Links for August 10th

Cult of Mac: How the Editor of Windows Magazine Became an Apple FanboyA lot of us Mac users started off as hardcore DOS/Windows fans. Wikipedia: Full moon namesThere are special names to refer to the full moon in every month. August's is the "grain moon," April's 's the "egg moon," February's is the "snow moon," …

Links for July 28th

New York Times: Nutrition Label Gets a Design OverhaulSome of the ideas to overhaul food nutrition labels are pretty clever. New York Times: After Aiding Republicans, Business Groups Press Them on Debt CeilingThe Chamber of Commerce threw the full weight of their support behind getting Democrats replaced by Republicans in last year's congressional election. Now …

Links for May 18th

New York Times: At Preakness, Not Everybody’s Idea of FunIt sounds like the Preakness has gone to shit. Their new mascot is "Kegasus," half horse, half beer-bellied man. His slogan is "a ten-hour party to celebrate a two-minute race." That's an event you won't be catching me at. Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: Walker seeks to stop …

Links for April 15th

Jacques Mattheij: Living in the zoneThis is an instructive account of what it's like to be a programmer, for those who don't understand why we're working at 2 AM, or why a quick interruption can be so frustrating. I do my best skiing at the very edge of my abilities—it's trance-like, and a distraction would …

Links for April 7th

Public Policy Polling: Barbour, Bryant lead in MississippiForget the point of this poll—the real news is that half of Mississippi Republicans think that interracial marriage should be illegal. Oh, and Sarah Palin is leading that bunch by a wide margin. Small government what now? New York Times: Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food …

Links for March 29th

BBC News: Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relicsSeventy ancient books, made out of lead, have been found in a Jordanian cave. The text is in encoded Hebrew, little of which has been translated. Scholars are debating whether they are of Jewish origin or—far more tantalizingly—very early Christian origin. Village Voice: Women’s Funding Network Sex …

Links for March 21st

Stack Overflow: Regular expression to search for GadaffiHow do you identify "Gadaffi" (and its many, many variants) in an block of text? With this regular expression. \b(Kh?|Gh?|Qu?)[aeu](d['dt]?|t|zz|dhd)h?aff?[iy]\b looks like the winner. Bonus points go to the guy who figured out that it can be matched with Soundex, which is probably a better way to deal …

Links for March 19th

Wolfram MathWorld: Pi DigitsThe first thirty million digits of pi are almost uniformly distributed. That is, 1 occurs with the same frequency as 2, 3, 4, etc. That's consistent with randomness, but hardly evidence of it. Ludolph Van Ceulen’s HeadstoneThis Dutch mathematician devoted his life to calculating pi. By the time of his death, in …

Is the local food movement a passing fad for the wealthy?

I’m putting on an event for Left of Center on Tuesday night here in C’ville. It’s about three topics that are important to me: food, local economies, and sustainability. Here’s the description we’re circulating: Tuesday, June 2, 7:00pm at Rapture (Facebook RSVP) Is the local food movement a passing fad for the wealthy, or is …

The new homesteaders movement.

All of a sudden, everybody’s getting chickens. It started before the recession, over the past couple of years, but it’s really taken off in the past six months. Acquaintances talk of how many square feet their new garden plot is or how many varieties of tomatoes that they’ve planted. People under the age of 65 …