29 Jul 06 Comedic Insigts: zefrank
Warning: If you are offended by foul language and crude humor (and you know who you are), then you may not want to watch this video.
Possibly against my better judgement, I have posted a link to this video – despite the foul language – because zefrank has some really good insights into the nature of understanding and managing complexity.
He said it best when he said (paraphrase): My strategy as a child [for managing complexity] was to play around with something until I understood the core of that something; its essence. Once I understood that, I could then explore various facets of that something that I happen to be interested in.
Tags: complexity
24 Jul 06 McRudy
Both Senator John McCain and former-Mayor Rudy Giuliani present obstacles to getting my vote that seem to me to be insurmountable. I suspect that there are a large number of people in the conservative & libertarian camp that would agree with me.
An entire book could be written on this topic. No doubt that if there haven’t been already, there will be someday. For me, though, it boils down to a few simple issues that I just can’t compromise on.
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14 Jul 06 Nifty utility for POSIX systems
It’s called bar. It seems to be a nifty little script that does what you would normally do with simple invocations of cat, tar, and cp, but it prints a progress bar.
Like this:
Tags: programming
07 Jul 06 Superman Physics
Do you ever find yourself critiquing the portrayal of physics in movies and comics that are obviously fantasy-based? For example, do you find yourself wondering how Superman can generate enough energy to produce ocular heat-rays/lasers that can burn through steel and melt glass, but accept uncritically the notion that he can produce such phenomena in the first place?
Similarly, do you find yourself wondering how fast could Superman actually fly?
I do, and I love it. It drives my wife crazy [from my editor: "...because she lives in reality while I, on the other hand, do not."], because she doesn’t make it past those base assumptions that people like me are willing to swallow uncritically.
It’s a fascinating intellectual exercise. There are some physicists that also enjoy applying science to fantasy. Some of the things I’ve often wondered about:
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Tags: fantasy, physics, superman
05 Jul 06 The Essence of Chess
From zefrank.com:
It is important to understand that you don’t win these kinds of games by trapping or surprising the opponent. You win by doing a deeper analysis at each move so that you are more likely to become aware of favorable deviations from previously analysed lines before your opponent.
05 Jul 06 Photo Essay of DPRK (North Korea)
Below is a link to a really fantastic photo essay of North Korea, including photos that weren’t supposed to be taken. The forum also includes comments that explain the context of the pictures.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?t=82755
02 Jul 06 First Things in my .emacs
Pardon the extra linebreaks. I don’t normally format my lisp code this way, but the layout of my blog makes this snippet linewrap and hard to read.
(global-font-lock-mode t) (defvar autosave-dir "~/.emacs.d/autosave") (make-directory autosave-dir t) (defun auto-save-file-name-p (filename) (string-match "^#.*#$" (file-name-nondirectory filename))) (defun make-auto-save-file-name () (concat autosave-dir (if buffer-file-name (concat "#" (file-name-nondirectory buffer-file-name) "#") (expand-file-name (concat "#%" (buffer-name) "#"))))) (defvar backup-dir "~/.emacs.d/backup") (make-directory backup-dir t) (setq backup-directory-alist (list (cons "." backup-dir)))
