Homo Sum:
humani nil a me alienum puto

June 12, 2010 11:17 pm

Apparently I could make a packet playing poker with the Swiss Supreme Court.

June 6, 2010 1:22 am

I am very, very pleased by the news that the entire Bletchley Park archive–millions of documents–are going to be digitized over the next few years. While I suspect the vast, vast majority of the documents won’t be of interest to me at an individual level, it will be a wonderful resource for researchers, and hobbyists. (And make no mistake, the fact that people all over the world will have access to the archive electronically dramatically alters the potential for both researchers and hobbyists to actually do that.) And those people will comb through the digital information to extract things–both individual documents, and aggregate results–that I would be very interested in. Generally speaking, I’m in favour of digitizing almost every document store, but as a long time cryptogeek, I’ve got a special place in my heart for Bletchley’s history.

May 19, 2010 11:02 pm

I am unable to resist “obscure words” lists, and generally most of the words on them are actually familiar to me. Not so with this list, on which I knew these ones from prior encounter: agraffe, bathykolpian, blandiloquent, callipygean, defenestrate, mumpsimus, slubberdegullion, and yclept. These, while I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before, were obvious in their meaning from their components: autohagiographer, autotonsorialist, batrachophagous, cruciverbalist, dephlogisticate, interfenestration, and preantepenultimate. And the rest were new to me. I think the most fun one to say, although rarely called for, would be “zenzizenzizenzic“, the one with the most fun definition is “sphallolalia“, and the one least likely to come up in my life is “mallemaroking“. There are several, though, that I could easily see coming up in my life, not least of which are “gambrinous“, “philosophunculist“, and “ultracrepidarian“.

May 16, 2010 1:48 am

Four acquaintances of mine are tromping about Japan at the moment. While I have a very low interest in doing that myself, I am quite interested in following along with their escapades through the Internet. Today, the escapades included ice cream flavours. “But there’s also tomato-flavoured ice cream. And sea urchin. And fried noodle. And lamb raisin. Yes, lamb raisin. No, I don’t understand why it’s lamb raisin.” And that’s not the peak. Go. Read.

May 10, 2010 11:31 pm

While I’ve internalized selections from The Jargon File (well, sections thereof, from particular versions) I have to admit that the stuff in the new programming jargon collection run recently at Stack Overflow is all new to me. I don’t see myself using many of them heavily, but I think I can see drug/shrug/smug report all making their way into my lexicon.

March 11, 2010 11:32 pm

If these are really the 10 most absurd scientific papers from last year then published hard science has nothing, absurditywise, on published humanities. (I’d actually be interested in reading the results of “Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?”)

March 8, 2010 12:07 pm

Yes, I would buy a generic metal album, if the vocals (and narration?) were done by Christopher Lee. I find it quite warming to see yet another affirmation that (and I mean this in the most inclusive and positive sense possible) Lee is just a big ol’ geek.

March 6, 2010 11:50 pm

Very busy this week on birthday-related activities. Regular schedule to resume soon. In the meantime, here are a couple of cool simulations to play with, since that seems to be something I’m interested in this week. First, a physics tool to simulate cloth as a grid of constrained points. Second, a quite cool fire simulation–I especially like making words and images out of wood and then setting them ablaze.

March 1, 2010 11:24 am

Just as a follow-up to that last post, I noticed this morning some recent research which essentially proves that women find the same man more attractive if they see him sitting in an expensive car, than in a less expensive one. Men don’t care about what car a woman is in. (Fortunately for the women of Canada, I use my beat-up, high mileage Focus to help mask the blinding brilliance of my attractiveness.)

February 12, 2010 12:08 pm

What does it say about me that when I followed a link to the website for the upcoming Naked Girls Reading Science Fiction show, I was frustrated that the site had lots of information about (and pictures of) the “girls” who would be reading, but no information about what science fiction they would be reading?

February 10, 2010 1:59 am

The preceding post was brought to you by Crémant St. Nicolas cidre légere mousseaux from Ciderie St. Nicolas. Here’s a lovely picture of it on my desk. (It won’t oust Archibald’s Hard Cider as the champ, but it will fuel blogging quite nicely.)

January 23, 2010 11:20 pm

So, did you read about Hugo Chavez accusing the US of causing the Haiti earthquakes with HAARP weaponry? I saw some discussion of that story, and thought it was a sign that Chavez had gone off the reservation… but it appears that it’s that the story is the result of some shoddy journalism and the Internet echo-amplification, not anything factual. Now the paranoid part of my brain is wondering if someone could cook up something like this on purpose specifically to reduce Chavez’s international credibility.

January 22, 2010 11:10 pm

If you are at all interested in how the business of publishing may change in response to some current disruptive technology shifts–and particularly if you’re interested in looking at the question from an author’s point of view–you should really pop over to Charlie Stross’ blog and read his post there outlining some thoughts on the question and asking for reader comments. This is one of those cases where the “don’t read the comments” rule does not apply: there are a couple of hundred comments there now with a pretty high signal-to-noise ratio, and lots of interesting (and some very scary) ideas are being kicked around.

January 20, 2010 11:58 pm

Looking at politics here, and in our neighbour to the south, I am starting to think that there’s maybe something to the depressive realism proposition. I am too rage-fatigued to post about today’s particular stories, but as usual Ferocious J has it covered, saying what I would probably say if I had the energy left to rant.

January 6, 2010 9:42 am

OK, the latest round of crazy TSA rules had solidified my resolve to not fly into America again (at least not until there are substantial changes in the way border and airport security are run)–not that this is a big deal, since my basic hatred of airports has had me driving to Boston and such locales rather than flying for well over a decade now. But now I have to see my own country make even more STUPID security theatre rules than the Americans? Argh. No books or magazines on the plane? Seriously? The directive is specific to “US-bound” planes, and as I said, I wasn’t planning to get on any of those, but still this kind of stupidity actually makes my cranium ache.