Linux on the iPhone! “I’m pleased to announce that the Linux 2.6 kernel has been ported to Apple’s iPhone platform, with support for the first and second generation iPhones as well as the first generation iPod touch.”

Nihilist Mints, Nihilists don’t believe in flavor! Each sleek, black 3” × 3/4” × 5/8” tin contains sixty completely flavorless mints.

MoOM, the Museum of Online Museums.

This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 272), featuring shots of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

Good editors aren’t better or worse, just different, Chris Siebenmann hits the nail on the head. Also see My sign of a good graphical interface and its comments.

Plan 9 coding conventions for C

Notes on some favorite subjects, by Tom Duff. Dive in.

GMail 2: monospace font for non-HTML mails at userstyles.org.

Aloe by Discoh.

Penrose Tiling in NodeBox.

The Girl Effect

Lebedev’s pyramid

List of algebraic structures, a great overview at Wikipedia.

The World’s Most Perfect Script, “Hangul is comprised of 51 jamo, or phomenic units, whose shapes are highly organized. Simple consonants are linear (ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅎ), vowels are horizontal or vertical lines (ㅏ, ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅜ, ㅡ, ㅣ), glottalized letters are doubled (ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ), and so on.”

The systematic construction of a one-combinator basis (PDF), by J. Fokker. A single closed λ-expression that generates all λ-expressions is constructed.

Wojciech Kosma microphone fellatio, awesome.

Mathematica on Amazon EC2, it’s as simple as ParallelEvaluate[...].

Processing 1.0 has been released.

The Case of M. S. El Naschie, Continued, by John Baez.

A fork in the road, Stikkit and I Want Sandy close down, Rael Dornfest goes to Twitter. Congratulations! But: Leaving users two weeks time before shutting down services is far too late and exactly the reason I don’t trust the Web 2.0 for the essential things.

How Fortran Was Developed, that’s actually how most languages were developed…

Chaos Computer Club fordert Erhalt der Freiheit im Netz, ich auch.

We have Good news, and we have Bad news, Gilad Bracha: Newspeak to be released, but funding has been discontinued.

HOPL III: The When, Why and Why Not of the BETA Programming Language

1945 Lost German Girl

Bowling balls, Chung-chieh Shan on the bowling ball dropping puzzle: “I found it easier to define a stream coinductively than to define a function from natural numbers inductively.”

nLab, the n-Category Café gets a wiki. Help fill it!

Calendar About Nothing: Tracking Open Source Contributions, The Calendar About Nothing generates a “Seinfeld Calendar” from your public “Github” feed.

I wish I were the Moon, extended edition with secret endings.

Living and Learning with New Media: Findings from a 3-year Ethnographic Study of Digital Youth, danah boyd presents the results of their research.

Guy Steele & Richard Gabriel: 50 in 50, awesome talk at JAOO. Must see.

Scooping The Loop Snooper (PDF), a proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable. By Geoffrey K. Pullum.

pcc, the Portable C Compiler, “The project goal is to write a C99 compiler while still keeping it small, simple, fast and understandable.”

Palace of pain…, Terry Eagleton on a gripping account of the Wittgenstein madhouse. Recommended reading.

Die Wacht am Rhein, Überlegungen zu drei Liedern. Von Walter Mossmann.

The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway, by Paul Shaw.

allRGB, “The objective of allRGB is simple: To create images with one pixel for every rgb-color (16777216 to be exact); not one color missing, and not one color twice.”

Malo is ultra small css library for building web sites. Almost trivial, but probably useful.

Die Ballade von der Hanna Cash, von Bertolt Brecht.

Roman Numerals, in your Java, WJW.

Littered desk in study belonging to Albert Einstein. No coffee cups?

9 Beet Stretch is Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th symphony stretched to 24 hours, with no pitch distortions.

Combinatory Logic at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

JS-909: A drum machine in JavaScript. Very nice!

Etherpad, a realtime collaborative text editor written in JavaScript. Works amazingly well, check it out.

Type-Checking Zero Knowledge, by Michael Backes, Cătălin Hriţcu, and Matteo Maffei. “This paper presents the first type system for statically analyzing security protocols that are based on zero-knowledge proofs. We show how certain properties offered by zero-knowledge proofs can be characterized in terms of authorization policies and statically enforced by a type system.”

Live Piracy Map 2008

Great Algorithms, lecture by Richard Karp. Covers nice stuff.

On the Death and 441-Year Life of the Pixel, “this bitmap alphabet is from La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus published in 1567.”

Google Lite

One Million Beer Bottles Later and it’s a Buddhist Temple.

Computer Scientists Are Offenders!

A normal order lambda calculator, by Oleg Kiselyov. “The present calculator implements what seems to be an efficient and elegant algorithm of normal order reductions. The algorithm is “more functional” than the traditionally used approach.”

Sexy primes are pairs of prime numbers that differ by six. Genius naming.

Hard drive sounds, the horror!

Ejacs: a JavaScript interpreter for Emacs, Steve Yegge is a hell of a coding machine. Read the novel or skip straight to the code.

O’Browser, an OCaml in a browser. “We present a way to run OCaml programs on a standard, unmodified web browser. To achieve this, we designed a bytecode interpreter in JavaScript, as well as an implementation of the standard library.”

Blogging Like a Hacker, the return of minimalist blogging systems! I gotta release Trivium too…

Trivium, my minimalist blogging engine that runs this site.

From Pickin’ Cotton to Pickin’ Presidents, an interesting correlation.

Oiligarchy is a playable commentary on the oil industry. Play the Flash game first, then read the postmortem. (I managed to get a “Farewell West”, but no M.A.D. at all.)

Mv_Embed is a javascript library for easy embedding of ogg theora/vorbis media with the HTML5 tag.

Vernacular Video, by Tom Sherman. “As video technology spun off from television, the mission was clearly one of complete decentralization. Forty years later, video technology is everywhere. Video is now a medium unto itself, a completely decentralized digital, electronic audio-visual technology of tremendous utility and power.”

ProofWeb is both a system for teaching logic and for using proof assistants through the web. Supports Coq, Isabelle, and a few others. Awesome, check it out!

Teaching logic using a state-of-the-art proof assistant, by Cezary Kaliszyk, Freek Wiedijk, Maxim Hendriks, and Femke van Raamsdonk. On above system.

acts_as_git is a simple plugin which stores all changes you make to a text field in a Git repository. This is ideal for something like a Git-backed wiki.

Paul Dirac Anecdotes

A positive aspect of the Bush legacy, “The international community now has a potent new motivating tool to dissuade world leaders from engaging in tyranny and aggression – tell them they’ll be like George Bush if they do it.” WJW.

New York Times Special Edition, 4th July 2009. You wish.

DRGBLZ, (O TEH HUGE MANATEE.)

Javascript Parser Combinators, an excellent library by Chris Double.

All Time Greatest Hits of the Twelve Tone Masters!

Hofstadter’s Terrible Law, interpreted as “nontrivial software is too complex for a single person to write in a single lifetime, let alone in a subset of that lifetime.” I say: Therefore, write simple software!

State of Love and Trust, Pearl Jam classic.

The first 100 days, what US presidents did. Great viz.

Swing States, by Robert Kosara. “I always wondered how much those swing states actually swing.” See comments too.

The Case of M. S. El Naschie, WJW. Must read.

And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, by Eric Bogle.

Xlib programming: a short tutorial, very short indeed, but what’s there is well written.

A Timeline of Western Philosophers, from Thales to Bordo.

Flag variables in Bourne shell programs, Mark Dominus discovered a nice trick.

You Should (Not) Have a Lobotomy, the first one was Nov. 12, 1935.

gae-sqlite will allow you to run Google’s App Engine development server with an SQLite backend.

There are only two kinds of people: those that can write well and those that don’t. I don’t count myself to the former, but I can as well have a look at them.

What do they, with their well writing? Bored from pleasing the common readership, the members of this rare folk start trying to please each other by writing the finest and most subtle texts. They write on writing, of course. People who can leverage the full power of a medium end up using the medium for nothing but communicating about it.

Thus, writers write on writing. Ham radio operators morse about signal strength. Mailing lists discuss net culture. Film directors produce movies full of inside jokes. It’s all a mere end in itself.

That’s what literacy is, in the end: Eternal rereading, reinterpretation, recombination of age old stories. Stories that are plain shadows. Metaphors that stand for nothing but themselves. And finally, once you’re bored from the idea of structuralism, you start discussion of structuralism itself.

I shall not act the innocent. Look at what I’m doing, not only writing about writing, but guilty of all above.

Maps of the 2008 US presidential election results

389 years ago…, “Inspired by the genuine progress of this country, I created this typographic mashup of the history of slavery, racism, and the progress of African Americans.” Must see.

Merb 1.0 now released.

Tender Tub made from polyurethene coated foam rubber; not cold and hard like the average bathtub, but soft and warm, and comfortable like a sofa.

tr.im is an URL shortening service with a nice URL.

Strasheela is a highly expressive constraint-based music composition system. The Strasheela user declaratively states a music theory and the computer generates music which complies with this theory.

Wet Hot American Summer, great drawings by Justin Longoz.

The Trouble With Pictures (PDF), excerpt from John Man’s book “Alpha Beta”: “It is an astonishing thing that human beings should be able to see marks on a surface and hear them talk of realities visible and invisible.”

FROSTBURG was a Connection Machine 5 (CM-5) supercomputer used by the NSA to perform higher-level mathematical calculations. The system had a total of 500 billion 32-bit words of memory (~2 terabytes), and could perform at 65.5 gigaflops.

Scientists Turn Tequila into Diamonds, WJW.

Town in Oregon Elects Genderqueer Mayor, why not.

From Monoids to Monads

twicl, my 120 loc shell twitter client.

Total Functional Programming, classic paper by D. A. Turner.

What about the natural numbers, by Colin Runciman. “A prime concern in the design of any general purpose programming language should be the ease and safety of working with natural numbers, particularly in conjunction with discrete data structures.” Includes pragmatic definitions to close the natural numbers.

Prediction and Entropy of Printed English, by C. E. Shannon. A very nice experiment.

Greatest common divisor in Coq

Write Or Die

The door code of the lock at the Catholic dorm is 2-0-4-6.
(The Jewish dorm has a lip detector instead.)

Plan 9 and related projects continue being a neverending source of inspiration to me. Consider Octopus’ Mails, which stores mails as directories, with all attachments unpacked. What could be easier and more convenient at the same time? Also see the implementation.

OpenBSD 4.4 has been released. I see improved EeePC support.

FSF Releases New Version of GNU Free Documentation License, “This version of the license allows public wikis to relicense their FDL-covered materials under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) 3.0 license.”

aoeui is a very small and efficient display editor built upon a philosophy of making interaction with UNIX text manipulation commands easy, rather than duplicating their features. Only 6kloc.

Bembo’s Zoo

js-comint.el is a comint mode for emacs which allows you to run a compatible javascript repl such as Spidermonkey or Rhino inside of emacs.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Plan 9 (PDF), University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece, October 30–31, 2008.

Colm is a programming language designed for the analysis and transformation of computer languages.

Matt Webb’s 100 Head Cattle Drive 2008

Notices of the American Mathematical Society, A Special Issue on Formal Proof.

Tangled Up in White, John Gruber on tangle-resistant cable.

Let’s have some fun with divergent geometric series. It can be shown (or rather, argued) that

In fact, Euler already knew this. Intuitively one can simply try the well-known closed form for geometric series, that is

for (at your own risk!), to find the solution:

Alternatively, you can use Riemann’s Zeta function

which, with , results after heavy rewriting in again.

For a different perspective, see Bill Gosper in HAKMEM 154, where he figures:

By this strategy, consider the universe, or, more precisely, algebra:

let

now add X to itself;

thus, so

therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) which is twos-complement.

Atypical Typing, Mark Dominus was an invited speaker at OOPSLA 2008. It is kind of terrible that what he told probably was news to many.

Subterranean Homesick Blues, Dylan’s classic cardboard video.

In Defense of Anonymity, Aaron Swartz built an tor2web proxy.

Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) is a musical piece composed by John Cage and is the subject of the slowest and longest-lasting musical performance yet undertaken. The current organ performance of the piece at St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany, began in 2001 and is scheduled to have a duration of 639 years, ending in 2640.

Le Beisl n’existe pas! Lesebefehl.

Knuth: Instead of writing personal checks, I’ll write personal certificates of deposit to each awardee’s account at the Bank of San Serriffe, which is an offshore institution that has branches in Blefuscu and Elbonia on the planet Pincus.

<chris2> you can't break marshmallows
<hasmanyjo> chris2: you can break anything with enough liquid nitrogen
<chris2> true
<chris2> except for liquid nitrogen
<chris2> ...which still is liquid
<hasmanyjo> chris2: dude, you just blew my mind
<chris2> <- master of the counterexample