Random links
Random links I’ve enjoyed over the past week or two:
- A great description of search, and search quality challenges, as applied to Google’s web search. (via kottke).
- Mr. Lee Catcam. Cat + Camera = genius. Be sure to check out the photo tours too. (via Greg via IM).
- Mark Pilgrim: One year with Linux. “When your operating system finally comes with a package management system that is both comprehensive and extensible, you will of course be welcomed… to the 1990s. In the meantime, I’ll continue to enjoy my time with Linux.” I’ve always thought it was crazy that neither Microsoft nor Apple have managed to open up their platform’s autoupdate services to third parties.
- Pulp Fiction, Jedi Edition. (Wow, Pulp Fiction was 1994? I feel old). I can’t mention that without also mentioning Pulp Fiction in Typography. Genius, both of them.
- Andrew Sullivan: “Verschärfte Vernehmung”. “The very phrase used by [President Bush] to describe torture-that-isn’t-somehow-torture — “enhanced interrogation techniques” — is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes.” (via kottke). I’m glad I don’t live under this kind of oppressive regime — though of course Britain does have the dubious honour of holding the records for both the largest number of CCTV cameras per country (ref) and the largest DNA database per country (ref). Oh, and we have the recently-established Ministry of
LoveJustice to worry about as well. - Ian Hickson: The CSS working group is irrelevant. Ouch, but he’s right.
- Boing Boing: Amazing mystery of the new AACS key leak. Well, that’s one way to leak an encryption key, I guess.
- The Science Creative Quarterly: The Social Norm of Leaving the Toilet Seat Down: A Game Theoretic Analysis. “In this paper, we internalize the cost of yelling and model the conflict as a non-cooperative game between two species, males and females.” Heh.
- Pharyngula, reporting on The Creation Museum. “Did man walk among dinosaurs? NO.” But there’s a ‘museum’ in Cincinnati that will tell you otherwise. Best quote, from the Washington Post: “For the biblical account to be accurate and the world to be so young, several hundred years of research in geology, physics, biology, paleontology, and astronomy would need to be very, very wrong.”
- Java theory and practice: Fixing the Java Memory model (also part 2).
synchronize
places read and write memory barriers at monitor entry and exit time — who knew? (Thanks, Miles).