November 2009
29 posts
Did you know that the OED lists "blackberrying"
as a verbal noun?
Did you know that it dates from 1861?
Yes, dear reader, if your first thought was “the act of checking email on a BlackBerry,” then you, too, are a hopeless geek.
If you’re so hopeless you haven’t even figured it out even now, well, the definition is simply “The gathering of blackberries.” (The food. Remember? It’s a type of berry?)
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“No, no, “I don’t blame you” is just a phrase!”
– Emmy
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Cement-based electronics →
Yes, you read that right.
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11-language quine →
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We Are In The Digits Of Pi And Live Forever
I ran across this odd article today (from which I stole the above title). There are several reasons I consider it odd.
It has not been proven that the digits of pi contain all finite sequences of numbers. It has not even been proven that the digits of pi contain an infinite number of “9”s. Past some unknown point, it might consist of an infinite nonrepeating sequence of digits between...
Imagine that a mysterious race of aliens visit...
You try poking and prodding the black box, but (as far as you can tell) you never succeed in eliciting a reaction. You can’t make the black box produce gold coins or answer questions. So you conclude that the black box is causally inactive: ”For all X, the black box doesn’t do X.” The black box is an effect, but not a cause; epiphenomenal; without causal potency. In...
“Occurs check: cannot construct the infinite type: b => Improving b”
– ghc 6.8, when I tried to compile the Singularity
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“intervalation, n. (in-ter-val-AY-shun): a celebration to commemorate the passing...”
– davidad, augmenting the lexicon.
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“Its sensual lines seem to draw the energy of the city right up into its belly,...”
– The New York Times, on a new museum in Rome
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“The chicken doesn’t tricks.”
– Wikipedia: Negation (linguistics)
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How to find the area under a curve without...
Ryan: guess how were taking the integral of these analog functions that come out of the gas chromatograph?
Ryan: its one of those machines that scribbles a graph on a moving peice of paper, forget what that's called
Ryan: but its how we measure the area under the graph that makes it seem really low tech for gas chromatography
davidad: do you literally measure the area on the paper somehow?
davidad: like by counting squares in the graph paper?
Ryan: indirectly
Ryan: but not literally
Ryan: more precise than squares
davidad: ah
davidad: that's good at least
Ryan: it's quite a clever idea for its simplicity
Ryan: we carefully cut the graph out of the paper with scissors
Ryan: and weigh it on an analytical balance
This Forbes article concludes: "This may be one... →
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The Perishers - Nothing Like You And I →
WatchMysterious Swedish Package PART 2!
(see the original at http://davidad.net/born)
[for the search engines: “Being or Nothingness” by “Joe K”]
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Animator vs. Animation →
One of my favorite Flash animations of all time (recently reminded of it by Julia Galef)
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Explanations of selected Java exceptions
IllegalThreadStateException: One of the screws in your computer is threaded the wrong way.
CloneNotSupportedException: You are a clone. Find the original you, tell him what you want to do and then kill yourself.
ArrayStoreException: You have used up all your arrays and need to buy more from the array store.
EmptyStackException: In order for Java to work, you must have a stack of Java books on...
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