leah blogs: August 2007

The day that Elvis died was like a mercy killing
America breathed a sigh of relief
We knew all about the drugs and the Vegas shows
And there wasn’t much of anything that looked like grief
And I guess he should’ve done like James Dean did
‘Stead of putting on weight and sinking down, down, down

It’s my 20th birthday today.

Sometimes I wish I was smarter than I am

With 20 years, Gauß already had shown it’s possible to construct a regular Heptadecagon, Ramanujan could calculate the Euler-Mascheroni constant in his head to 15 decimal places and Galois came up with the theory named after him—he’d die soon after.

I haven’t even published a single paper. (I’m working on it, but I only realized this a week ago and couldn’t get anything done in between. I’m sorry.)

And now it’s too late to crash
Too late to burn
Too late to die young

I’m admittedly still on my first apartment, first car and in the first city. Probably soon in the second apartment, second car and second city—if that is easy, shall I perform induction on life?

Can you name the last good film Marlon Brando made
While trying to keep his kid from going to jail
And the old people in the street are telling you
Don’t become like me, but every day you creep a little bit closer

Geez, soon I’m thirty.

And now it’s too late to crash
Too late to burn
Too late to die—young

—Dan Bern, Too Late To Die Young

NP: Dan Bern—Past Belief

I enjoy lurking in obscure IRC channels and often have been amazed how many people I met there I already knew from some other channel. Today, this happened again, so I just had to map all language channels I could find on Freenode and make a diagram of their relationships.

I tried to find all language-specific general channels, and came up with these: #perl, ##c, #python, ##c++, #ruby-lang, #haskell, #bash, #lisp, ##java ###javascript, #perl6, #scheme, #erlang, #ruby, #latex, #lua, #d, #asm, #zsh ##tcl, #ocaml, #fpc, #io, #awk, #sed, #forth, #scala, #ada, #dylan, #sml, and #!/bin/sh.

I also added #rubyonrails, #concatenative, #esoteric, #oasis, #haskell-blah, #ruby-de, #camping, and #rack, which are not really general language channels but interesting to see.

After frustration with R (I first wanted to make a kind-of heatmap), I decided to use GraphViz’s fdp. Here’s the preview of the map (click for fullsize, beware: 1833x2084px):

If you want to print it, there also is a PostScript version.

The font-sizes are logarithmic, legend for the edges:

• If 45% of the smaller channel are in the other channel, there is a bold line.
• If 25% of the smaller channel are in the other channel, there is a solid line.
• If 10% of the smaller channel are in the other channel, there is a dotted line.

Enjoy.

NP: Jeff Buckley—Lilac Wine

In der Stufe haben wir ja einige recht aktive Blogger, und man kommt kaum nach mit lesen. Statt alles in mein NetNewsWire zu importieren suchte ich nach einem öffentlichen Feedaggregator und bin dann bei SuprGlu gelandet.

Sämtliche Blogs der Stufe kann man jetzt also gesammelt auf

http://wgabi2007.suprglu.com/

lesen.

Wer noch andere stufenrelevante Blogs hat, bitte bei mir melden.

NP: Bob Dylan—Let Me Die in My Footsteps