Can’t resist

8.3 miles running yesterday (1 hour, 40 minutes)
35.3 miles biking today (2 hours)

Yeah, I know I’m slow compared to all you uber athletes out there. I’m just working with what I have

From a webpage about the book Higher Order Perl

 The other reason that the cover pictures are significant is that since my original goal in writing the programs was to impress my girlfriend, the cover pictures are therefore part of the output of the most successful Perl programs I’ve ever written. I wish all my programs achieved their design goals so spectacularly.

I tried that once – I had my wife write the last sentence of my first book for me. I thought it would be a great way to share the accomplishment with her.   Instead, she criticized my sentence structure and completely ruined the moment.  Alas

An excerpt:

        There once was a man who went to a computer trade show.  Each day as
he entered, the man told the guard at the door:

“I am a great thief, renowned for my feats of shoplifting.  Be
forewarned, for this trade show shall not escape unplundered.”

This speech disturbed the guard greatly, because there were millions
of dollars of computer equipment inside, so he watched the man
carefully.  But the man merely wandered from booth to booth, humming
quietly to himself.

When the man left, the guard took him aside and searched his clothes,
but nothing was to be found.

On the next day of the trade show, the man returned and chided the
guard saying: “I escaped with a vast booty yesterday, but today will
be even better.” So the guard watched him ever more closely, but to
no avail.

On the final day of the trade show, the guard could restrain his
curiosity no longer.  “Sir Thief,” he said, “I am so perplexed, I
cannot live in peace.  Please enlighten me.  What is it that you are
stealing?”

        The man smiled.  “I am stealing ideas,” he said.

And another:

    A master was explaining the nature of Tao to one of his novices,
“The Tao is embodied in all software — regardless of how
        insignificant,” said the master.

“Is the Tao in a hand-held calculator?” asked the novice.

“It is,” came the reply.

“Is the Tao in a video game?” continued the novice.

“It is even in a video game,” said the master.

“And is the Tao in the DOS for a personal computer?”

The master coughed and shifted his position slightly.  “The lesson is
        over for today,” he said.

There really is a Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jannsen Adventures

I saw this icon on my plane flight back from Tampa.   I’m curious what the designer intended it to mean.   I came up with the following ideas:

• Men and Women should put the number 0 on a pedestal.
• Do not have sexual intercourse on this plane, or you will have blank-faced babies with stubby arms and one leg.
• When you’re staring down the barrel of a gun, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman.

Any others?

Regarding this story – Is there anybody out there?

1. First, the Drake Equation called, they want their calculations back.
2. Second, 1979 called, they want their song lyrics back
3. Third, the journalistic standards on this article are mind-numbingly bad…. A 0.01% chance that life develops????
   1. That’s per-planet. Think about that for a moment. How many stars are there in the Milky Way galaxy alone?
      1. Between 200 and 400 billion.
         1. How many of these are similar to our Sun?
            1. Unclear, but not higher than 15%
   2. So (and this goes back to the Drake Equation) – how many of those stars have planets?
      1. Estimates are that 10% of sun-like stars have planets
   3. How many of those stars have planets in the habitable range
      1. Unknown, but at least a few we’ve found so far appear to be in the potentially habitable range – Let’s say 1%, based on the fact that 3 out of the 287 we’ve found seem to be close to livable.

Given all of these facts and estimates. How many Sun-like stars in the Milky Way?… Assuming 300 billion stars total, that’s 45 billion Sun-like stars. How many of these have planets?… About 10%, or 4.5 Billion. How many of those have planets in the habitable range? 1%, or 45 Million.

Yes folks, based on our latest understanding of the Milky Way galaxy, there are 45 million planets out there capable of supporting life.

Now, according to the initial article, only 0.01% of those will have intelligent life and civilization… That would mean there are “only” 4500 civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

The latest in retro gadgets.  What… they couldn’t put this in a shoe?

Can you imagine the looks you’d get, walking down the street, talking on one of those.

What retro gadget can you come up with?

Visit this page: http://css-tricks.com/examples/StarryNight/

and once you get there, resize your browser. What a trippy effect.

This is an exceptionally precise recipe. And differs only in spirit from the way my wife and I got together.

The corollary for geek guys who want to meet regular girls? Go tutor math at the local elementary school. You’ll be snapped up *edit* – by an unmarried mom or teacher - in no time.

A leader is most effective when people barely know he exists.
When his work is done and his aim fulfilled, they will say: ‘We did it ourselves.’

- Lao Tzu

Via Fark:

[Obvious] 25 percent of teens have sex by age 16. In related news, 75 percent of fathers of teen girls have one of those nice Mossberg over-and-unders, and enjoy showing the neat laser-sighting feature to their daughter’s dates

1968, meet 2008

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/pod_bay_doors.png

If you haven’t played Portal, you’re missing out on a major piece of the geek-culture zeitgeist of 2007.

This is a great quote:

“Adultery always begins with the adulterer(s) claiming to themselves and to others that the relationship is “harmless” because it hasn’t crossed a certain line. The line where it becomes wrong is the line where you start having to rationalize like that.”

Seems about right to me.

I love it when random happenstance leads me to fascinating stories like this one. Mary Wise, head coach of women’s volleyball at the University of Florida, is arguably the best college coach in the world, ever.

Who would have thought that reviews of a product on Amazon would be so amusing.

Must be that dry British pen humor, not the profanity-laced, scatalogical humor of us Yanks.

http://steampunkworkshop.com/lcd.shtml

Via Bryan Caplan, commentary from Tyler Cowen on anti-natalism:

Most people believe that they were either benefited or at least not harmed by being brought into existence… David Benatar argues that coming into existence is always a serious harm. Although the good things in one’s life make one’s life go better than it otherwise would have gone, one could not have been deprived by their absence if one had not existed. Those who never exist cannot be deprived. However, by coming into existence one does suffer quite serious harms that could not have befallen one had one not come into existence… The author then argues for the ‘anti-natal’ view—that it is always wrong to have children—and he shows that combining the anti-natal view with common pro-choice views about foetal moral status yield a ‘pro-death’ view about abortion (at the earlier stages of gestation). Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct.   (jb’s emphasis)

Sorry..  Better for whom, or what?  How can the word “better” mean anything if there are no moral actors to judge?   Does he mean “better for the Earth?”  The Earth will eventually melt into a pile of slag.  Only intelligent life, acting as moral agents can possibly prevent that.  Does he mean “Better for animals?”  Again, every fluffy bunny, every species of dog, fish, cat,cow, or woodchuck will eventually go extinct, but for the intervention of intelligent life.

Or maybe his position is more extreme – all life is suffering, all life is pain, therefore, all life (in the universe) must be destroyed, so that the amount of suffering will be decreased.   Benetar takes suffering, and places it on a pedestal, as the one thing that must be avoided at all costs.

I’m sorry, but that doesn’t strike me as  either interesting or profound.  If I said “Tickling is the one thing in the universe that must be avoided at all costs”, I could easily follow that with demands that birds be made extinct, artificial feathers destroyed and everyone’s fingers cut off, so that we could all avoid the horror of being tickled.

And everyone would simply respond with, most charitably, an incredulous stare.    I suggest the same response for Mr. Benetar’s proposal.

Very funny for those of us with scars from the last tech bubble.

I haven’t watched the video yet, so I am not commenting on that until I get the chance to see it.

*Edit* I watched the video.  It’s priceless.

One of the benefits of living and working in DC is that I now know a lot more about the layout of our nation’s capital and the surrounding area. So, for example, in Live Free or Die Hard, when I see metro trains that say “MTA”, I know that they’re not Washington’s Metro, whose logo is a big M.

Also, when I see cars driving through various streets, and see very tall skyscrapers, I know that that particular scene is also not shot in DC. I couldn’t say that every scene in “DC” was faked, but most of them were, or at least looked fake, which is probably worse.

It was a fun movie, but the over-the-top-ness of the heroic survival was fairly ridiculous, even for a movie named “Die Hard”. Also, the plot was essentially a recycling of the plot of Die Hard With a Vengeance. Mac-guy Justin Long handled himself pretty well, all things considered.