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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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