Month: April 2010

NYHRC

my new gym. it has a fricken yacht. how awesome is that?

Against Active SETI

If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.

Active SETI is not science; it’s diplomacy.

1b Species?

The total number of species of marine microbes, including both bacteria and archaea, based on molecular characterization, is likely closer to 1b.

Google OSS Black Hole

brad explains why many many engineers disappear into a black hole when they join google. his comments about infrastructure definitely ring true. the problems i am solving at work are both more interesting and challenging than what i used to do in open source.

Wasp controls Cockroach

utterly amazing with what precision the wasp does brain surgery.

Trusty beards

from the merely moronic (goatee) to the decidedly evil (pencil thin mustache)

Typeface Decision Chart

with comic sans of course.

Gratuitous API Differences

I think it’s safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS. It’s full of all kinds of idiocy like this — Here’s how it goes on the desktop: NSColor fg = [NSColor colorWithCalibratedHue:h saturation:s brightness:v alpha:a]; [fg getRed:&r green:&g blue:&b alpha:&a]; [fg getHue:&h saturation:&s brightness:&v alpha:&a]; But on the phone: UIColor fg = [UIColor colorWithHue:h saturation:s brightness:v alpha:a]; const CGFloat *rgba = CGColorGetComponents ([fg CGColor]); // Oh, you wanted to get HSV? Sorry, write your own. It’s just full of nonsense like that. Do you think someone looked at the old code and said, “You know what, to make this code be efficient enough to run on the iPhone, we’re going to have to rename all the classes, and also make sure that the new classes have an arbitrarily different API and use arbitrarily different arguments in their methods that do exactly the same thing that the old library did! It’s the only way to make this platform succeed.”

jwz on the gratuitous api differences between osx and iphone / ipad

Volcano & Air Travel

last time the eruption lasted for months. this would kill european airlines, business travel and tourism at the very least.

Al-Qaida Scammed

How, exactly, do you run a nuclear scam? It was a lucrative line of business for criminal groups in the former Soviet Union. “Sometimes they’re criminal gangs that have information that some material had come out from the, let’s say, the area of the former Soviet Union or some stockpiles and they will try to provide that material to other groups to sell. A lot of it is scam, you know, red mercury, whatever else.”

Russian mobsters scamming al-qaida repeatedly. lololol