Conrad Barski, of Lisperati fame, has created a wonderful set of Lisp icons. Now, you have no excuse: you must have a Lisp project and put in its webpage one of these cool logos. What, you don't grok Lisp yet? No problem, Conrad has also the best tutorial to get you started.
The Simpsons was one of my all time favourite series. Dr. Andrew Nestler has compiled a fun guide of references to maths in The Simpsons. Who said math is no fun?
Lisp500 is an informally-specified bug-ridden implementation of Common Lisp, ready to meet your needs in just 500 lines of C... well, it's actually 503 LOC, and probably would have a (slight) chance in the Obfuscated C contest, but, hey, that's the price to pay if you insist in greenspunning away.
This list of the 100 oldest .COM domains currently registered a is fascinating look at the history of the Internet. Who was visionary enough to register a .COM domain, and when?
See the full list here.
Try this in a, say, elisp buffer: M-2 C-x $.
C-h f set-selective-display for the full history. Handy, eh? Of
course, a real folding editor is just an emacs package away.
For those of you don't having the book: Free Culture: Lawrence Lessig Keynote. In his keynote address to a packed house at OSCON 2002, Lawrence Lessig challenges the open source audience to get more involved in the political process. Read the complete transcript of Lawrence's keynote presentation made on July 24, 2002.
Read about the last (and unbelievable) in breast implants... here. No comments!
A couple of weeks ago, i spent a couple of days configuring a KDE desktop, only to come back to my beloved ion/emacs uberproductive environment in another couple of days. Well, not just only... it comes it wasn't a total waste of time.
First things first: so-called modern desktops are not for me. They are not productive. You (well, at least i do) spend lots of time making them look pretty, and you mostly succeed at that. But then what? Nothing but eye candy. Integration is still poor. Nothing can be done without a mouse. There's nothing even remotely close to the tightly integrated environment emacs, w3m-el, planner, muse, emacs-wiki-journal, gnus + leafnode + r2e + fetchmail, circe, quack, slime, etc., etc., etc. provide. An environment that is extensible in a lisp dialect, so add to those packages a lot of little hacks of mine to make it work exactly how i want. An environment that you can run in a urxvt with a few of external viewers (gv, xpdf, dia, display and friends), which are awesomely glued together by ion3 or ratpoison or even sawfish. And, would you believe it?, no XML, zero, nada. Now, that's what i call a modern desktop. And a fun one.
That said, i think that, as of lately, GNOME is even worse than KDE. I cannot stand its treating users as dummies, reducing the feature set of its applications to a ridiculous extreme in the name of a totally flawed concept of what user-friendliness means (a recent example: i briefly tried evince to substitute xpdf, and found it, by comparison, beautiful and nearly useless; the project's motto is: "Simply a document viewer"; case in point.). KDE is not perfect (actually, it's usually a mess), but at least it doesn't babysit you. Features are there. For instance (and this is the reason my last foray wasn't a total waste of time), amarok is, in my opinion, a superb media player. It has become my default one, despite the huge amount of resources it demands. But, at least, it gives me something in return: live music lib updating, powerful playlist management, automatic access to lyrics and artist info from Wikipedia, iPod integration and pretty looks without too much hassle, to name a few... the list goes on. GNOME players are a joke and consume the same resources: i'd rather use mp3blaster or emms, for gawds sake.
Yeah, i guess that was a rant :).
The Chinese government has announced that it will be launching its second ever manned space flight on Wednesday. China invented both gunpowder and small rockets around the year AD 1000, so i guess it's due time they become significantly involved in space programs. Specially if, as they're saying its goals are strictly pacific.
The gelatinous substance of the brain is a dense matrix of billions of robotic cells. Inside the cells are other intricate machines. There's no one in there. So how does the conscious "you" clamber from the darkness of the box out into the bright arena of subjective experience? There are two puzzles to solve. No one has yet fathomed how the material substance of the brain can conceivably give rise to conscious awareness [the hard problem]. The other puzzle is more amenable to science: how does the brain, with its diverse and distributed functions, arrive at a unified sense of self?
Read more in this Times online article. And if, like me, you're interested in these issues, i'd recommend Susan Blackmore's book, Conciousness. Don't let the childish illustrations (they're actually drawn by a child, Susan's daughter) discourage you: this is a very serious and well written book, full of insight. Interestingly, Blackmore took for several years an honest interest in paranormal 'science', only to become a well informed skeptic (see also her article on why i gave up parapsychology).