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Joke of the Moment What's green and smells like yellow paint? Green Paint. --from Sickipedia, wouldn't recommend going there unless you're really into the mood for offensive jokes by brits. Slate Articles of the Moment For some reason lately I've been stockpiling some interesting Slate articles, never quite getting around to posting them. Ron Rosenbaum on catchphrases. Some phrases that he finds annoying I find cool and useful and vice versa. I wonder how old he thinks "my bad" is? I remember my girlfriend making jokes about it in 1990 (mishearing it as "my bag" and then translating into french as "mon sac") William Saletan on hypocricy on human values... interesting meditation on the division between public / semi-private / private, how the first category often has more to do with how we'd like the world to be than we are ourselves. (Which is a positive spin of good old hypocrisy.) Finally... Paul Collins on whence the semicolon? I must confess my understanding of when to use colons and semicolons is pretty shallow and academic, if that. (But like Paul Robinson says... "The period and the comma are the only lovely marks of punctuation.")
Quote of the Moment "You learn something every day... ...and then forget it every night" --Dromedary's grandma, after he showed "her how to operate her microwave for the umpteenth time"... from this great b3ta top about wisdom from old folks... Brilliant Hack of the Moment --SpindlyQ, founder of Glorious Trainwrecks (who run that game jam I join every month) has made a way of playing the old Mike Tyson boxing game with the GameCube Bongo Controllers... "Mike Tyson's Jungle Beat"! It brings back a buch needed element of physicality to the game. Personal and Professional Geekery of the Moment Here mostly for reference: On kind of a lark, but useful for my team at work, a kind of dumb and slow 3D grapher of test results. But also, a VERY excellent introduction for experienced programmers, Dive Into Python. It's free, you can download the whole thing as a single HTML page... and it doesn't pretend it has to teach you the fundamentals of programming, it just walks you through the structures and pointing out similarities and differences with other languages such as Java and Perl and even VBScript and PowerBuilder. At work people are pointing out I should be using Python and not Perl. Which is tough... I realize I've been doing Perl for 14 years! But with this introduction, I'm digging Python. It's like a middle ground between Perl and Java. The "white space matters" thing is a bit overplayed (just like "unreadable Perl code" is overdone...) you can put in as much white space as you want, you just need to get the indenting right.
Video of the Moment
Like many math problems, the premise is a bit absurd: Farmer Brown knows he has, I dunno, 30 animals, cows and chickens. He doesn't know how many of each he has, but he does know that among them they have, say, 74 legs. (Why Farmer Brown is able to count legs but not animals, and not distinguish a chicken leg from a cow egg, is not made clear...) Now there's the fancy-pants school-larnin' way of solving this: (let c be the number of chickens, m (for moo) the number of cows) we know c+m=30
That math seems a lot easier to do in your head! I'm not sure what the equations for it look like though... let me see... c + m = 30So that's a lot of steps that seemed easier to manage when you chunked things the right way. Maybe it's more like Let a be the number of animalsI'm not quite sure what the takeaway math lesson from this is... maybe it's the use of more variables when you're trying to do stuff in your head?
Design of the Moment
Article of the Moment GOOD magizine's guide to the Shadowy Organizations That Rule the World each one rated by mythical power and actual power. The big winner is the Davos World Economic Forum... I had forgotten about the reporter Laura Garrett's Insider View e-mail from 2003, and how dire the outlook was then. That was right before the start of our miscapades in Iraq.
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