When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives.
They chronicle some of the apocalyptic predictions of the past 50 years or so, including acid rain, CFCs, famine, and oil shortage. I think the folks who make these predictions often want to focus humanity’s attention on some important issue. The method works for a short while, but mistrust brews when apocalypse fails to materialize. I think this is what has happened with environmental concerns. We’ve heard apocalyptic predictions regarding nature for so long that a substantial group of people are now convinced that anybody who even mentions “climate change” cannot be correct. We’ve got to stop turning climate change into an imminent apocalypse.
I just finished reading Animal Farm and found a great quote attributed to Orwell by Wikipedia.
The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. … Things are kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervenes but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.
He was speaking sometime around World War II. Someone on Slashdot the other day said that only governments censor, because only they may do so by force. They suggested that other people simply make choices about what they wish to publish. Apparently the author of 1984 thought about it a little differently.
So, maybe a year ago I changed my “religion” on Facebook, because I wanted to make sure I had something in there that really defined me. I settled on “Coed Naked Motorcycle Hiking”, because I like motorcycles and I like hiking and “coed naked” seems to go pretty well in front of anything. Facebook didn’t think this religion existed, so I created a page complete with a photo from Waking Ned Devine. You know, that scene where the wrinkly old dude is riding a motorcycle naked. It seemed appropriate, and I guess I had old shriveled dudes on my mind for some reason.
Star Trek had it right. They were a bunch of peace loving (except for Worf) scientists roaming the universe in a war ship. They always kept their cool when someone faced them down, but if they needed to Jean Luc had no problem blasting the enemy out of the sky.
I’ve been reading Animal Farm recently, and it has impressed upon me the need to maintain arms and a force capable of using them no matter how peaceful society gets. And today may be the most peaceful time in history, so it’s important to think about these things.
Here’s a list of great papers in Computer Science. There are some great papers on there, but one thing missing is the book, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. That’s not exactly a paper, I suppose, but it is one of the most influential programming books.
Regarding books that I need to read, here’s a list of 88 books that influenced America. I need to remember to read some of those, along with The Old Man and the Sea… I guess I just need to finish that last one at some point…
Wired has some great reporting, and this story is no different.
On July 3rd, I installed this exhibition app on all the free computers at the 14th Street Apple Store. […] When the slideshow first opened, it would capture an image of whoever was standing in front of the computer, and show them first before fading into the previously captured photos.
It’s the backstory behind the “People Staring at Computers” art exhibit. This guy wrote a program which used a MacBook’s webcam to detect faces, then capture a photo and send it to his server. He installed it at a few Apple stores and let it run for a few days. Many people think the result is pretty cool (and I agree), but Apple and the Secret Service didn’t.
This article from NPR will be interesting to any chili pepper fans, and to anybody who has enjoyed drinking coffee on a hot day.
“The hot drink somehow has an effect on your systemic cooling mechanisms, which exceeds its actual effect in terms of heating your body,” says McNaughton.
It’s a look at why Indians drink hot tea, because you know, it’s hot there. Why wouldn’t they drink cold water or a soda? Hot drinks on a hot day seem strange to folks in the US; I like to hike with a cup of coffee, even on a hot day, and folks regularly tell me that’s strange.
I dropped cable TV a few years ago, and when I finally got a Roku I started getting some news again. Watching the Arab Spring on CNN International last year, and tuning into Al Jazeera English at any time, I’ve noticed that interviewees from the Middle East tend to use many more analogies than Western speakers. These news channels interviewed folks from all walks of life all over North Africa, and out to Afghanistan, and I noticed this pattern regularly. The speakers had some apt, colorful analogy that they could toss into their regular speech. I was impressed, but it made me wonder what the cause of this difference was, or if I was just imagining it.
There are a lot of pitfalls to using PHP, and they bite new users quickly. “Spot the vulnerability” is a cool site which highlights examples of these pitfalls:
http://spotthevuln.com/ (BROKEN NOW)
Of course, PHP is a pretty speedy way to develop any type of server-side web code. Josh Lockhart has put together a list of best practices for PHP development and tailored it to new PHP developers:
http://www.phptherightway.com/
If developers would follow the recommendations in the databases section it would take care of so many vulnerabilities out there today. There are parameterized database APIs available for most popular programming languages.