A Natural Progression
In Europe more so than the US, men’s restrooms utilize troughs instead of urinals. Depite the reduced privacy, these are a good idea for bars and such where good aim is in short supply. I have always thought that as a natural extension of this the entire floor should be…
Delicious Snowballs
He slumped down into a plastic, vacant rail station seat across from me, pausing for a moment as if to contemplate the enormity of the task he was about to undertake. His right hand held a European citrus soda while a package of six snowballs dangled from his right. Go…
Yavin 4 = Tikal
This morning while watching Star Wars, Episode 4, I noticed the skyline of Yavin 4 – the rebel base from which was launched the final attack on the Death Star – was familiar. It is a view from the top of one of the stepped pyramids at Tikal in Guatemala….
Fear begets subjection
In Dune Frank Herbert wrote, “fear is the mind killer.” Humans are designed to fear; it is a good evolutionary trait that kept us alive and away from velociraptors. However, it is reactionary and comes with the cost of loss of prescience. I would go so far at to surmise…
What I learned today
When typing in a bash shell, one can fix typos on a previous line with the ^ symbol. For example, “^wong^wang” will replace “wong” with “wang” in the last command and re-execute it. That’s amazing! http://lifehacker.com/5698494/quickly-fix-command-line-mistakes-with-the–symbol heh…wang.
What I learned today
If one picks a number at random from the universe, there is a 30% chance that the first digit will be 1. How awesome is that? For example, pick up any science text and tally the occrances of each of the nine digits starting a number (0 does not count)….
Today I learned
Today, I learned the awesomeness of the “*” printf formatting rule. printf(“%*c”, 5, ‘t’) will print 5 tabs. Behold, I no longer need employ loops for indenting!
I dream of diff e q
One of my dreams last night involved me solving a partial differential equation in extensive detail. That is pretty nerdy by itself, but the result of completing the derivation was unlocking some sort of pornography.
Today I learned
I learned that the Cromwell Diner has the spiciest omelet I have ever eaten – spicy in a way that melts intestines.