Month: November 2014

Book of Legendary Lands

new umberto eco!

The Book of Legendary Lands an illustrated voyage into history’s greatest imaginary places, with all their fanciful inhabitants and odd customs, on scales as large as the mythic continent Atlantis and as small as the fictional location of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment. A dynamic tour guide for the human imagination, Eco sets out to illuminate the central mystery of why such utopias and dystopias appeal to us so powerfully and enduringly, what they reveal about our relationship with reality, and how they bespeak the quintessential human yearning to make sense of the world and find our place in it

Landing on a comet

Humans are awesome the 1% of the time they’re not slobbering idiots.

Woo-hoo! Philae is on the comet! Humanity’s little lander has made it.

breaking the 4th wall

the most uplifting part? jj abrahams quit!

Shingy

He is passionate about spaces, and when a space is not working he reboots it, taking everything out and starting over. “This is a space I recently rebooted for Tim”—meaning Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL. “Do you like the scent? I still need to put some sound in here”. Armstrong looked around. “I have meetings here, and people don’t know where to sit”. “They’ll figure it out, man”.

it’s not clear who is trolling whom.

Beer & cheese cave

In times of persecution, beer nerds throughout the ages hid in caves. So it was this weekend

God managing the Rapture

crapware is deadly

The $9b Witness

Holder’s Justice Department struck a series of deals: cash for secrecy. The banks paid big fines, without trials, only secret negotiations that ended with vague, quasi-official papers called “statements of facts,” which were conveniently devoid of anything like actual facts.

turns out the change we can believe in was not what you thought when you naively cast your vote in 2008, and again in 2012.

Speech demo

nice speech demo by my teammate john dimm just tell it a story, or try to bring up a picture of a toaster without actually saying toaster.

here’s a video about how it works:Fun with Speech – John Dimm

with a bit more work to reduce latency, this could be a very fun drinking game 🙂

Fuzzing JPEGs

With instrumented, generational fuzzing, lesser-known features (e.g., progressive, black-and-white, or arithmetic-coded JPEGs) can be discovered and locked onto without requiring a giant, high-quality corpus of diverse test cases to seed the fuzzer with.

This is how we’ll accidentally awaken the elder gods.

zero G water bubbles

those are some good shenanigans