Some props for Mr. Governor.
A paper by Sir Francis Galton first published in the March 7, 1907 issue of the scientific journal, NATURE. The paper provides what appears to be the first solid explanation for why Google's ranking algorithm, not to mention the form of government we've come to know as "democracy", are so capable.
Interesting. This is the first time I've seen mention of Firefox shipping with Ogg Vorbis and Theora built-in. That could definitely change the horrible pace of adoption we've seen thus for.
Not sure how I've never stumbled on this before. You can remove items from the list to cause require to reload a file.
Rafe on Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project: "... a catalog of media formats that are no longer in use. In many cases, media stored in these dead formats can no longer be read because readers are no longer available for them."
Compare (as in, diffs) the output of 15 different Markdown implementations. Includes every Markdown implementation I've ever come across and then some...
If you move the slides quickly, it feels a bit like playing Desktop Tower Defense.
"... tittle is easily the most likely source, since to a tittle was in use in exactly the same sense for nearly a century before to a T appeared (it’s first recorded in a play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher of 1607) ..."
"John McCarthy, better known to many as the originator of the LISP computer language, called me up to say he would be leading the fight at Stanford to reverse the ban." - Could the man possibly be any more credentialed amongst hackers?
"Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi."
From the comments: "HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts."
reddit.com is running Pylons-0.9.6, Paste-1.4.2, Routes-1.7, Beaker-0.7.5 on FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE (amd64). Wow. Nice environment.
I have a strange fetish for init systems (sysv, rc, launchd, etc). This is the first quick introduction to Ubuntu's new init system (Upstart) I've seen. Nice examples of using the initctl command and writing job files.
What PrinceXML is coded in, apparently. It's like Prolog for large systems: declarative, strongly typed and type inferencing, module system, closures, currying, lambdas, and with a strong determinism system. Compiles down to C (as a portable assembler).
"... Ballmer is an old-school kind of guy. He's not really a tech guy. [...] He's a Big Three automaker kind of guy. And this is a Big Three move. It's Ford buying Jaguar and Land Rover and Volvo because they can't think of anything else to do."
Bill de hÓra making all kinds of sense on the topic of Android, mobile platforms, the cloud, and other things.
"Between 1988 and 1991 I worked on the research program that led to the Mars Pathfinder rover [...] All three of [the prototypes] were programmed not in Lisp, but in little mini-languages whose compilers were written in Lisp."
Time Mag pulls back the curtain on Scientology and reveals the cult for the batshit criminal organization it is. It's about time. EDIT: sorry, this was published in 1991 :-(
Kragen throws some useful criticism at Digg/Reddit: "If you fill your head with 'merely a collection of trivia, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational', it won't stay there; it'll trickle right out again."
Contact based HUDs are coming: "Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have developed a prototype contact lens that incorporates an imprinted electronic circuit and lights."
Why RedMonk is succeeding where other analyst houses fail: "Other analyst firms primarily target sell-side or buy-side. We really don’t see the world that way. RedMonk’s core constituency is 'make-side': the makers and doers, hackers and players."
"A million lines of code is not ten times more than 100,000. It's well-known that schedules grow faster than the code ... so the schedule for developing a million lines of code is 22 times bigger than for 100,000 LOC."
“The Algorithm's coming-of-age as the new language of science promises to be the most disruptive scientific development since quantum mechanics.”
"I have spent many years working on the FreeBSD kernel, and only rarely did I venture into userland programming, but when I had occation to do so, I invariably found that people programmed like it was still 1975."
"We live in a world where it is legal for a company to patent pigs, or any other living thing except for a full birth human being, but copying a CD you bought onto your hard drive is considered an infringement of someone else’s rights."
"Like with unix, cells are not 'spawned' - they are forked. All cells started out from your ovum which has forked itself many times since. Both halves of the fork() are identical to begin with, but they may from then on decide to do different things."
... the primary activity depicted here is standards development, particularly the historically mandated procedure for determining the linear measurement known as the "rood", related to the English "rod", the German "rute" and the Danish "rode".
"Why is the dollar the world’s reserve currency? How does the government fund it’s debt? and what the hell causes inflation?"
Atwood's had a great year.
EC2 is my current pick for most interesting / innovative tech development of the year. Everyone will have to have an EC2 clone by the end of 2008.
Looks like they're bringing the basic capabilities of readline up to the GUI level. Definitely interesting.
Now this is an interesting theory on John Gabriel's GIFWT.
This'll be a fun ride.
"Talking about a software development schedule more than a year out is like talking about where we go after we die. Everyone has some idea where we'll end up, but those ideas differ wildly, and there's a lack of solid evidence to support any of them."
"Maybe I’ll start to believe when they start promoting Ruby on Rails at JavaOne, as opposed to promoting JRuby on Rails at RailsConf."
"... it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must distinguish between the traditional and erroneous modern usage. This is why we fight."
I'm in the middle of Newton infatuation having just finished the first leg of Stephenson's Quicksilver. Did you know they're publishing the Baroque Cycle in three smaller trilogies now? The first is worth reading without any further committment.
"It's easy to make, unpatented and could be added to drinking water. Imagine, Gatorade with cancer control."
I've been looking for a essay-sized historical account of the Shiite/Sunni conflict for a long time now. A former Marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector lays out what appears to be a fairly comprehensive story over three pages.
Everything is made from oil. It's crazy.
Being neither unhappy or intelligent, I wouldn't know :)
Love it! This is less of an article and more of a minute by minute account of hacker seeing something he doesn't understand and following the trail (man, code, calculus) to understanding.
Aaron Swartz reviews a newish book on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Insanely good topic, bad book?
Oh wow. The concept of logical patches is something I never considered before. Darcs has a "record" command that let's you split multiple changes to a single file (or files I assume) into logical changes ("hunks").
Wow, I'm surprised I've never seen anything about this before.
The second way to teach quantum mechanics.
Interesting corollary to Vox Populi. (Via Aristotle Pegaltzis)
Nice article on burnout, which I have to admit I've been struggling with on and off for the past six months or so :-(
Sometimes I think Aaron's brain is my brain in the future. I've had all of these same ideas rattle around in my brain before but they never seem to line up so neatly for me. It bugs me a little.
This is my favorite episode of WNYC's RadioLab and maybe my favorite piece of radio, period. The segment, "The Invisible Hand" is outstanding. The show is now in podcast and the last five eps are available in mp3. "Emergence" is only available as a RealAu
Blame the Babylonians - they used the Sexagesimal system. Don’t get excited - it means that instead of using base 10 (as we do) they used base 60.
Nice little Feynman short on google video. Feynman talking, Feynman painting, Feynman being the complete bad-ass that only Feynman can be... I can't get enough of him.
So I'm considering automating my del.icio.us to just automatically add links with "statistically infrequent" words as tags to all Steve Yegge's posts...
Malcom Gladwell's blog :)
ABC's Bob Woodruff got a camera in there somehow..
Aaron Swartz looks at the productivity problem, how not to proscratinate, etc. This is just what I needed right now.
Paul Graham reports on the first class of Summer Founders...
Some interesting thoughts on Gödel's Proof and its implications on nonstandard numbers.
Holy crap this is the coolest language book I've ever seen. No seriously, you have to flip through the chapters - there's regular comic strips and other crazy non-sense.
More great stuff from IT Conversations. This time a look at Von Neuman's impact on math, science, computing, etc.
"... a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker."
Oh wow - this is the definitive work thus far I guess.
And the hits just keep on comin' - IT Conversations / Tech Nation has an interview with the author of a Godel biography.
Everything I ever wanted to say about the current state of software development in ~50 slides. Thanks, Sam.
Interesting prediction market that uses buzz around different technologies. I split my starting cash between REST, delicious, and Python.
How programs adhere to the basic laws of Darwinian evolution.. Seems to gel with everything I've learned.
Simon Willison showed me this scan of a Newspaper from April 14, 1865. It looks like a blog.
Nice. Gladwell talks about his new book "Blink" on IT Conversations. I haven't listened yet but it's impossible for Gladwell to say anything that is uninteresting.
Cluetrain Manifesto: "This is why we hate you." Hughtrain Manifesto: "This is how we're going to fuck you up."
Paul Graham takes the honest route with High School kids and tells them what they should really be worried about. Great quote: "Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience."
I need to read this a couple times when I get some times..
Doesn't this qualify as a genetic algorithm?
