October 2008
24 posts
Design process of new 5 EUR (NL) commemorative... →
Fascinating account of the design process behind the new 5 EUR ‘Netherlands and Architecture’ commemorative coin. Python powered realisation to boot!
“The best performance improvement is the transition from the nonworking state to...”
– John Ousterhout
Moving the Earth: a planetary survival guide →
Eminent scientists such as Stephen Hawking have endorsed the idea of establishing colonies on the Moon or other planets so humanity would survive any disaster that wiped out life on Earth. Yet evacuating all 6.7 billion Earthlings would take the equivalent of a billion space shuttle launches. Even if we could launch 1000 shuttles a day, it would still take 2700 years to move the whole...
How I Turned Down $300,000 from Microsoft to go... →
“If you want a recipe for restless sleep, I can give you one. Add one part “what will my wife think” with 3,000 parts Benjamin Franklin; stir in a “beer anytime you damn well please” and top with a chance at financial independence.”
“Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. Almost every vocation is chosen...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich August von Hayek's speech at the Nobel... →
“Yet I must confess that if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it.”
“The decimal numbers called - they are pissed and they want their 2.0 back.”
– Nitin
Sad Guys on Trading Floors →
“Turning the economic crisis into one of those clever internet memes.”
Science fiction without the future →
“Too much nostalgia poisons vitality and creativity in any field. But sf should be especially allergic to nostalgia. Science fiction’s most important contribution to the culture, it seems to me, is not to predict the future but to imagine it. To help us get our minds around the headlong-into-the-future-without-brakes nature of current times, to ponder how to remain/be/become human amidst...
“A rock star is not someone who takes the temperature, who gauges the marketplace...”
– Bob Lefsetz — Jesus Was A Democrat
'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other... →
In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in...
“A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never...”
– Lee Segall
“Any ordinary Joe or Ananda
would be ridiculed for insisting yes
and no in the...”
– from “Until the Sacred Cows Come Home” by Jim Culleny
Devil's Pie (sw) →
Devil’s Pie can be configured to detect windows as they are created, and match the window to a set of rules. If the window matches the rules, it can perform a series of actions on that window. For example, I can make all windows created by X-Chat appear on all workspaces, and the main Gkrellm1 window does not appear in the pager or task list.
Great Thoughts →
I once heard a story about Einstein that is probably apocryphal, but I like the message it conveys. Supposedly, Einstein was confronted by a student who said that he kept a pencil and paper by his bed in case an idea surfaced while he was sleeping. “Do you do that?” he asked Einstein. “Alas,” Einstein replied, “I seldom get ideas.”
— By Robert W. Lucky
“The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted...”
– Muhammad Ali
“Daemon: Bot-mediated Reality” by...
A shattering moment in America's fall from power →
“Our gaze might be on the markets melting down, but the upheaval we are experiencing is more than a financial crisis, however large. Here is a historic geopolitical shift, in which the balance of power in the world is being altered irrevocably. The era of American global leadership, reaching back to the Second World War, is over.”
— Political philosopher John Gray and retired...