| memepool rage against the turing machine |
|
| Wednesday Jan 10, 2001 | I'll never use another chippy-breaky CD "jewel" case again, now that
I found instructions on making an origami CD case:
19K GIF; 24K PDF -- from the web site of some mathematician who does neat origami.
to Gadgets by sburke |
| Friday Sep 15, 2000 | Some clever journalist actually tracked down the source of that amazing photo of the fires in Montana,
which people've been emailing around lately.
to Photography by sburke |
| Monday Jul 31, 2000 | jwz's old letter of resignation from Netscape/AOL and Mozilla bears some rereading, particularly now that Suck.com is
calling for the embalming
of Mozilla's undead corpse.
to Web by sburke |
| Wednesday Jul 26, 2000 | One for the Babbage "if only people had listened" file:
Konrad Zuse came up with apparently the first
high level language, called
Plankalkül. When? 1945.
Not stoked enough? He had an electromechanical, freely-programmable binary computer working in his parents' living room in 1938. I can imagine the fights that that caused. "Konraaaaad, I want to put my feet up, but there's tickertape spools on the footstool! And AGAIN with the metal shavings in the sofa!!"
to Computing by sburke |
| Pee-wee Herman to Eric Raymond (ESR):
"If you like Python so much, why don't you marry it?". to Computing by sburke |
| Wednesday Jun 28, 2000 | In a JavaOne interview, Jon Bosak ("father of XML") came so close to up and saying what I've been screaming for years -- SGML is the biggest fucking mess that otherwise smart people ever came up with.
For example, he observes, delicately:
"You know, with SGML, after 13 years of implementation there were fewer than half a dozen SGML processors in the world, and with the single
exception of James Clark's, all of those processors had been constructed by efforts that were Department of Defense sized effort.
So you just look at that and you say, well, I guess that SGML is probably a little on the far side of the complexity we want."
Gosh, a little, probably?
to Computing by sburke |
| Thursday Apr 27, 2000 | It's a whole thing now with people asking me about
the word
"mook" and what it means.
Mook this,
mook that,
mook
mook
mook
mook.
Well, I says you pays your money you takes your chance, you use your word, you picks the meaning.
As Bob Murphy used to say, "they're not booing, they're yelling Mooooooookie, MOOOOOOkie, Mookie!!" to Linguistics by sburke |
| Wanna see what some mook of a marketing/demograhics agency thinks of people in your zipcode? Go have a look-see at the aptly-named
MicroVision lifestyle game!. Just feed in
your zipcode and an email address that is, to say the least, not checked for validity, and see what generalizations pop out.
My zipcode reportedly has a plurality of "very low income young single adults with young children" who "smoke 9 or more cigarette packs per week" and "don't know the amount of money needed to retire comfortably". Wow, this is even more accurate than calling my Psychic Friend! to Economics by sburke |
| Monday Mar 13, 2000 | I just can't cope with the three facts that
1) there's a rap group called Commodore 64,
2) Amazon flags their latest album as containing
EXPLICIT LYRICS,
and 3) that track five on that album is called
"Proof of the Riemann Mapping Theorem".
to Music by sburke |
| Never did I think I would live to see a a deeply heartfelt and inspiring Web shrine to Carol Channing.
Altho partly this is because I thought I was the only person
who'd ever seen Thoroughly Modern Millie.
to Culture by sburke |
| "Know Your Patron Saint"
will clue you in to the magesty of Catholicism, so that you may know that
St. Cyriacus is invoked against diabolical possessions, and against diseases of the eye, and bazillions
of other USEFUL FACTS. to Religion by sburke |
| Wednesday Jan 5, 2000 | Chuck is a chef, he makes food.
He has recipes so
you can make food too. I had some food he made once, hooboy it was good! to Food by sburke |
| Wednesday Dec 29, 1999 | Get all assed-out and fashionable with well-known Korean designer nail-file conglomerate Assi!! Like the site says, "It's the new name that opens the fantastic world of Nail File. We contain women's hope and dream toward the real beauty in Nail File. Fantastic design, high quality, various models, we are always sweating for, are also motto and confidence of ASSI, a beauty creator."
That's Korean for "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful!"
to Fashion by sburke |
| Thursday Dec 16, 1999 | "Upset when our Lord's name is abused? Don't want your kids hearing all the sex jokes?"
So prods the Web page for
TVGuardian,
(an anagram
for "dung-vat air", if you're keeping track)
a miracle gadget that allows you to watch a cast of thousands die in the any given
Bruce Willis bloodletting, without being bothered by anyone saying "God damn it!".
Now that's wholesome fambly entertainment! to Media by sburke |
| Friday Nov 26, 1999 | Who knew there were so many
different kinds of barcodes?
And each of them with their own strange encodings and checksums. to Computing by sburke |
| Monday Oct 4, 1999 | Oh boy oh boy! William Gibson's got
a new book out! to Literature by sburke |
| Saturday Oct 2, 1999 | Again with the trouvés!
Years ago I found a vinyl-covered book from a bizarro religion known in olden days
for hearing the voice of God in AM radio static. From the dazzling art in the text,
I assembled the St Germain of Dada Silent Contemplation Shrine. to Art by sburke |
| One for the trouvé file:
It should serve me right for running an
Altavista search on "metatheory", but I stumbled on a site featuring
some pretty peculiar diagrams, supposed to diagrammatically represent philosophical systems.
They look like what you'd get if
Marcel Duchamp
had had access to Adobe Illustrator.
to Art by sburke |
| Wednesday Sep 29, 1999 | "It's rather an interesting, titillating finding" one fine scholar says of
a study claiming that gay men have bigger dicks than straight men.
And what's the rigorous and careful methodology behind the
Kinsey Institute data that this study is based on?
A survey that
"asked 4,187 heterosexuals and 935 homosexuals to measure themselves with a ruler at home and mail in the lengths." SCIENCE! to Sex by sburke |
| Wednesday Sep 22, 1999 | They're not exactly accurate enough to target
cruise missles with, but the
U.S. Gazetteer Place and Zipcode Files
may be a good starting point for any applications
that need to know where in the US certain zipcodes are.
to Cartography by sburke |
| Monday Sep 20, 1999 | Get yer wordlists, get yer pipin' hot wordlists! Big and free and multilingual, and available for download. (Courtesy of Grady Ward, AKA the Moby wordlists guy) to Linguistics by sburke |
| Al Gore (Gore Vidal's slower, straighter cousin, as well as
inventor of the Internet, doncha know!)
opined a while back
that sex in the media causes teen pregnancy.
That must be an odd kind of causation, seeing as how media is getting more
pr0n-o-rific all the time, while
teen pragnancy rates are plummeting.
to Politics by sburke |
| Yom Kippur is getting
so
commercialized these days.
People forget it's supposed to be
all about the sin! to Religion by sburke |
| Saturday Sep 11, 1999 | "...Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing Soul transpires At every pore with instant Fires, Now let us sport us while we may;..." -- so says Andrew Marvell, the 17th century's version of Smoove B to Sex by sburke |
| They tell me you are wicked and I believe them. to Literature by sburke |
| Stop using the gibberish phrase "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." and use the real thing it's based on --
Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33.
Look for the familiar bits
starting at "...neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum, quia dolor sit, amet, consectetur, adipisci
velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt, ut labore et dolore magnam
aliquam quaerat voluptatem.".
("Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to
obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances
occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.")
Deep, huh?
to Linguistics by sburke |
| Witness a (possibly somewhat expurgated)
history of Tetris,
everyone's favorite "Soviet mind game".
to Games by sburke |
| Feeling stupid? Go convince yourself you're really smart and know all the
words in the dictionary, by poking randomly around the
Collins Cobuild Student's Dictionary,
a dictionary for (if not by) British children. Example definitions:
"cigars: Cigars are rolls of dried tobacco leaves which people smoke."
"paranoia: Someone who suffers from paranoia wrongly believes that other people are trying to harm them."
Comes with sound files so you can learn to pronounce
"thorough"
like a good English(wo)man.
to Reference by sburke |
| Fast forward to the future with snobol4.com!
And be sure to get the t-shirt they got there. It'll go great with your Nagel prints and your Coleco Adam game collection.
to Computing by sburke |
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