December 2009
12 posts
Maybe this year will be better than the last.
langer:
Avatar is a bad film.
Not because it lacks any meaningful character development (which it does), not because its plot is laughably flimsy (which it is), and not because it is little more than a big-budget remake of FernGully, but because it is yet another example of b-grade Hollywood moralizing, of not very smart people with typically superficial good intentions offering Americans an...
my data is just fine, thank you
I think a lot about the evolution of language, and how words come to mean something more or different than they did 50 or even ten years ago. It’s tricky, sometimes, being a bit of a stickler about spelling, grammar, and punctuation (and perhaps more than anything, semantics), while still allowing our language to evolve, and changing with it. I do think it’s possible, though, to live...
my christmas story
It was December of 1981. I had just turned 9, and there were two big-ticket items I and my two brothers (Casey, 6, and Bennett, who we called “Ben” in those days, 11) desperately wanted for Christmas: an AT-AT imperial walker and an Atari 2600.
A couple days before Christmas, I accidentally got a glimpse of the Atari in its large, glorious box in the trunk of my Dad’s car. ...
the three stages of debugging
stage 1: that’s completely impossible and I refuse to believe it.
stage 2: ok I believe it now. but now I don’t understand how it worked in the first place, or how anything else is working.
stage 3 (if you’re lucky): oh now I get it.
Welcome to stage 2, population: me.
http://langer.tumblr.com/post/280573007 →
langer:
“We choose to examine a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery. We cannot make the mystery go away by explaining how it works.”
—
Richard Feynman, Caltech lectures, 1962 (via fdanbo)
I got turned onto this quote yesterday by Dan-o while we were...
22T!
danob@michael-jordan:~$ df -h /dev/md1 Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/md1 22T 1.1T 21T 5% /mnt/raid6
It was Feynman’s idea to use the double-slit experiment as an introduction to the principles of quantum mechanics. I have a recording of him explaining it in a lecture at Cal Tech in 1962, but alas it’s nearly an hour long so tumblr won’t let me upload it.
So for now I’ll just quote my favorite part:
“Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you know...
