beach near my family’s house, fifty miles away by water.
“Amid the chaos in Iraq, one company of U.S. Special Forces achieved what others have not: a functioning democracy. How? By relying on common sense, the trust of Iraqis, and recollections from Political Science 101.”
“You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.)”
My browser passes completely. Does yours?
“For too long, Paul Graham has gotten a free ride by saying things that disagree with people’s prejudices in an informative and entertaining manner.”
Via Julieclipse.
Photograph by David Edwards.
(Sorry for the Iff hiatus. It was for the best reasons.)
Funny offensive sketch comedy. Caution: offensive.
I don’t know whether Kiva in particular is trustworthy, but I endorse its stated idea. It’s nice to see microcredit getting more popular here.
One of the finest flames of all time.
When did we start switching titles and subtitles?
Complete with the astonishingly campy old illustrations.
“The Liberal Democratic Party’s final draft cuts the ‘no war’ clause from Article 9, and outlines an expanded role for the military.”
Via Ari.
You probably shouldn’t read it.
Via Platypus.
Not the “Sin City” Frank Miller. I think.
"For example, I want the next C grammar to define that a space comes between any keyword and an opening parenthesis. “if (foo)” would be legal, but “if(foo)” would not. Not a warning, not optionally checked, but actually forbidden by the language parser."
“The Universal Decimal Classification is a system of library classification developed by the Belgian bibliographers Paul Otlet and Henri la Fontaine at the end of the 19th century. It is based on the Dewey Decimal Classification, but is much more powerful.”
Pretend you’re colorblind. Via Bodger.
Overall, according to estimates published in “The Lancet”, about as many people have died because of this war as there are living in Peoria, or working for Microsoft, or were killed by Krakatoa in the 1883 eruption – or words in most novels, or hairs on your head.
This might actually do justice to the original by keeping the politics and mind games central instead of making it an action flick. (The trailers are in the new H.264 codec, which you’ll probably want QuickTime 7 or VLC to play.)
Certain images sure do catch on. For instance, apparently it’s hilarious or insightful to point out that kids aren’t watching teevee when they’re reading “Harry Potter” (reviewed here by Harold Bloom), or that Mr Bush’s position in re criticism for inaction during the New Orleans flooding is comparable to the position of New Orleans residents in re the actual floodwater. Haw haw!
And I thought “Mallard Filmore” was nuts.
A black-and-white film about an incubus. With William Shatner. In Esperanto.
Any true friend with a copy will immediately let me see this. Heck, I may buy it.
Via my brother.
See also “What is Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit?”.
A good idea but not ambitious enough. More interesting questions might well make it more popular.
J’s a descendent of APL, the one famous for funny characters. Dig Cliff Reiter’s thorough game of life.
A good phrasing of the obvious.
Via Boing Boing.
Via Grow-a-Brain.
Finally, a creepy database of everything you do that isn’t from the government. Via Bodger.
Paul Graham’s talk from the “Arc at 3 Weeks” notes. There’s nothing like a room full of gleeful nerds. (His voice is like a cross between Glowing Fish’s and Garth Elgar’s.)
“We can also see the effects of this plethora of vowels (936 vowels, each able to bear one of 65317 logically possible tones, giving over 61 million possible vowels (with tone)) on the morphology of Winodanugaian.”
Translated from Czech. Famous for popularizing “robot”.
Via Metafilter. It’s nice to hear the tones done confidently, but I think we can assume that the rather fey timbre is a personal feature.
You can call me Wrestling Fly-debate.
Via Bodger.
Via Wavelet.
“Charles Baldwin, a retired environmental-health engineer, explains his role in developing the biohazard symbol, which is now showing up everywhere.”
Most elementary-school textbooks are just plain wrong about how wings work.
The originals were Norse mercenaries.
Via Bodger.
Inventor of the Unix pipe, among other things.
Via Jauss and Grow-a-Brain.
This is where iPods come from.
Previously featured for his Christmas letters to Christopher Walken.
“Fog of War” was very good.
How should you act before you know how to act?
Dylan was going to run the Apple Newton. It’s often described as a lisp-like language with C-like syntax.
“When the atchange program is running, it watches one or more files. When any of those files changes, the atchange program will wake up and do any actions you want.”
Bodger, Noam, and I were discussing this; Noam found the account given here.
“information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics.”
Via Bodger.
I’m with Steve.
Via Julieclipse.
Owner of Ben and Jerry’s, Dove, Axe, Lipton, et cetera.
Elected with a campaign song including the line “he killed my ma, he killed my pa, I’ll vote for him”.
Long but with lots of interesting links. VLC is the easiest open-source way to play WMV movies.
The Red Cross can always use a donation, although apparently they can’t put it to use directly.
“The following plot shows how much I paid for each gallon of gas I bought over the past 26 years or so.”
An aerial photo every 20 seconds for 60,000 miles. In Flash.
“Because they were well disguised, some have even suggested Matsuo Basho, a traveling poet, was actually a ninja employed by the shogun to keep a watch over daimyo, and that haiku he published were really secret codes telling other ninja some unknown secrets. This is a view dismissed by almost all historians.”
See also Wang tiles and the rule 110 CA.
“Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound.”
A respectable CMS – if you need a quick website, give it a whirl. I would favor it over Movable Type.
Via Bodger. Those astronomers are a clever bunch.
136 is the last word on the matter, really. The rest were superfluous.
“Previously titled: Why We Are Invading Afghanistan”.
See also the Wikipedia article.
Barsh is an interesting man but probably sane.
I have some cancelled stamps, thanks to my dear mother.
The USSR’s homage to the Space Shuttle.
Via Slashdot.
“Chainsaw hurled a chair at his human-resources chief, the very man who approved the handgun and bulletproof vest on his expense report.”
In Java. From Metafilter.
Splendid. Dig, just for example, the image-based lighting.
Via Platypus.
Via Grow-a-Brain.
Via Wavelet.
“Whereas most humans are good at viewing the ‘big picture’ of their surroundings, autistic people, Grandin believes, tend to be much more sensitive to the details. This hypersensitivity led her to notice things that have evidently been traumatising animals for centuries in human-imposed environments but that other experts had missed.”
Balanced rocks and reversed time.
“It is our distinct pleasure to bring to you a web page dedicated to those individuals who for so many years signified the highest standards in ideologically-based Olympic event judging.”
An article in The Oregonian about Not Back to School Camp (no, I’m not linking to the redesigned site, guys). Sol Neelman’s photos were rightly celebrated; eventually I’ll find my pictures of him taking them.
A reporter describes the reaction to his presence on a small island lately disturbed by a drug bust.
I grew up on that island (and met the reporter); David Loyd is my father. I find the article interesting mostly for its honest but distinct bias – or, if you prefer, selectivity. Some of the stories recounted as such are not true and most of the people described seem like caricatures, but I think this is to be expected; on the whole the article reassures me about papers’ reliability.
“The Portable Antiquities Scheme is a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public.”
The best radio I’ve heard technically and as commentary. You can find the CD set at many libraries. “The Idea of North” is the best explanation I know of the direction that urban culture lacks.
Strange little arachnids – one of the things called daddy longlegs.
A binary encoding of numbers such that n and n+1 differ in only one place.
“An expansive ecosystem of knee-high mud volcanoes, snowy microbial mats and flourishing clam communities lies beneath the collapsed Larsen Ice Shelf in Antarctica, say researchers.”
Flash. Via Grow-a-Brain.
I’ve respected Penguin less lately, but this seems clever.
Many examples of the mid-20th-century’s Byzanto-Victorian glory.
A college friend of my parents.
By M. Bedau, R. Crandall, and M. Raven.
He subbed in a class I took once and gave the impression of being (a) brilliant and (b) a caricature of a suave Mafia boss, accent and everything. Dig his research.
“This FAQ shows how quantum paradoxes are resolved by the ‘many-worlds’ interpretation or metatheory of quantum mechanics. This FAQ does not seek to prove that the many-worlds interpretation is the ‘correct’ quantum metatheory, merely to correct some of the common errors and misinformation on the subject floating around.”
“PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database.”
In Flash.
With facsimiles of the fairly well-designed original. (The Real Character comes up in the beginning of the Baroque Cycle.)
eπ − π = 20. Almost.
A nerd joke – it refers to this kind of race, not skin color.
He actually means just notes; it’s not a modest title for a whole book. Most of the ideas apply to all languages. Rule 5 – data structures over code structures – is particularly useful.
If you look for what makes Unix good, you keep finding Pike’s tracks. He co-invented Plan9 (a sort of meta-Unix) and UTF-8 (the least bad character encoding).
Exceptionally fertile Amazonian dirt.
Pretty pictures.
I agree. Modern nuclear plants are extremely safe and efficient. Yes, we don’t have a good place to put the toxic waste, but we don’t have a good place to put any toxic waste; it sure beats coal. I think “in Yucca Mountain” is a better idea than “in the air”.
Furthermore, the governor of California wants solar panels on roofs: “A battery of industry, environment, public-interest, and religious groups have thrown their weight behind the legislation, ranging from Shell Oil to the American Lung Association to a statewide coalition of nearly 300 churches. Robert Redford, Edward Norton, and other celebrity greens are also enthusiastically endorsing the effort.”
If political necessity is making Republicans environmentally responsible, I, well, I just don’t know what to think.
Via Julieclipse.
(PDF.) In the public domain in Canada. It’s lopsided and wordy but a good read.
“Sturmwind” may replace “Mr Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” as my primary nickname for Noam.
I wish I had a Preservation Directorate.
Yes, they say; the CCD beats film for general use.
“Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities.”
His son’s books are good.
Photos. Kind of a David Alan Harvey style, doubtless enraging to some.
I’m surprised I hadn’t linked to this already.
What if enough uranium collected in the planetary core to maintain a five-mile-radius fast neutron breeder reactor?
The poor guy seems to have forgotten that group of several million irony-sensitive folks, each with their own World Almanac and means of publication, which we so lovingly call teh intarweb. For further coverage of the wonderful War On Violence, see Grow-a-Brain’s “Visualize World Jihad”.
Evans: we had best look at religion as “a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child would reject for being false.”
Rushdie: “religion today is big public business, using efficient political organization and cutting-edge information technology to advance its ends. Religions play bare-knuckle rough all the time, while demanding kid-glove treatment in return.”
But these are compatible ideas. Evans is describing the respectful attitude we wish we could afford, and Rushdie is not rejecting the model but saying it’s too soon – that Religion-with-a-capital-arr still treats this as a war, not a conversation, so we have to stay loud. I think it’s difficult but possible to both resist and appreciate supernatural thinking.
(PDF.) Having Googled this case a while ago, I doubt that Kovacevic was as innocent as D'Amato supposes, but it’s an interesting article.
“A survey last week suggested that only half the Serbian population believe the Srebrenica massacre actually took place.”
The BBC++.
Interesting nerds. Via Bodger.
I’ve read Grow-a-Brain for what seems like ages now, and Hanan Levin, its proprietor, was kind enough to suggest a co-post. Please consider it today’s edition of Iff, and enjoy the boat-y goodness.
Thanks, Hanan!
Navigating straight to a J2K displays it properly for me, but only through QuickTime.
Contemporary electropop. The members are a model, a graphic designer, a geneticist, and an industrial designer. They interview well.
The reviews are practical and technical. His English is great.
See also Bob the Angry Flower and Tom Tomorrow. Intelligent design provides a perfectly nice way for religions to begin reconciliation with reality; it’s a pity it’s being sold as competition to actual science.
RealAudio, sadly.
How irregular is English pronunciation?
“A categorical syllogism is an argument consisting of exactly three categorical propositions (two premises and a conclusion) in which there appear a total of exactly three categorical terms, each of which is used exactly twice.”
Via Platypus.
The Ministry of Defence conservatively calls it “brilliant”.
I have some time to spend on improving Iff and I’d like to know what you think of it. Would you like to have a method to see only posts since a certain time? Would you like to be able to link to individual posts? Would you prefer that I link to more or fewer of a certain kind of page? Is some aspect of the design annoying? E-mail me or otherwise get in touch.
Thanks!
He was one of the few African missionaries to notice indigenous cultures and languages, and he explored a third of the continent, freeing slaves as he went. When he died far inland, his friends carried his body for five months to bury him in Westminster Abbey.
Noam’s install of Iff. He’s already linked to some great stuff.
Looks good for educating the as-yet-naïve.
“One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.”
UTS is like UTC, only it squeezes or stretches the last 1000 seconds before a leap second and thus avoids some problems representing it.
A good Goon Show to start with.
Platypus and I have this too. I welcome questions.
“In its simplest form, the technique can be used to take photographs without a camera”
Via Rion.
Via Julieclipse.
Mmm-mmm. I sure hope it doesn’t bloat up. (RnRS are standards for the programming language scheme; R5RS is one of my favorite manuals ever.)
I like it, though I don’t use it often.
“Ecological fallout from economic development is in no way an ‘externality’ as the economic jargon has it; it is a positive depletion of real wealth, of human and natural capital. To seek to have economy without ecology is to try to manage an environment with no knowledge or concern about how it works in itself – to try to formulate human laws in abstraction from or ignorance of the laws of nature.”
Via Julieclipse.
Loud Flash. This was the high-end model in 1992; it cost $8k.
Via Bodger.
Marred by a senseless adoration for Real Video and poor spelling.
Via Julieclipse.
Via an anonymous link donor.
A mockery of complaints about Han unification. Warning: PDF. Warning: nerd humor.
In my view, Scala and Scala Sans are among the best postwar fonts, and this is an excellent essay. However, Majoor tends to gloss over details and present opinions as facts, so don’t trust his history as such.
A highway font that gets more legible as driving speed increases.
“When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usualy Discovered.”
Remind me not to be a war photographer. The photos are … really something.
I don’t have the biology to tell whether the thesis is nuts, but it sure is interesting. His argument for the optimality of the vaned micro-eye is especially intriguing.
“Arc is a new dialect of Lisp we’re working on.” I’ve been following this since just after he came out with the idea, and it hasn’t really gone anywhere. I’m still following it, though.
By some accounts, Iceland has the most web sites per capita, and most of them seem funny or learned.
Via Grow-A-Brain.
Ten dizzying theorems in under 3500 words! An excellent value!
Unnecessarily aggressive, but necessary to say.
Via Ari.
From our friends at the CIA.
A gothic algorithm for efficiently sorting arrays by any index if you don’t already have a sort function that can take an arbitrary comparison function as an argument.
Mmm, radioactivity.
Color naming is an old philosophical/psychological/physiological curiosity. As far as I know, there’s no definitive text on it yet; this paper would certainly be a useful ingredient.
Tim Berners-Lee (who invented the world-wide web) explains what makes a URI good.
An outstanding Daring Fireball post, in which Gruber justifies his use of Google Ads.
And you thought the cover of Tigermilk was pretend. (This is dated 5 April; it may be descended from a hoax.)
You ought already to have read the original.
You are not expected to find this appealing unless you live in northwest Washington.
Neat stuff about honey (“with financial support from the New Zealand Honey Industry Trust”, so don’t trust it too much).
Sponsored by Coca-Cola.
“My name is Marianne Rafferty and I have been an Operating Engineer for 19 years now and have had this site up and running going on seven years. I have some personal insights, links to great sites, awesome personal photographs, safety tips and charts and a guest book with comments from Australia to Japan to New Zealand!”
Possibly the only NSFW chemistry page ever.
Via Platypus.
“In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.”
W00t!
Nice survey.
“Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.”
“GARRAYS are generalized arrays, combining the properties of Lisp arrays with hash tables and extending the concept of an index.”
Pick a Pope!
By Wavelet’s kin.
“Dover Cross, he reckoned, looked capable, but he was no longer in the first flush of youth and that was putting it mildly. It was a euphemism.”
Click the last image on each page to continue.
Mmm, ozone.
In Flash.
He also has a page on the Mojave phonebooth, and supports Danneels for pope.
Folks not afflicted NADD think those who are can’t focus because, look at us, we’re all over the place. PLEASE STOP CLICKING ON THINGS – YOU ARE GIVING ME A HEADACHE. Wrong. NADDers have an amazingly ability to focus when they choose to. Granted, it’s not their natural state and, granted, it can take longer than some to get in the zone, but when we’re there, BOY HOWDY.
“I can hardly believe we’re already in another city,” said Ann. “Just four hours ago we were in Chicago.”
“We’re not quite there!” corrected Roger. “We’re in the airport, which is some distance from the city, since it requires a good deal of space on the ground, and because of occasional accidents. From here we’ll take a smaller vehicle into the city.”
A little analysis shows some neat patterns.
A mefi thread on Dubai’s newest huge ill-advised project.
Tempting.
Habemus papam … no, John Paul II is still there as far as I know; it’s just that Pius XIII is so much healthier and more verbose, and, most of all, nearby. Oh, and he’s so reassuring: “Lest anyone think that We are claiming the ‘Holier than Thou’ syndrome, We are not.”
Via Ari.
A little like the liar’s paradox.
Sunlight by wavelength.
Via Grow-a-Brain.
Via Julieclipse.
All kinds of fun stuff.
Really, it’s just the word “biosecurity” that’s so great.
Australia and New Zealand have, on average, the best-designed governmental sites I’ve seen.
It uses wavelets, so you know it’s cool.
He was a good candidate in the 2004 Democratic primaries.
“This site is a listing of satellite images and movies taken by weather satellites around the globe. I have links to satellite pictures at other sites that are well known around the weather community and links to those tha are practically unknown. Some of the pictures, especially those in visible light, offer stunning views of the Earth.”
Everyone’s favorite propaganda tabloid!
An argument that P=NP because the real world “solves” NP-complete problems in polynomial time. This makes a compelling case (a) that digital physics warrants further philosophical consideration and (b) that mathematicians should be kept away from hallucinogens, alcohol, and refined sugar.
Via my brother.
Everyone’s #1 fave Presocratic. Big on fire and water, sleep, inversion, and gnomic epigrams. Amaze your friends with such insights as “If there were no sun, it would be night” and scoffing insults like “Dogs bark at everyone they do not know.”
A clever little function.
Unlamda is a joke language; the scheme suggested actually uses Church integers.
The Hitler Youth’s competition.
A Flash game. Listen to Boards of Canada, play with small noisy forest things, and chill.
Via Wavelet.
Remind me to understand this.
Peter Benenson, the founder, just died.
Java.
“The aim of the simulation is to create a detailed biological environment and a cognitive simulation.”
A friendly tutorial for the programming language Ruby.
Via Zack.
Base φ (= (sqrt(5)+1)/2 ≈ 1.618) for counting.
The invention of information theory. (PDF.)
Now he’s walking around the world with a cross. Takes all sorts.
Brian Eno on what’s easy to use.
Martin Majoor’s newest font. He’s still doing that thing he did with Scala and Seria. References to Dwiggins – think of a Dutch Electra.
Via Wavelet.
A hot, hot garage band.
Hot genius-on-genius action.
The inescapable and involuntarily risibility of someone stodgy saying something silly.
Retinex is the rough analog for images.
“Other developed countries focus much more on contraception. The upshot is that while teenagers in the U.S. have about as much sexual activity as teenagers in Canada or Europe, Americans girls are four times as likely as German girls to become pregnant, almost five times as likely as French girls to have a baby, and more than seven times as likely as Dutch girls to have an abortion. Young Americans are five times as likely to have H.I.V. as young Germans, and teenagers’ gonorrhea rate is 70 times higher in the U.S. than in the Netherlands or France.”
Via Platypus.
Don’t take this at face value.
A classic nutcase.
I like Graham’s writing, but he was asking for this.
Via Ari.
“A cautionary tale told via dinosaur proxy.”
Via Platypus.
A Swiss mathematician! Hah!
A notorious all-purpose loophole in Canadian law.
So what have you done lately?
Via Joey.
“When the Malaysian Communist Party surrendered in Southern Thailand in 1989, there were at least two former Japanese soldiers with them.”
A B-24 ditched over Libya in 1943, all crew lost; discovered in 1959. There are several neat sites about it.
“The stone city, made up of five citadels at 9,186 feet above sea level, stretches over around 39 square miles and contains walls covered in carvings and figure paintings, exploration leader Sean Savoy told Reuters.”
Watterson v. Zero Wing.
“Tom Dobrowolski’s multi-platform collaborative text editor.”
I keep trying for something like this.
This is why election methods are tricky.
All images, 'cause he’s like that.
Works best in Firefox.
Interview with Christopher Faraone.
A fascinating Flash game.
Supposedly those wacko lefties are crrrazay enough to blame earthquakes on so-called “global warming”. Actually, they aren’t.
Via Ari.
Haven’t you heard? Computers are so last year.
“In Edward the First’s time some of the cases remind of the barbarian laws at their rudest stage. If a man fell from a tree, the tree was deodand.”
“Sure, the great majority of scientists are not wanton robbers or libertine, cross-country-killing-spree hijackers. But is that because they have some mathematical-type proof that one ought to be nice? Or is it just because they are a bunch of nerds that would not be able to rob and rape without getting their scrawny asses kicked?”
CS in a nutshell.
“UCW is a family oriented company, focused on clean and spiritually educational entertainment. UCW exists to minister the Gospel of Christ to the Lost and to see lost souls saved. Our long term goal is to have prayer placed back in public school.”
A once-popular editor. Reminiscent of vi, but a sorta-ancestor of emacs.
LED arrays to replace household lights.
Geeks and non-geeks think about images differently.
Okay, so making fun of emo kids is like shooting fish in a barrel, and cheesy pseudo-50s narrated docu-info-mercial-tainment … thingies … are overdone, but this manages excellence.
Ends with “vid Byrne”. Starts with “David By”. Has a “vid Byr” in the middle.
A parody of tinyURL.
Made me go find out what “Kind of Blue” sounds like.
Lane is one of my favorite prose stylists, and this is why.
Accurate as far as I know.
A black beat poet who was silent between the assassination of JFK and the end of the Vietnam war.
“General Motors paid Chumbawamba $100,000 to use their song Pass it Along for a Pontiac Vibe television advertisement in 2002. Chumbawamba then gave the money to the anti-corporate activist groups IndyMedia and CorpWatch.”
I heard about them from Julieclipse.
Yes, that Herman van Veen.
Via Bodger.
Ironic? Heroic? Dumb? Or all three?!
Best. Word. Evar.
“This highly compressed little manual is intended to give an overall view of Greek Grammar without examples and exercises. Then each section will correlate with some point on the larger schema, and bit by bit you can fill in the detailed grammatical information you need, all in the right places in the synoptic view of the system.”
Recommends starting with Homer. Watch for typos (e.g., a rather confusing “test” for “text”).
A story we can all identify with.
Try the old ones. The USSR fell apart! The Simpsons looks good!
“Punctuation marks that look like smiley faces express happiness on a new communication tool known as ‘Internet.’ The computer network is already being used by 15 million people worldwide – to chat or do important research. Communication may be anonymous and isolated, but there’s always someone to talk to about sports, recipes or politics.”
A semi-legendary collection of problems and solutions.
“Why have The Lord of The Rings, Star Wars, the Harry Potter stories, and other tales of heroic fantasy, been so phenomenally successful in the present apparently cynical and disillusioned age?”
Not all computer books.
He also wrote QuickDraw, MacPaint, and HyperCard, three of the best pieces of software ever.
In Flash.
Mos-kau! Mos-kau!
Could be better.
“I would be prepared to submit to the Congress of the United States, and with every expectation of approval, any such plan that would, first, encourage worldwide investigation into the most effective peacetime uses of fissionable material, and with the certainty that the investigators had all the material needed for the conducting of all experiments that were appropriate; second, begin to diminish the potential destructive power of the world’s atomic stockpiles; third, allow all peoples of all nations to see that, in this enlightened age, the great powers of the earth, both of the East and of the West, are interested in human aspirations first rather than in building up the armaments of war; fourth, open up a new channel for peaceful discussion and initiative, at least, a new approach to the many difficult problems that must be solved in both private and public conversations if the world is to shake off the inertia imposed by fear and is to make positive progress towards peace.”
I’d consider voting Republican in 2008 if it were Ike.
Read the EULA carefully.
Astronauts take lots of pictures which, while excellent, aren’t well-calibrated enough to be scientifically useful compared to the dedicated sensors. So they stick them here.
“‘What the hell would he be asleep tonight for?’ I asked.”
Via Ari.
Directed by Tim Burton, with Johnny Depp as Wonka and Alan Greenspan as Grandpa Joe.
You can’t get the bomb deep enough to contain the radioactivity.
Macaca munzala. Well known to locals.
vicious_satire(U2, boy bands);
Oh. My. Gawd.
Via Wavelet.
Jar! Marzipan! Tariff!
Via Ari.
A way to see polarization unaided.
NBC and CBS aren’t running an ad because it makes the controversial statement that not all religions are open to all people.
(How many religions completely refuse to accept someone because of a permanent involuntary condition? I’m really not sure.)
This is a shameful example of my using this feed as a bookmarker: I haven’t read this yet.
One-hour exposure.
A chilly, open Flash short.
“I hate you, Milkman Dan!”
Not … not safe for work. At all. But it’s nice and pixelly.
Ranking from 2001. Via Julieclipse.
“LIMA, Peru - Peruvian police said on Monday they seized nearly 1,540 pounds (700 kg) of cocaine hidden in frozen giant squid bound for Mexico and the United States.”
Spotted by (who else?) Wheel.
Yes, that is a lot of pixels.
A cross-platform cosmological explorer. Worth it just for the wrench at a couple ly/s when the stars start moving.
A very tall building.
“A North Carolina news and arts weblog”.
Loads of fun iff you have Unix utilities.
“PLT is a multi-university group working on advanced programming languages, including language design, formal semantics, language implementation, and programming environments.”
A more exacting digital Bembo. Still rawthah problematic.
A new but expensive highway font. If I were the DOT, I’d only accept stuff in the public domain.
Via Ari.
Comics made to spam subjects. Often excellent.
Via Mossaia.
“I think Bush just spoke to the 51 percent of America that fondly remembers spiking a baby’s heels and leaving her in a jar on the hillside.”
This gives me an idea!
Heh heh. Heh heh heh.
“[B]oth disciplines deal with creating visually and structurally balanced shapes. Both deal with the duality of inside & outside form.”
“A few years ago at Lincoln Benefit Life, he showed poems to his secretary. If she didn’t understand them, he’d revise. ‘I never want to be thought of as pandering to a broad audience,’ he says, ‘but you can tweak a poem just slightly and broaden the audience very much. If you have a literary allusion, you limit the audience. Every choice requires a cost-benefit analysis.’”
“Support for war among the Christians is at an all time high. It tickles me to no end to write that sentence. Christians, supporting war! It was not too long ago that such an utterance would have been unthinkable. We have quietly convinced them that they are, in truth, warring against the Muslims of the world, and that their very existence is dependant upon such support. Our agents amongst the Muslims have already achieved great successes, and now the lessons we learned with those people are paying off with similar success in our efforts against Christians.”
“Employing the laser will allow astronomers to place an artificial corrective guide star wherever they see fit. To do so, they shine a narrow sodium laser beam up through the atmosphere. At an altitude of about 60 miles, the laser beam makes a small amount of sodium gas glow. The reflected glow from the glowing gas serves as the artificial guide star for the adaptive-optics system. The laser beam is too faint to be seen except by observers very close to the telescope, and the guide star it creates is even fainter. It can’t be seen with the unaided eye, yet it is bright enough to allow astronomers to make their adaptive-optics corrections.”
“For 60 years the skeletal remains of more than 200 people, discovered in 1942 close to the glacial Roopkund Lake in the remote Himalayan Gahrwal region, have puzzled historians, scientists and archaeologists. Were they soldiers killed in battle, royal pilgrims who lost their way and succumbed to hypothermia, or Tibetan traders who died of a mysterious illness?”
Pirates!
Iconoclast!
Orangoutang!
Squawking popinjay!
Prattling porpoise!
Scoffing braggart!
Julia said I hadda.
Quiet, polite, doomed protest! Yay!
“‘Wouldn’t reality be what each individual perceives as being real?’”
57Ni-22Cr-14W-2Mo-0.5Mn-0.4Si-0.3Al-0.10C-0.02La-5Co-3Fe-0.015B … all mixed up in a bucket.
“Quozl works in outback Australia as a software engineer doing internet firewall and operating system support for a large multinational computer company. When he’s not doing that, he creates programs and electronic devices, takes photographs, and a few other things”
“At 5 a.m. on 3 October 1955 the MV Joyita, a 69-foot unsinkable wooden fishing boat, slipped out of the harbour at Apia, Western Samoa, heading for Fakaofo in the Tokelau Islands. There were 25 people on board, and the voyage should have taken just under 48 hours, but the Joyita never arrived at its destination. Yet no distress message was received from the boat, and an extensive search by the Royal New Zealand Air Force failed to find any sign of it. Five weeks later, on 10 November, the Joyita was spotted by a passing ship near Fiji, 600 miles from its scheduled track, abandoned, waterlogged and adrift. Four tons of cargo were missing.”
“Escarabajo con cambio de color en el caparazon”
“Geologists have discovered in Antarctica the remains of three ancient deciduous forests complete with fossils of fallen leafs scattered around the tree trunks. The clusters of petrified tree stumps were found upright in the original living positions they held during the Permian period.”
“Unlike any trees today, the long-extinct Glossopteris trees lived in stands as thick as almost a thousand per acre just 20 or 25 degrees from the South Pole, a latitude at which they received no sunlight for half the year.”
Looks reasonably technical.
“In recent years the residents on the semi-autonomous Tanzanian islands claimed that [the ghost] only visited the islanders during voting, such as in the contentious general elections in 1995 and 2000.”
“But to the surprise of many this current ghost has reappeared when there is no polling of any kind.”
Remember when we used to discriminate against innocent people? And we said it wasn’t unfair to keep them separate by law? Wasn’t that weird?
They should really use a less distracting color than black for ‘no data’.
Draw your own conclusions.
Good to know. Good to know.
A landmark of graphic design (and geometry, obviously). One of Tufte’s examples. Via Ari.
This “RSS” thing looks worth checking out.
“Need to Know is a useful and interesting UK digest of things that happened last week or might happen next week.”
M4d qualities.
This month it’s a program(me) cover from the London Pavilion.
I just watched one.
I’m a sucker for a good mapper.
I think the aluminum would be the hardest part. Hmm!
E-Z-2-hack JavaScript for to look stuff up at your public liberry^Wlibrary.
In Indonesia. Small and apparently just barely pre-Holocene.
These people are behind a disturbingly large portion of the new music I like.
A video of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music.
Where ash might go if it goes at all.
Take that, Canada!
Much the same format as the infamous Apple ads.
Just what it says.
Very, very smart.
“He uses the IMSAI connected to an acoustic coupler and his telephone handset to access W.O.P.R. This may seem a little unrealistic, but bear in mind that in the movie W.O.P.R. was also designed launch both nations’ entire intercontinental ballistic missile supply in response to a power cut.”
Built on KHTML; looks more featureful but more cluttered than Safari.
A guy I like uses a law I don’t like to stop people I don’t like from doing something I think they ought to be able to do. You’ll need New York Times registration.
Best of all, it allows infinite character instances per frame.
Usually impressive. Often offensive.
Woohoo!
Your one-stop source for corrections and retractions.
The to-do list shortens.
Via Julieclipse.
This sends a clear message to notorious sandalwood smugglers everywhere.
Via Mossaia.
“The animals, with characteristics of both gorillas and chimpanzees, have been sighted in the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to local villagers, the apes are ferocious, and even capable of killing lions. A report about the mysterious creatures is published in this week’s edition of the UK magazine New Scientist.”
A very good lisp blog.
The subject matter … well, all right. The execution … wow.
“To be sure, the UNIX community has its own measure of technical parochialism and nerdy tunnel vision, but in my experience there seemed to be a suspicious overrepresentation of polyglots and liberal-arts folks in UNIX shops.”
A wiki for the stack-based programming language forth.
Pretend your main memory is a lifo. It’s fun.
Image decompression before your very eyes!
Not bad for a first effort.
I don’t pretend to understand it, but apparently it’s going to compete with gopher.
A little math on colorspace transforms.
That noise you just heard was me using this feed for e-z-grep bookmarking.
It’s a para-meta-www, or something.
Huh.
Intuitively obvious but nice to see spelled out.
“Wrong, St. Anselm! By that argument there must exist a pie such that no greater pie can be imagined, which therefore must exist. Stupid St. Anselm! Mmmm… Godpie.”
A really nice reference for all sorts of refractive meteorological effects.
I did this a couple months ago at home with sound-in from my computer because the PC didn’t have a mic. It was pretty sweet.
It’s political! It’s a parody of a parody! It’s Bollywoodesque! Watch it!
“Where do you stand on women’s rights?”
“Ah-ha-ha! I’ve always felt right about the vimmen!”
“It could look nicer, but a lot of our Lego pieces are otherwise engaged in other projects built by me and my daughter, so I had to scrounge for pieces among the dregs that met the bare minimum requirements.”
An old Japanese pangram.
A pro-life Christian ethicist sounds an awful lot like a … you know … a liberal.
“What does this tell us? Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues; they form one moral imperative. Rhetoric is hollow, mere tinkling brass, without health care, health insurance, jobs, child care, and a living wage. Pro-life in deed, not merely in word, means we need policies that provide jobs and health insurance and support for prospective mothers.”
A Java grapher of the popularity of numbers.
Big parabolic acoustic focusers in England. Apparently they felt kind of silly when they invented radar.
Neal Stephenson’s 1996 Wired story about, um, travel of some kind. I haven’t read it yet.
If there’s one kind of news I go to NASA for, it’s giant squid news.
