October 2009
35 posts
2 tags
GNU libc: System V contexts →
So apparently the C language includes continuations. This is totally awesome.
Oct 31st
2 tags
Swiftweasel →
Score 1 for Arch Linux. It’s like Firefox, but fast.
Oct 30th
1 tag
“Zenity is a tool that allows you to display Gtk+ dialog boxes[…]It comes...”
– http://freshmeat.net/projects/zenity
Oct 29th
“To launch my study, I placed advertisements in national newspapers and...”
– Richard Wiseman, via telegraph.co.uk
Oct 29th
2 tags
Oct 29th
1 note
2 tags
Emily: The smartest creatures alive...Terence Tao, Stephen Hawking, and my cat.
davidad: Your cat?
Emily: My cat is a super-genius. She's just hampered because she doesn't have a larynx to make human sounds, or opposable thumbs.
davidad: Ah. Well, Stephen Hawking doesn't have those things either.
Oct 27th
1 note
Oct 23rd
2 tags
Oct 23rd
2 tags
Oct 22nd
2 tags
“If you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything.”
– John Tukey (via Julia Galef)
Oct 20th
1 tag
"Fig. 31: Technical details of the group of...
If this caption piques your interest, you might consider finding a copy of the excellent book “Automata: A Historical and Technological Study” by Alfred Chapuis and Edmond Droz. Other chestnuts include “Fig. 166: Death preventing the corpse from leaving his coffin,” “Fig. 284: Pipes, cog-wheels and buffers making the cock crow,” “Fig. 322: The hot-air...
Oct 20th
Passenger: That is one jumbo-ass airplane.
Oct 20th
sinfest.net
One of the better webcomics - I used to follow it, forgot about it, got linked to it recently, and I think I’m going to start reading it again. (At my peak I read about 40 webcomics regularly; recently I’ve trimmed down to just xkcd, Questionable Content, Dinosaur Comics, and Girl Genius [plus Dresden Codak, but that’s hardly “regular”].)
Oct 19th
Oct 16th
2 tags
Karan: I have an exam tonight, lame.
davidad: in what?
Karan: Fluid Dynamics
davidad: ah
davidad: should be a breeze
Oct 15th
1 tag
Dream Car: Marussia B1
The first supercar to come out of Russia, it looks amazing on the outside: The dashboard is beautiful, at least if you appreciate LCD screens, like I do: And it’s packed with all kinds of electronic goodies, including a windshield projector, in-cabin webcam, and WiMax internet connection, allowing for Skype calls on the go using the built-in Linux PC with a Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and a...
Oct 15th
1 tag
Oct 15th
Wolfram|Alpha Homework Day →
While this may be a good idea, it seems like a terrible idea.
Oct 15th
“Thought he, the ancient errant knights Won all their ladies’ hearts in...”
– Samuel Barber, Esq., in Hudibras (c. 1678)
Oct 15th
Top cities visiting this blog so far
Cambridge, MA. (Myself, mostly, I suppose…) Wellesley, MA. Columbia, MD. Bennington, VT. Bristol, RI. Allston, MA. Fairfield, IA. Berkeley, CA. Holliston, MA. And 25 other cities that had less than 2 visits each (that is to say, one visit), including Reno, Portland, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.  I wonder if I need to generate some original content that...
Oct 14th
Finland makes 1Mb/s broadband a legal right →
They say that they plan to require 100Mb/s by 2015. (Do note, however, that 1Mb/s, or one megabit per second, is equivalent to 128KB/s, or 128 kilobytes per second.)
Oct 14th
2 tags
S: Guess who they got to headline the origami convention this year!
P: Ben Folds?
Oct 14th
Oct 13th
1 tag
Sweden's Internet b0rked →
Oct 13th
Luke: see ya later
davidad: k nye
davidad: *bye
Luke: the science bye?
Oct 13th
2 tags
ListenA short theme from the Wizard of Oz, sung a...
Oct 10th
Ryan: hmph
Ryan: all the cool elements are radioactive
Oct 9th
1 tag
Oct 9th
1 tag
"The Boxer," covered by The King's Singers →
A pretty song sung a cappella by pretty voices.
Oct 9th
1 tag
ThoughtTreasure: A natural language/commonsense... →
This system looks exceedingly nifty, but unfortunately, the author’s website, signiform.com, is down, so I can’t find anywhere to download the code, or to interact with the system directly.
Oct 8th
1 tag
“In 2009, Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) claimed in an editorial:...”
– from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking
Oct 8th
1 tag
Oct 8th
1 tag
Oct 8th
1 tag
Human Voice from Mechanical Piano →
The actual principles at work here are discussed by the composer at http://ablinger.mur.at/docu11.html
Oct 8th
1 tag
Brain Music
I want to make a brain-controlled musical instrument… (see http://www.emotiv.com/ResearchPlus.html) Any ideas and/or funding? :D I’ve always loved to pick up new musical devices or even objects that weren’t intended to be musical and get melodies (or at least rhythms) out of them. This would be a completely new dimension to that - and might even be a way to train my brainwaves...
Oct 7th