Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Poignant story about a runaway with Aspbergers.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

11/18/09

  • More pirates.  
    • Interesting point:  "In the attack, the Alabama's crew also took evasive maneuvers and used a new technique to repel pirates: a so-called long-range acoustic device, which emits high-pitched sounds painful to the human ear."  
  • Psychology in the subway.  Some interesting tidbits. 
    • "The more justification that was offered, however, the less likely people were to stand up."
    • "Incidental touching was more likely to occur among same-race, same-sex passengers."

Friday, November 06, 2009

Links for 11/6/09

Good QuickCheck tutorial

Profiling + Template Haskell + Cabal

Cabal makes building, installing and distributing a Haskell program very easy.  Template Haskell makes writing cool pattern matching easy.  Profiling makes, well profiling easy.  But how can you do all these things together?  TH doesn't work well with profiling, so you need to compile twice.  Once with no profiling to make regular .hi and .o files.  Then again with profiling, renaming the .o and .hi files to .o_p and .hi_p in order to make it work.  With Cabal, you can basically do the same thing.  Compile once without profiling

runhaskell Setup.lhs configure --user
runhaskell Setup.lhs build
runhaskell Setup.lhs install

then again with the following additions to your cabal file, in the ghc-options section:


-prof
-auto-all
-osuf p_o
-hisuf p_hi

This should build the TH project with profiling support.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Quotes for 11/1/09

  • He’s highly educated – and rather better than a country like this deserves.  -- Gore Vidal on Barack Obama
  • God looks after alcoholics, little children, and the United States of America. -- Otto von Bismarck
  • "I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will."    I like that very much: "If the accident will."  -- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
  • "The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in." -ibid



Links for 11/1/09

Good op-ed by a rancher against meat demonization.  He reiterates Michael Pollan's point that grass fed, organically grown beef has low environmental impact.  Far lower than, say, Brazilian soybeans.

Fact about Incendiary bonbs:
Modern incendiary bombs usually contain thermite, made from aluminium and ferric oxide. The most effective formula is 25% aluminium and 75% iron oxide. It takes very high temperatures to ignite, but when alight, it can burn through solid steel. In WWII, such devices were employed in incendiary grenades to burn through heavy armor plate, or as a quick welding mechanism to destroy artillery and other complex machined weapons.