January 2009
82 posts
Cornify - Unicorns & Rainbows On-Demand →
Champion of Guitars →
Guitar Hero, except it’s a text adventure. Created by Bill Meltsner, a hoopy frood I know from Simon’s Rock, it recently got some attention.
Clinton-era Whitehouse.gov →
My name as a color
Warning: this is not interesting to anyone but me.
I just found the “custom topbar color” feature at Hacker News (whoo hoo), and I was trying to decide what to change it to, when I realized that I could change it to my name! If I spell it as “Jeb”, then I can get the hexadecimal ASCII values for each of the letters and concat them to get the hex color #4a6562.
Kurt Gödel: A Contradiction in the U.S.... →
Morgenstern’s descriptions of Einstein and Gödel are neat to read. Gödel seems really naive, and Einstein is a bit meaner than I would’ve imagined.
Szilard's 10 Commandments →
Biography is tragedy.
Unthinkable Futures →
A neat list of improbable future scenarios.
France offers free newspaper subscriptions for... →
support for newspaper deliveries and a doubling of its annual print advertising outlay amid a swelling industry crisis.
All Souls: The toughest test you’ll ever take →
Probability lessons may teach children how to... →
The article is okay, but the principles at the bottom (Ctrl+F reality check) are pretty useful. I’ve observed them being violated many times Some of those observations were of myself. I won’t say how many.
carpalx - keyboard layout optimizer →
“Carpalx optimizes keyboard layouts to make typing require less physical effort and cause less wrist and carpal strain. Use different training sets to generate an optimal layout for all tasks.”
“There’s a strong possibility Barack will pursue a career in politics.”
– Political Punch: Sacre Bleu! Le Monde Publishes Never-Before-Seen 1996 Interview With Obamas About Their Marriage
Kinda neat, it’s not often you find these kinds of apolitical peeks into famous peoples’ lives.
“There are 27 million slaves in the world today.”
– Free the Slaves - Home
LittleSis » Profiling the powers that be →
“LittleSis is an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you.”
One Room Configured 24 Ways →
Wow, this is really cool. They should’ve put a video up, though.
Legends of Zork - The legendary adventure returns,... →
Oh dear.
Buffalo, MN Chamber of Commerce | Buffalo,... →
I came across this on a design showcase site, and I must say that I’m impressed. It’s not that the site is anything outstanding—it’s really not—but it’s not butt ugly, which is refreshing for this kind of organization.
“Amazingly, within 48 hours the car was left in the exact spot where it was taken...”
– This quote is beautifully inspirational; to earn that kind of respect without using fear and without trying is a feat few ever live up to. 15 reasons Mr. Rogers was best neighbor ever
2.5 Is it reasonable to propose incompatible changes to Python?
In general, no. There are already millions of lines of Python code around the world, so any change in the language that invalidates more than a very small fraction of existing programs has to be frowned upon. Even if you can provide a conversion program, there’s still the problem of updating all documentation; many books have...
Temp Job in Paradise Pays $100,000 →
Site Design Might Be Broken
Just thought I should probably mention this: I didn’t test my new layout in other browsers or operating systems or even other window sizes (actually, it’ll probably break if you shrink it too much… yep, it does. Okay, I put in a quick fix for now, but it’s going to put a horizontal scrollbar up if your window is less than 1100 pixels wide.). However, I have not the...
My Personal Programming Patois
I’ve been hacking away for a couple of days on a fun little project. I’m building a computation modeling system/programming language that brings together dynamic/duck typing, lazy evaluation, Lisp-style macros, purely functional computing, “true” extensible syntax (as in, not Lisp “extensible syntax”, but allowing for fully context-sensitive syntax definition)...
Quick Update
It’s been a couple of days since I’ve posted a general update, so I figure I should. The first change you’ve probably noticed; I gave the ol’ blog a bit of a visual update. I really just mutated the original, so I can’t claim full credit (the original was just the default Tumblr template), but I think it’s a nice change. There’s more to come, so look...
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a...”
– Robert A. Heinlein
The History of Python →
There are only two posts so far, but this looks to be a good read: the history of Python, straight from its creator, Guido van Rossum.
“Thus, the average car driven for one kilometer (0.6 miles for those of in the...”
– Official Google Blog: Powering a Google search
When Jesus met Buddha →
The Loss Response - Down and Out — or Up -... →
