A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages is the funniest thing I’ve read in months. I actually fell out of my chair laughing. That said, I’m pretty sure you have to be a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages to really get much of any of the humor of it. But if you are a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages, it doesn’t get much better than this. Snip:
1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.
Random Fact: Linus Torvalds (the guy who started Linux) and the state of Iowa share a birthday – today, Dec 28th. Linus is 40, Iowa is 163. Happy Birthday to both!!! In other news, I’m pretty sure noticing that makes me a huge dork, but I’m pretty okay with that.
It was announced on Monday that the Star Tribune, one of the Twin Cities two major newspapers, has finally emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Not a whole lot of news there, they’ve been struggling for a while, had lots of layoffs, and as long as I’ve lived here there’s been speculation about their impending doom (you know, being a newspaper and all). Especially with competition from bloggers, who can publish stories immediately and who can update their stories to be absolutely current as new facts come to light, where as, due to the printing and distribution process of newspapers, everything in newspapers is necessarily from the previous day. Perhaps the traditional news industry could compete better if they just rebranded themselves as the recents. The Star Tribune, one of our two major recentpapers. That sounds about right.
But one of the things that has always struck me as a little odd since moving to the Twin Cities is that we have two major recentpapers here, the Star Tribune and the Pioneer Press. It would seem that with the challenges that are facing the dead tree edition of the news, that it would make sense to combine these papers – half the writers / double the potential circulation for each. It would seem like the smart business move. I’m sure there are tons of reasons this hasn’t happened, and admittedly I’ve never really cared enough about ink on pulp action to really investigate why this is, but it does set my mind wondering, to the really important question facing the recents industry…
What would they name it if they combined the two?
Now obviously, they couldn’t just keep one name and let the other one die. Too many hurt feelings that way, wasted name recognition, and it doesn’t really signal the new start they need.
No, they need a whole new identity, something that would really give them a presence that people would take note of.
The Star Press?
The Pioneer Tribune?
No, neither seems quite right, still pretty bland. Maybe we could combine the names more…
The Stress?
No, though not bad.
The Piobune?
No, sounds like a new medication or a medical condition.
What about….
I’ve got it!!
The Pie-Star
Now that would put those pesky bloggers on notice.
A few days ago I was thinking about age differences in relationships. Specifically, what is the culturally acceptable age difference between two people in a relationship. I think everyone has a general idea of what’s okay, and it tends to fall along the lines of a couple years of age difference as teenagers, a few more as twenty-somethings, and the older you get, the more of an age range is okay. But there’s also that fuzzy range. The “not all out creepy” range, but where it still raises a few eyebrows and makes your close friends a little guarded and hesitant to offer any encouragement.
So, in thinking about this, it occurred to me that a better way to measure this would be the percentage of the age difference. I’m calling this the Relationship Creepiness Index, or RCI for short. To calculate it, take the age of the younger partner, and divide it by the age of the older partner. If this value is between 100% and 85%, it’s pretty socially acceptable. If it’s between 85% and 75%, you get into the makes your best friend uneasy range. If you descend below 75%, you might as well get an unmarked white panel van and start hanging out down by the playground. Okay, don’t actually do that, but that’s how people are probably going to see it.
In playing with the ranges a bit, percentages seem to work relatively well because they account for the fairly narrow dating range of teens and twenty-somethings, while still broadening out for the 40+ crowd, and even more so for senior citizens (though let’s not dwell on that). The below graphic gives a thumbnail overview of the range, showing ages 14 to 95 on both axises:
The very, very large version of the above image is here. If you want to tweak the formulas or play with the numbers, here is a copy of the spreadsheet in ODS format.
The formula and bounds are still pretty rough, but it seems like a reasonable and simple equation. To give a few examples:
20 and 23 year old dating = 39 and 45 year old dating = 52 and 60 year old dating = 87% = outer edge of the green zone, but fine.
18 and 23 year old dating = 35 and 45 year old dating = 47 and 60 year old dating = 78% = well into the yellow, pretty creepy
17 and 23 year old dating = 33.5 and 45 year old dating = 44 and 60 year old dating = 74% = go straight to creepytown.
It could probably use some tweaks, but it’s at least a starting point for measuring and comparing creepiness of age differences in relationships.
I’d like to meet someone who can type in such a way that the tapping noises the keys make are timed so that they convey the same message that the person is typing, but at about a third of the speed and in Morse Code.
A while ago at work I was working on a rather dull programming issue. I had been working on it for several weeks. I won’t bore you with all the details, but and it largely consisted of going through a tremendous number of computer generated files produced in an incredibly archaic and unreadable format, and trying to make sense of them, with no documentation. Things like establishing that if a line started with “ARFTJ|PRU|742|X” it meant that it was the start of a customer’s address, and the zip code would be somewhere in the next line. Or that if it had “890-439,UIC,<something>,qw94″, the <something> would be a single letter indicating if the address was new, old, being updated, or being deleted. In filtering through all this gibberish, I was also polishing off my command line skills (as you’ll see if you’re a complete dork and critique such things, they’re still quite rusty in the below. Also, blurred in a few spots for security’s sake). In particular I was trying to find out what all the <somethings> in the above were. At least narrow down all the possibilities to work through. I knew “D” and “N” where quite common, and I had seen one or two others here and there. So, I cut all the relevant lines out of the originals files, and then made an alphabetically sorted list of the possibilities I was dealing with. I have now bored you with the details. At this point your mind should be roughly as numbed as mine was when this popped up on the screen as my result:
That’s right. DINOZ. I think it’s trying to tell me something.
I can’t believe I haven’t posted this yet. Like back in the days of Nrrrd Grrrl. Though better late than never I suppose.
I love this song, by Jonathan Coulton, who is not only awesome for writing great, funny music, but also for licensing his work under a Creative Commons licence, and having a realistic take on how the music industry should actually work. When I talk about how much I hate record labels that make it hard to share their content, and are ultra-unfriendly to the internet, this is what I want them to be like. Dear Jonathan Coulton, please take over a major record label and make them not dumb. In fact, please take over all major record labels and make them all not dumb. Thank you.
I also like the wonderfully dorky class project style video take on the song.
From looking around, it’s apparently originally from a designer call Justin David COX (his emphasise).
Of course my next response after laughing, being a computer geek and all, is that this doesn’t make any sense. The only logical progression is to either copy or cut something, and then paste it. That’s kind of the point of having those functions. I suppose the Copy Paste Dance would involve a bit more flailing, though I’m not sure if that would make it more or less suited to the IT folks.
From reading the comments on the original post, I’m apparently not the only one with this line of thought. From Yudhi:
I don’t get it, after you ‘cut’ something, then there’s nothing else to ‘copy’.. since everything has already been ‘cut’… the only next thing to do would only be ‘paste’…
you dig?
And after that, we immediately find out that the guy who made the poster is a total dick:
sorry you dont get it.
i know how computer works. i assume the same for everyone else, yet they still seem to get the poster. its just trying to represent the band’s name “Cut Copy” in a literal representation, not rewrite the technical functionality of a keyboard. thanks, for assuming we’re all idiots, though
Sorry for being slightly more familiar with universal keyboard short cuts than with an obscure Australian Indie Electropop group. Guess we’re all just not cool enough to understand the deep layers of meaning your fliers promoting bands. Also, learn how to use the shift key, ass. While we’re at it, learn how to properly use apostrophes, plurals, contractions, and commas too. In short, repeat grade school.
I would make a poster showing my literal representation of both the designer’s name and his personality in the same image, but I do have some standards around here.
It’s dorky, it’s juvenile, and it makes me laugh. Almost 10 straight minutes of Star Trek clips strung together into one giant sexual innuendo, in case you needed more proof that Star Trek fans have too much time and sexual frustration on their hands.
I was planning to post a youtube video of a song that I heard recently, really like, and have stuck in my head. However, when I found the song on the singer’s official youtube channel (I like to link to the official versions so the artists get the page hits and all of that) it has embedding disabled. So I can’t post it here. Yes, I could link to it, and send you over to youtube, but I’m not, because this made me mad. I’d like to promote a small independent band, give them free publicity. But they put up a block to make it harder for me to share it with you.
Side / technical rant:
What really makes me mad on the internet is people trying to prevent sharing. The whole internet is sharing. It’s what the whole thing is based on. And (RIAA come get me you bastards) it’s based on making copies. Now, to be clear, I’m all for attributing work, and making sure the people who create things get the credit/cash (double meaning intended) for it, but we need to recognize the underlying technology here (to say nothing of the social aspect). Everything you’ve ever looked at on the internet (with very, very few technical exceptions that I won’t get in to) is a copy. Every time you visit a website, you don’t actually look at it where it lives, you make a copy of it on your computer, and look at it on your computer. What actually happens when you go to a website is this. Your computer sends out a request over the network. This request itself is copied many, many times around the network until it gets to a computer where the files live that you’re looking for. When your request makes it to the computer that has the web page you’re looking for, that computer knows to break up the files you’re looking for, and send them to you in little pieces. These little pieces (packets) then get copied many, many times to get them across the network back to you. Each picture and bit of text gets broken up, and copied from one computer to the next until it gets to you. Once at the bits for a given part of the web page get to you (for instance all the part of the background image), your computer puts them back together into an exact copy of the one on the computer where the website lives. And then, your browser puts all the images and text and dancing bunnies together, and displays them for you. you don’t get to see anything on the internet until you have made a copy of it on your computer.
Everything we call The Internet, is just a way of describing and organizing this copying of files from one computer to the next.
</rant><vengeance>
So, since this band didn’t want me to embed the nicely done, well recorded, professional, studio version of their song that is catchy and gets stuck in your head, I looked around a bit. I found a video of them doing the song live backstage at some show and sounding about as good as your average Stairway to Heaven playing college student after coming back from the bars and screaming all night, and looking about as good/sane too. Don’t want to make giving you free publicity easy? Fine. Free mocking is even easier, and embeddable:
The lyrics are still funny, but it’s amazing what a recording studio can do. </vengeance><random association theatre>
The above clip also makes me think of Benny and Joon:
And yes, that is Captain Jack Sparrow.
Let see you go Norwegian indie rocker to Disney ride in fewer steps.
