Ordered a chai tea today to go with my veggie special from the always-yummy Indian cart near the CS department. The guy who runs it is very obviously Indian, so I’m going to assume that this is reasonably authentic chai.
Some odd combination of licorice and something else makes it taste like tea that’s been [...]
…but kinda cool. Besides, grokking Smalltalk will, I suspect, turn me into one hell of a Ruby programmer once I get around to learning Ruby (so I can play with Rails, naturally).
Metaclass allInstances inject: 0 into: [ :sum :each | sum + each theNonMetaClass methodDict size ]
Metaclass allInstances inject: 0 into: [ :sum :each [...]
The Pragmatic Programmers now have a book available called “How To Program.” It looks like a fairly gentle introduction for non-programmers, though I’m guessing you’ll still have to have at least a slightly above-average geek quotient (or access to a geek) in order to really benefit from it. Of course, you’ll also need [...]
So apparently sex relieves stress (though note that the article contains some contradictions, discussed here) and a “long and passionate kiss” can lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, reducing the risk of a stroke.
Both items via Salon’s Broadsheet blog, which usually has some interesting reading.
Researchers put Demicans and Republicrats in an MRI machine, show them videos of candidates, study their brains to, quote, “discover why Democrats and Republicans can hear the same information, but reach opposite conclusions.”
Turns out people are remarkably good at resolving cognitive dissonance without even thinking about it:
“We did not see any increased activation of the [...]
(For the curious, see Wikipedia: Ouroboros.)
In lieu of actual new content, I just ran across these highly entertaining pants-related entries in my archives, and thought I would share in case any of y’all were also in need of a puerile giggle: Meme Sheep, and May The Pants Be With You.
As a bonus, here’s a [...]
Just ran across this amusing comment in the Point class in Smalltalk:
bearingToPoint: anotherPoint
”Return the bearing, in degrees, from the receiver to anotherPoint.
Adapted from Playground, where the ultimate provenance of the algorithm was a wild earlier method of Jay Fenton’s which I never checked carefully, but the thing has always seemed to work”
I had some trouble getting to sleep last night — our cat, Jack, came up on the bed after a few rounds of puking, and every time he made any kind of noise, my eyes shot open as I prepared to redirect him to the blanket we *can* wash. After a few minutes of [...]
Geograph British Isles is a project to get “geographically representative” photographs from every grid point of a big map of the British Isles. It’s a fantastic example of something that might once have been the lifetime obsession of an eccentric millionaire, made accessible to the average citizen by the reach of the Internet. [...]
Dumbest lyrics ever.
Anybody out there successfully using phpicalendar to publish your calendars from iCal? Feel like helping me out?
[EDIT: Posted too soon. I figured it out.]
The previously-posted procrastination reading came about because I’ve been stumped by a weird little problem where one of my web forms wasn’t saving its data properly, and I was sure it was going to be this hairy, obscure bug.
Turns out, I just called the wrong method: instead of transferring from the form to the [...]
From today’s procrastination reading: “It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.” -Paul Graham
Today’s mail contained a lovely surprise — a copy of the #4 collection of The Sandman, “A Season Of Mists,” and the cover even matches!
Thanks very much, llortsher! I thought you’d forgotten!
*does a little OCD dance, but not really, because OCD guy doesn’t dance, so really it’s just a dance of the MIND!*
Gravity, a Flash game based on the n-body gravitational problem.
More fun than it sounds.
So after looking at the numbers involved in buying the entire Buffy series on DVD, we decided to sign up for Netflix instead. We’ll just add “buy EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD” to the list of things to do after I graduate and find a job. (=
Watching Numb3rs last night, fawnapril and I came to a rather disappointing conclusion:
This show sucks.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m happy to see geeks on TV, and the power of mathematics in the modern world cannot be overstated. But the show’s producers seem to have called up the local temp agency, asked for anyone who [...]
So as I mentioned yesterday, I discovered that I was taking the wrong math class. “Wrong,” in this case, meant “you’re welcome to take it, but it won’t fulfill any requirements.” The CS program being what it is, I have no time for anything that doesn’t fulfill *some* requirement, and in this case, [...]
I just discovered that I’m taking the wrong freakin’ math class. This sucks beyond the telling of it. But the best part is that my department’s website doesn’t seem to be responding, so I can’t look up the current requirements. CRAP.
Okay, I should be working, but this was too beautiful not to post first: Sharon comments cost evangelist $50m deal.
Seems Israel’s Tourism Minister took umbrage at Robertson’s suggestion that Sharon’s stroke was punishment from God, and is cancelling arrangements to build a Christian Heritage Center in Gallilee.
Not that Robertson will learn from it, mind [...]