class warfare?

Bertie’s Aunt Dahlia demands that he give out prizes for the school of which she is one of the governors. He demurs:

“I mean to say, I’m not the type. You have to have some terrific nib to give away prizes. I seem to remember, when I was at school, it was generally a prime minister or somebody.”

“Ah, but that was at Eton. At Market Snodsbury we aren’t nearly so choosy. Anybody in spats impresses us.”

from Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

u-g-l-y

Kempt is usually a pretty decent website, but today they have what I am convinced is the ugliest tie ever.

On Scheme

Scheme, for those of you who don’t know, is a programming language. For the past, oh, fifteen years, I’ve been meaning to learn one—even briefly signed up for a C++ class in college (dropped after the professor provided essentially no explanation other than “This is equivalent to x in Pascal” for every language feature). The other day, however, on my lunch break, I began to read How to Design Programs which is not really about Scheme, but uses Scheme to show you its examples. Here, finally, is a language that actually makes sense to me—largely, I think because the programs read like math.

So, for example, if you want to check whether some number solves all you have to do is

(define (equation x)
  (+ (sqr x) (* 4 x) -3))

and then call, say, (equation 3), which is either equal to 0 or not.

I find this enormously wonderful. I’m not incredibly good at math intuitively, but give me long enough, and it makes sense to me.

I takes my jollies where I can gets ‘em

In the course of my work, I access a mainframe system pretty much daily—kind of old school, but it gets the job done. (Though because we’re running a heavily customized application, I haven’t learned anything about how things “normally” go on mainframes—though I did get slightly interested in Rexx.) Like lots of official systems, this one has an Announcements screen when you first log in. Since the end of last month, though, it’s been only this:

   THIS SCREEN LAST MODIFIED:    SEPTEMBER 30, 2009        RR
   ************************************************************************    

   ******************************HAVE A NICE DAY********************           

For some reason, this makes me laugh every time.

Internet Monsters

DeMaskara

Originally uploaded by DeMusticker

Found this while browsing.

Electromagnetism!

At the request of my lovely wife, I have finally gotten around to getting the wireless router working at the Chittom household. It’s only taken me a year and a half or so. Maybe two years, I’m not sure. For whatever reason, the Linksys firmware on the wireless router didn’t like to play nice with our DSL modem, so after wrestling with it a while, I flashed the router with DD-WRT—and now I have the geeky pleasure of one more Linux-based device in the house (the other being our Roku Netflix Player).

Now if I can only get my netbook working again, I’ll be set.

How many tongues can you get in that cheek?

I’ve never been quite sure about “Jack and the Beanstalk,” where the boy trades a cow for a handful of beans and eventually makes a fortune off the deal. I suspect that this tale is best interpreted as implying that risky enterprises can occasionally pay off, but taking on such outcome volatility also creates a nontrivial chance of being eaten by a giant.

From a NY Times blog post about economics in fairy tales. (via MR)

Poor people get the short end

The New York Times is running an article entitled “Low-Wage Workers Are Often Cheated, Study Says.” One of the study’s authors, a sociology professor, says “We were all surprised by the high prevalence rate.” Really?

Joss redubbed

I’ve been watching Dollhouse. As with most Whedon shows, good dialogue. But, as a big Firefly fan, the best part is that more than once have Topher’s lines—”This feeling? It is not unlike pride.” springs to mind—echoed faintly in my ears in the dulcet tones of Captain Malcolm Reynolds.

Of course, given that apparently one of Whedon’s directions during the filming of Serenity was “Say something Mal would say,” maybe the Dollhouse crew should get Fillion on board. Given that rumor is that Summer Glau and two (more) of the Battlestar Galactica folk will guest star in season 2, adding Fillion would make at least a few more thousand geeks’ heads explode.

The secret number is 312

There are now 312 movies in my Netflix queue. At optimal viewing rates, this will last me at least a year, assuming the postal service doesn’t slip up.