Links for December 19th

New York Times: Nearly a Third of Americans Are Arrested by 23, Study Says30.2% of us have been arrested for something more serious than a minor traffic violation. (I say "us," but I haven't been arrested.) As Sen. Webb points out, either Americans are the most evil people on the planet, or something is fundamentally …

Links for December 5th

Planet Money: Why Burn Doctors Hate Instant SoupStyrofoam "Cup Noodle" style containers turn out to be wildly dangerous. They spill easily, and hospitals throughout the country get a never-ending series of little kids who have been burned as a result of these things falling over. Companies that make short, squat containers don't have any problem—it's …

Links for September 29th

Boston Globe: Worcester woman’s two-faced cats makes the record booksTwo-faced and two-headed cats generally live for days or weeks at the most. "Frank and Louie"—one cat, two faces—is twelve years old now, and is doing just fine. (Other than being not entirely pleasant to look at.) Twan van Laarhoven: Finding rectanglesSolving problems like this is …

Links for July 6th

The Register: Google dumps all 11+ million .co.cc sites from its resultsGood. .co.cc sites are almost uniformly worthless—a hive of malware sites and search engine spam. Andrew Sullivan: Boehner’s Economic Terrorism"For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only …

Links for April 19th

Politico: Half of Iowa Republicans don’t believe Barack Obama was born in U.S.Another quarter simply aren't sure. Iowa Republicans must be some of the dumbest people on Earth. Rubular: A Ruby regular expression editor and testerEnter a regular expression and a test string, and it evaluates the results. Marvelously useful. Reuters: Swedish spruce may be …

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 March 28th

Jim Loy: Converse, Inverse, ContrapositiveI never know when to use "converse" versus "interverse." (And I'm not smart enough—and possibly not pretentious enough—to ever use "contrapositive.") Turns out it's pretty straightforward. Philip Greenspun’s Weblog: How did the New York Times manage to spend $40 million on its pay wall?Forty million dollars? That's just stupid. I really …

Links for March 24th

Data Science ToolkitA self-contained virtual machine with a toolkit of brilliant data analysis utilities. Geolocation for IPs, street address to coordinates, coordinates to political divisions—that stuff you'd expect. But it can also pull country, city, and region names out of unstructured text. It can render HTML and return the text that would be displayed in …

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 …